Dear Ada,

I’ve just read your posts, and I agree with Anita that what your boyfriend has with “Sarah” seems like emotional infidelity.

To me, several things stood out as potential red flags. First, this:

They have been close friends for a long time, they’ve met each others families, they have a lot of shared memories together.

You’ve been with him for 4 years, since 2021. She’s known him since 2020, just one year longer. 2020 was the year the pandemic started, and everything shut down. When did they have time to make all those “shared memories” and for their parents to visit each other, when social gatherings were practically non-existent? Were they hanging at each other’s place all the time? Did he tell you anything about those shared memories with her?

He’s describing her as almost a childhood friend, someone he’s known for a long time, and yet, it’s been a mere one year longer than he knows you. Besides, soon after you two met, you went on a road trip across the country, which lasted till recently. So practically, he hasn’t seen her since 4 years or so.

It’s also weird that in that same year, 2020, he met her, became such a good friends with her, to the point of accompanying her to 2 abortions and being her main emotional support – greater than any of her female friends, which she had presumably known much longer than him.

This entire time span is more than weird to me, and to be honest, raises suspicion.

Other red flags I’ve noticed is him being uninterested in movies and TV shows when you suggested them, but then immediately watching them as soon as she recommended them (“I would recommend TV shows/movies and he’d never watch them, but would watch them as soon as she recommended the same ones“). It seems he cares about her opinion and wants to please her. While he doesn’t show the same kind of care and concern for you.

Or the fact that he didn’t want to apply for a job at your company, but rather chose to work with her (“When he needed to find a new job, I offered he could work at my company, but instead he chose to work with her (it never actually panned out, but I feel the hurt still”)).

Regarding that job situation, you said:

I tell myself he didn’t chose her, he was just afraid of being rejected for a job I referred him to, or that he’s hesitant to take my recommendations because the stakes are higher with me, and he’s anxious. He’d agree with me here, but I still resent him for it.

What do you mean by saying that the stakes are higher with you? Do you mean he would feel under more pressure to perform at your company, than working with her/at her company?

Also, the fact that he is sending her the same funny cat memes that he is sending you is rather disturbing as well. It’s like treating both of you the same – sort of having the same kind of emotional bond (or even a closer one) with her than with you, which is definitely not okay for an intimate relationship.

He is trying to convince you that there’s nothing strange about his relationship with this woman, but the way I see it, that’s not true.

In our arguments he has insisted that he would not mind at all if I wanted to make more emotionally intimate male friends, but this I don’t believe.

It seems he is accusing you of not wanting to be emotionally intimate with your male friends, as a way to justify his too enmeshed relationship with his female friend. He claims that his style is the real friendship, while you are somehow deficient (“he thinks an ideal friendship is one that is emotionally intimate”). And yet at the same time, he was nervous about introducing her, because he was afraid it wouldn’t seem as platonic as he claims it to be:

He was nervous about introducing us because he was afraid I might not view their relationship as platonic as he did.

And that was in the beginning of your relationship, when you didn’t have such a strong resistance to their friendship. Which means that a part of him knew that how they interact (or at least how she interacts with him) may not be seen as purely innocent, like a brother and sister connection. Specially since there was sexual tension between them:

He has admitted that at first there was underlying sexual tension in their relationship, but over time it has faded to nonexistent.

I learned that they met because she thought my boyfriend was attractive and flirted with him. Boyfriend never reciprocated and is adamant she no longer has these intentions, and I’m inclined to believe him, but I feel weird about it.

He is now claiming that this sexual tension (which allegedly came only from her and wasn’t reciprocated) is now all gone. But I wouldn’t be so sure about that, because sexual attraction doesn’t fade so easily, especially if he is such an emotional support to her.

What is for sure is that at the time you were supposed to meet her, he felt anxious because he wasn’t sure what you’d conclude about the nature of their relationship. So there was something off after all – even in his eyes.

Since he is so adamant now that everything is pure and innocent, it could be that he is fooling even himself, not wanting to admit the nature of their relationship. But in doing that, he is also gaslighting you about the nature of their relationship, making it seem like your problem of not being tolerant and accepting enough, and denying that it is actually him who has a problem (e.g. of setting boundaries with her).

