Hi LeeP,

Thank you for your reply. I am so sorry to hear that you lost your husband. Cancer is a very cruel disease.

When you say you didn’t know who you were, why do you feel that way? Did you feel like you followed along with what your husband wanted in life, or what you felt your family/peers/society felt you should do?

Why do you feel that you are afraid to look?

I can empathise with ‘not knowing who you are’. I think when you move away from one life (so with me, away from the religion, and with you, away from your life with your husband) you perhaps are so used to living a certain way or being a certain way that is so intertwined with other people that you forget to take stock of what you really want or how you really feel. It is definitely easier to be taken along with the current than to swim against it.

Hi Anita,

Did you have counselling or therapy to reach this stage? Or is it a case of having to constantly remind yourself of the fact that you are not the person your mother said you were? I think it is so difficult to let go of the beliefs our parents instill in us because they taught us when we were growing and you look to them to learn how to live and what to believe.

Thank-you for remembering my post from earlier on in the year, I have re-read it and I feel like these feelings keep cycling through my life. The people and circumstances may change but these feelings manifest again and again.

I do feel ashamed all the time when I really think about it. Whenever I speak to anyone I assume they are thinking negative things about me because I feel like a failure or worthless. Sometimes I even feel embarrassed to eat at work and I’ll let people push in front of me in queues and things like that because I don’t feel like I deserve to go first.

I think the problems with my family will always be a struggle because if they knew some of the things I did they would probably shun me completely and never speak to me again. I now have a nephew and another one on the way and it would hurt me very deeply to not be able to see them. I don’t introduce my boyfriend to them and I can’t talk too much about my life as I don’t want them to leave me, so I think there will always be an element of shame as I can’t be open with them. It’s hard to process this and ‘categorise’ these thoughts in a way that I can accept without feeling guilt.

I allow myself to cry in private when I need to, but I do very much struggle to cry in front of other people.

I feel like these problems are preventing me from having a healthy romantic relationship. I start off ok when I can distant myself, but once things get more intense and feelings and attachment are involved, I straight away start to feel insecure and inadequate. I feel like they are losing interest or that they do not love me enough (although I don’t know what ‘enough’ would even really look like). We spoke before on my post about feeling insecure because my partner is attractive and he had been using dating sites whilst with me. I can understand that this is not an acceptable behaviour so it’s normal to feel insecure after this has happened, but with the existing issues I feel like I would have ended up feeling insecure anyway. I did not feel this way at the beginning. It is as soon as I start to care about someone that I am suddenly terrified of losing them and then I become certain that I will lose them because I feel like I am not enough.

I stopped my counselling because my counsellor was focusing very much on my mother’s death. She asked a lot of difficult questions and I would go away feeling very upset. I feel like maybe this is part of the process but I didn’t want to feel so weak and down that I couldn’t face getting out of bed and going to work.

Hi Anita,

I have taken some time to think about what you said.

I have realised that I am not really happy with my life at the moment. My job has become mundane and requires little effort. It doesn’t challenge or inspire me. I don’t have much of a social life as all of my friends are in relationships and I don’t see them often. I don’t see my family too often as they are all busy with their own lives and partners.

Because of this, I put so much pressure on every relationship I enter, as it becomes my favourite part of my life if it’s a good one, or a reassuring distraction if it is simply ok. I then become anxious that I’m going to lose the relationship and be left alone to realise that I’m not happy.

I need to try and enjoy my life outside of a relationship and fill it with things that I cherish instead of simply focusing on the person I am dating and hoping that somehow they will fix all my problems and make me happy.

Thanks Anita, I will certainly try and express how I feel calmly and see what kind of response I get.

I think the problem is that he doesn’t say how

he feels when we speak about this and I have to

keep asking. I don’t get impatient but try and stay calm so I get an honest response. I get the feeling that maybe he felt insecure or as if he was more into things than I was but doesn’t want to look weak. I am not always very good at expressing my feelings because it makes me feel vulnerable.

Hi Anita,

I don’t feel good at all.

I usually don’t meet people that I ever feel care for me and I did feel that he did.

But finding this out has made me doubt his feelings for me and my own intuition.

He was swiping on them, that’s the only thing I know for sure. He says he didn’t talk to anyone of meet up with anyone but I feel I can’t believe anything he says now.

The reason he gave for being on there was that he liked the buzz he got from matching with people and he should have ended it when we got serious but found it hard to break the habit.

I haven’t ended things because I don’t feel ready to lose him. I love what we had and I love and care about him.

I feel really sad and disappointed and as if I was just not right for him or not enough.

Hi Anita,

Thank-you for replying. Yes you are right, I am giving my power away to strangers that have no significance in my life or my relationship.

I suppose perhaps I feel that he is more attractive than me and that’s why I’m letting myself get insecure about this.

Maybe I need to work on my self esteem but I’m not sure how to do this.

Hi Anita,

I saw my husband again yesterday. We spoke a lot about things. I realised that I feel a lot of responsibility and guilt for speaking with him. I know now that he very much wants to give things another try. I feel that he is much more certain than I am. He feels that it was circumstances and immaturity that broke our relationship down and that things would be different now, that we have learned from the past and wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes.

Now that I know this, I feel a lot of pressure to make things work if we decide to see each other again. I feel that just by seeing him, I should know that I want to be with him again. The truth is that I don’t know. I know that there was a time when we loved each other very much, and I haven’t been able to forget that. I know that if it was fully over for me in my mind I would have filed for divorce. But I don’t know if we would be in love again. I feel that I can’t know the answer to this unless I see him and speak to him, but as I said, I feel guilt for this because I don’t know what will happen and it will be like me leading him on.

We spoke honestly and I told him I will try and accept that he is responsible for his feelings and he is aware of the risks involved in seeing me so it is his choice to discuss these things. But the truth is that I feel a huge responsibility now because I know he will be upset if in a months time I realise that it’s over.

I didn’t ask him if he wanted to get back together. I thought it would be cruel to do that if I wasn’t sure myself. And I am in a relationship with someone which I haven’t ended.

Yes, it was nice to be able to have an honest talk about everything. We had never done that before. When we tried to speak it would become very emotional and heated and we would never be able to discuss anything.

I agree that we would need talk much more. But I am hesitant to do this until I am sure what I want. One of the things we would need to discuss is the jealousy issues he had. He used to get angry if anyone looked at me and he would have access to my phone and social media. I used to allow it, but I wouldn’t be able to anymore as I feel it is too intrusive.

Regarding my current relationship; I have doubts concerning a few things. He is nice to me, and he has morals and beliefs that I agree with. He doesn’t try to change me and accepts me for who I am. My doubts may seem shallow, and perhaps they are, but he isn’t very good with money and I feel apprehensive starting a future with someone who has a flaw similar to one of my own. I fear that we would be a bad influence on each other. I earn more money than him and would like to travel and buy a home in the future. I am not sure if he would be able to join me with these goals due to his financial situation and it is something I’d have to compromise on. Another thing is that he can be quite selfish. We live about 20 miles apart and during the week I always go to his place because he struggles with time keeping. I do too, but it seems that I have to be the one to make the effort. I do not feel like he would make the effort to be there for me if I needed him, unless it was very serious.