As I said, I don’t like his stance of accusing you of being not intimate enough with your male friends, as a way of justifying his excessive intimacy with Sarah.

I’m pretty sure that you’re not unreasonable for wanting some boundaries in their relationship. You’re not unreasonable for wanting a different level of emotional intimacy with your partner than the one you have with your friends. If he is telling you otherwise, then he’s gaslighting you. And that’s a form of emotional abuse.

I hope this helps you further in gaining clarity.

Dear Confusedasf,

you are very welcome!

through our no contact time, (it’s been two weeks now) i got a lot of clarify,

I do think you have an amazing insight, and I think you understand very well why you get upset with him: when he expresses his stress and anxiety to you, it seems you feel threatened, because you don’t know how to help him, and you also feel that in those moments he sees you as a burden and doesn’t love you (“so when he does express his feeling, and not able to tell me what i can do, i feel helpless and internalize it as i’m a useless person and i can’t help him, he keeps tell me again and again how stressful he is, means he doesn’t love me and i’m essentially just a burden“).

You’re also realizing that you trying to be supportive when he was expressing stress and anxiety didn’t really come from a truly supportive place in you, but more from wanting him to get over his stress quickly, so he could cater to your needs:

my intension is wrong, it’s never come from his benefit, it’s come from me thinking that’s the right thing to do and i forced myself to do it.

i want to know if he feels better not because i want to feel less lonely, because i care him as a person.

My impression is that you yourself feel insecure and dysregulated quite a lot, and you needed him as a strong, reliable, positive presence – to be there for you. Almost like a parent figure to your inner child. So your inner child has a need for him to be emotionally stable – the same as a child has the need for the parent to be positive, strong, reliable – to be able to emotionally regulate the child. Does this ring true to you?

When he is stressed and wants to vent about his problems, he of course is the opposite of what your inner child needs. He is the needy party in those moments, and he cannot be the giver, but he is a “taker”, so to speak. And this feels scary, because the person you expect to take care of you emotionally isn’t able to do that, and is falling apart.

If what I’m saying is true, the only way you could support him is for you to seek emotional support and regulation elsewhere (e.g. therapy is an excellent place!), and not from him. When he is in distress, he cannot be the anchor for you, that you expect from him. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. It’s just that in those moments he himself is a needy child who needs comfort and soothing.

He on the other hand would need to seek therapy, because his ways of dealing with stress – drinking, getting stressed to the point of not being able to eat or sleep – aren’t healthy at all. And of course, it affects you as his partner because he disappears from the relationship into this abyss. So he definitely needs help.

You said:

he is open to therapy, he is looking at aa, he is trying to get help, again things happened and dragged him into more cycles of not able to make those plans as well.

Is he really serious about getting help? When you say “things happened and dragged him into more cycles”, do you mean there was another crisis and he resorted to drinking again?

i want to know how can i approach the conversation and if we still have a chance.

I think the main thing is to clarify with yourself that you shouldn’t to look to him to give you emotional stability, because he isn’t able to do that at the moment. You’d need to become emotionally stable within yourself, with the help of therapy.
Your support of him could be in the form of acknowledging his stress, having empathy for him, and not pressuring him to cater to your emotional needs when he is in distress.

However, I would also expect him to start therapy, because just promising isn’t enough. I wouldn’t want to stay in the relationship is he is continuing business-as-usual (resorting to drinking when under stress).

I think your relationship has a chance, but you both need to make changes on your respective sides. You yourself are doing a lot already, going to therapy and having a lot of self-awareness. So you just keep that up, you’re doing great! 🙂

And I hope he steps up to the plate too…

Dear Confusedasf,

I am sorry for your breakup, but I agree that under the circumstances, it was the best option.

It seems he couldn’t handle the stress of life, specially faced with new circumstances (as you said: a new job, new girlfriend, and wanting to move out of his parents’ house. having to travel long distances to work, to me, to his parents separately, to his hobby, to business trip). It got so bad that he couldn’t eat or sleep, and resorted to alcohol to “self-medicate”.

You said:

He’d do anything to make me happy, and whatever I say, he’d receive it very well without pointing out any problem or hard feelings

This sounds nice, however it might also mean that he is afraid to express his true feelings, and might be a bit of a people pleaser. You said he felt “just drained in his stress about work, about relationship, about family and about future”. It could be that he felt the need to fulfill people’s expectations (not just yours, but also his parents’ expectations?), and he felt thorn between those different pulls, and possibly confused about what it is that he actually wants in life.

You said he doesn’t really want to talk about “hard topics” but keeps everything bottled up inside:

He also has a problem talking about hard topics, but he’s always anxious about them, all the time; he thinks about them 24/7 without communicating.

It seems he wasn’t able to communicate that he has too much on his plate and that he needs to better organize his life, but instead he promised you certain things, but then failed to follow through: “he would make promises and fail to show up”

After that he felt ashamed of himself and even more pressured: “he feels deeply shame about it and gives him more pressure again”. And then he resorts to drinking…

Maybe at some point he started talking openly about his stress and anxiety, but you were already too disappointed in him that you reacted with rejection:

I reached a point where I built too much resentment, when he started to share his anxiety & stress, all I heard was complaining and annoyance.

You didn’t have the capacity to “hold” him at this point, to show empathy and understanding. But this is not to judge you at all – you have your own issues, and he actually would need individual therapy. It’s great that you yourself are going to therapy. Is he? Is he open to doing that? Because if not, you couldn’t really have a healthy relationship with him, because he seems like he has a lot of emotional trauma to heal from.

if we start over, will the pattern change? or we will just hurt more and eventually love dies.

If he doesn’t agree to therapy, I’m afraid the pattern wouldn’t change. What you could do however is show more understanding for him, and accept that his negligence and failure to keep his promises are not the result of ill intent, but of his own internal turmoil and unresolved issues. What I’m trying to say is that you could have understanding for his issues, however you cannot be in a relationship with someone who isn’t willing to work on those issues, but is medicating them with alcohol. That would be a clear line for me.

However, if he is willing to work on himself, then perhaps your relationship has a chance, because you say you did click on many levels and feel very connected to each other, so there is a potential there, if the baggage of the past is addressed and healed.

I hope this helps. I do feel your pain and the wish to be together, but also the impossibility to continue as things are now. I do hope he chooses healing, and that you can grow together. If not, then separation is the best possible option, even if it’s painful.

* sorry Ben, I’ve remembered now that you have a brother. My bad, sorry about that!

Hi Beni,
(or would you prefer to be called Ben? Because that’s how you signed your latest post)

Oh, I spent so much time on this message. I hope it makes some sense to you

well, I think I understood most of it, but I’m not gonna lie, it’s not super easy 🙂

Ties of dependency and fear I’d say. I wouldn’t say they have hurt me anymore because they they could not do better and I did allow them to hurt me.

Well, even if they did the best they could, or they didn’t hurt you on purpose, they did cause emotional wounding. The wound is there, even though they didn’t mean it. It’s like you get hit by an arrow accidentally – it hurts, regardless of the fact that it wasn’t done on purpose. (ok, maybe this is a silly analogy, but it’s the first thing that came to mind).

And secondly, as a child you didn’t “allow” anything. We as children are passive “takers” of whatever treatment we get from our parents. We don’t really have the discernment to know what’s right or wrong, neither do we know how to set boundaries or stand up for ourselves. And many times, we think it’s our fault if our parents behave in hurtful ways.

So please don’t think that you allowed anything, as a child. Many times, if the abuse isn’t so obvious (such as beating or other types of physical abuse), the child doesn’t even know that they are suffering from abuse or neglect. For example, the child might be getting constant criticism and shaming, and yet believe that they deserve it.

So I think it’s okay to say that your parents have hurt you, i.e. caused some emotional wounding in your childhood. It doesn’t mean, however, that you never forgive them and that you – as the adult – cannot do anything to heal that wound. The wound is there, but now it’s your responsibility to do something about it.

Actually it’s a good thing that in order to heal, we don’t need anything from our parents – even if it was them who caused the wound. That’s the beauty of healing our own inner child- we don’t need to rely on our parents to give us what they failed to give us in childhood.

I say it this way because when I get caught by a strong emotion I become that emotion. I’d say, I’m born. Death would then be: “to be unborn again”.

So when you’re overwhelmed by an emotion (i.e. become the emotion), you say “I’m born”? And when you don’t allow the emotion to take over, you say you are “unborn again”?

That’s an interesting wording. Actually, the ability to observe our emotions without getting overwhelmed by them (like you said you did a few posts ago), is the feature of our Observer Self. And the Observer Self is one aspect of our True Self, or our Divine Self. So when we observe the emotion, but don’t become it, we’re in our Divine Self.

I’m mentioning this because being the Observer doesn’t really mean to be emotionally “dead”. It’s more like being “aware”. So to me, instead of “emotional death”, I prefer the term “emotional awareness”. Provided that we’re talking about the same thing: observing the emotion but not becoming overwhelmed by it. But please let me know if I’m not understanding you properly…

To the thinking mind it feels like death and I’ve been very afraid of it. First you have suicide thoughts and then you learn that physical suicide will not work. I did little acts of suicide like not drinking enough. Not eating. Not washing. I just gave up on trying to live. It did not seem worth the energy. But then you just keep living. It’s weird.

I am glad you’re not contemplating physical suicide. But I also understand that being overwhelmed by strong emotions can feel very scary (“To the thinking mind it feels like death and I’ve been very afraid of it.”)

It seems that you wanted an escape from those overwhelming emotions, and you tried to deprive your body of basic needs (eating, drinking), so you would feel less, right?

I understand that there is pain but no ties to it. This to me is the soil for healing to happen. Because then what is stuck in the body can move and be free and then healing happens.

Hmm… let me see if I got this right: You want to detach from pain, and the pain (and the unwanted emotions) are in the body. And so if you detach from the body, this could help in healing? Again, sorry if I’m misinterpreting your words… I would really like to understand, because then I could give you my thoughts on it (of course, if you’re interested).

I wonder did you make these career decisions you been talking above?

I’ve realized what’s holding me back from making those career decisions (layers of fear). Now that I’m trying to make an action plan, I see that my tendency to procrastinate is still present. But now I am looking it in the eye, I know what I’m dealing with, so it’s not automatic and unconscious. So I think I have a better chance to overcome it.

Hey Beni,

it’s a joy to hear from you too! <3

Oh, you have been going trough a thing and found some lightness. I’m proud of you!

Thank you! Yeah, it was a kind of a dark night, but I did find light(ness) and hope, eventually…

I wonder what beliefs the knees are connected with.

I’m afraid a part of it is a consequence of an old injury (a fall) that dislocated my kneecap just slightly, and over time caused my cartilage to wear off. But it was a slow and insidious process, and I didn’t get a proper medical advice either, so the damage to my cartilage progressed more than it should have 🙁

But I’m sure there is a spiritual, i.e. psychosomatic component as well, because it is about mobility and movement. And I’ve been pretty immobile and paralyzed in making certain career decisions. During this latest “dark night”, I’ve actually realized what core beliefs were behind it, so I’m working on releasing those.

And there was also the lower-back pain, which was an additional very nasty episode. Thankfully, that’s much better now, although I feel I’ll never be the same again, in terms of the ability to put stress on it. But thank God, it’s much less of an issue than before.

In any case, both of those are problems with physical mobility, and I’m pretty sure it’s related to the psychological aspect as well. And I think that because I’ve become aware of it, it’s easier to manage the physical pain as well.

I revisited a woman in autumn which turns out I’m really attached to. More than I thought. I have been suppressing that for a year before. To keep it short she has no space for me. I think every day of her. I think she’s the love of my life and I don’t really move on and I’m learning to accept that. Also I’m not moving on with my life I’m kinda waiting for her.

“she has no space for me” – meaning she’s not interested in a relationship with you?

That must be hard if you believe/feel she’s the love of your life, and your love isn’t reciprocated 🙁

I’m not moving on with my life I’m kinda waiting for her.

You think she will change her mind? Did she give you a hint that she might?

This is connected to the relationship with my mother inside. I feel way better about her I love her. Outside I don’t care so much.

You mean you love this girl and you’re hurt that she doesn’t want to be with you, but you don’t show it to her? You pretend you’re cool about her rejection? Or you haven’t even showed her clearly that you have feelings for her?

It feels a bit like my parents have died. Also the relationship with my dad is something I reflect more often now.
I feel avoidant about meeting family and old friends.

Oh, I’m sorry about that. A part of your isolation – which you talked about before – is that you didn’t want to relate to people on their terms, but on your own, right? Specially with your mother, you didn’t want to fulfill her “orders” (to clean the kitchen, etc) while she treated you with disrespect. Do you feel that’s still the case – that you don’t want to pretend with people, or conform to their expectations, but you’re also not able to set proper boundaries, so it’s easier for you to withdraw?

I have been staying 3 months in a monastery and will stay another month in june.

Oh cool! How’s that been?

All this has taught me a lot and i can stay present trough more pain and am more accepting with myself. I generally feel peaceful even when in pain and often I can step away from heavy and dark tought patterns.

That’s great that you can emotionally regulate yourself and you don’t slip into dark thoughts. That’s a real strength. To sit with pain, and feel it, without letting it consume you.

Turns out I’m not who I think I am..

Would you elaborate on that?

Dear Sophie,

I totally empathize with you, because it’s not an easy situation to be in. I’ve got a person with very similar characteristics to your mother in my close surroundings, and it’s extremely hard.

She too is self-destructive, doesn’t care about her health, and then when there’s some emergency (usually of her own doing), she calls her son to rescue her and take care of her. She likes overspending and getting into debt (from which she expects to be rescued as well, taking no responsibility for her spending habits.) She also gets into conflicts with neighbors due to her own antisocial behavior, refuses to cooperate, and then blames the neighbors for being “crazy”.

She is entitled, stubborn, refuses to take responsibility for her actions, and like your mother, expects her son to extinguish the fires that she herself started. She hasn’t been diagnosed with anything, because she absolutely refuses that there is anything wrong with her. But she definitely shows traits of narcissism and possibly borderline as well. And like a true narcissist, she can actually show a normal face in public, feigning a rational, well-educated and well-mannered person, while only her closest family and friends (and next-door neighbors) know her true self.

Her son is on the receiving end of all this, and it’s been very hard for him. He’s grown up feeling responsible for her – he like you is a parentified child. And she uses guilt-tripping (“but I am your mother, I took care of you as a child, now you should take care of me!”) to get him to do what she wants.

He would feel guilty if something bad happened to her – because she’s programmed him to believe that it is his responsibility. But it’s also true that nobody would want to see their loved one get into serious trouble, fall sick or die. And so he needs to balance his care and compassion for his mother with self-protection and not allowing her to ruin his life.

In the last 6 months I’ve been learning more about narcissism and have come across a fantastic resource for adult children of narcissistic parents. A psychotherapist Jerry Wise has numerous videos on his youtube channel on how to do exactly what you’re seeking to do: become your own person and liberate yourself from your mother’s grip. A video that can serve as an intro into his approach is titled “How to Raise Your Self-worth Even if Your Parents Destroyed It“.

Another useful video I can recommend is How To Heal From A Narcissistic Parent, by Barbara Heffernan. She is talking about whether to cut contact or not, and how the most important thing is to cut the entanglement, i.e. become less emotionally attached. And then we can decide how we want to relate to them – whether to reduce contact and set strong boundaries, or cut contact completely.

Dear Anita,

you’re very welcome!

Ibuprofen and other NSAIDs can be a temporary solution, but as far as I know, they’re not recommended to use on a daily basis, because they can have side effects, such as kidney damage and heart problems. Better solution would be to do physical therapy to strengthen the muscles and relieve the joint. But of course, if you only have occasional pain, be it in the knee or anywhere else in the body, using pain killers is fine.