Dear lpkR09,

I’ve been thinking some more about your situation. Your boyfriend did take you for a ride… I mean, from the onset, he was worried about what your sister will say and insisted that she approves of your relationship, even though you said let’s take things slowly and first get to know each other better. But before you were supposed to leave to another city to your PhD studies (in June 2019), he insisted you talk again with your sister, and if you don’t get her blessing, at least get her promise that she wouldn’t be meddling in your relationship. Because, as he said, “unnecessary stress from her would keep on causing us pain“.  And if she refuses to stop meddling, he said “its best that we walk away because no amount of happiness in a relationship can mitigate stress on the personal front.”

So if your sister refuses to approve of your relationship, he was willing to call it quits with you, because he believed that the stress would be just too big for you to be able to enjoy your relationship. Here he projected his own feelings of stress onto you – it was him who wouldn’t bear the stress of not being accepted by your sister and parents, not you. You would have been fine with that, if you needed to choose.

He called you dramatic, but in fact it was him who created this whole drama of asking for approval from your sister, totally unnecessarily, and then obsessing about what will happen if she doesn’t agree. And then anticipating that she wouldn’t agree, he felt your relationship was doomed, and so he already started withdrawing. Already in April 2019 he was getting cold and not interested in talking to you much, and confessed that he almost sexted another girl. He was “tired” and “exhausted” from all the drama that he himself created!

You told him you were willing to fight for your relationship and cut off contact with your sister if necessary, but he said “please don’t, not for me“. And he said “even if we break up now you will laugh about how stupid it all was in a year.  Life changes you know and this is not important. The world is so big and we have so many things to do and see.  Love is not everything.”

It seems he’s the kind of person who gives up even before he even tried. Moreover, he sabotages himself so that there’s no chance he would succeed. He sabotaged your relationship with the unnecessary drama before it even had a chance to develop. The only reason you stayed together was because you were very tolerant about it, you agreed to “take it slow”, you overlooked his decreasing interest in you, his doubts and fears, and later, his addictions. I believe his addictions are another way he’s sabotaging himself. He’s afraid of success, afraid of love and of being loved.

When the two of you just met, end of 2018, he wanted to wait for 6 months to start a proper relationship with you, to get his act together. I believe it was because he felt unworthy of you. You mentioned he did some things in his past that he wasn’t proud of – so probably that was a part of his problem. My take is that he felt a mess and unworthy all the time. But he didn’t openly show it, but rather behaved in a way that sabotaged your relationship, sabotaged his chance with you.

You were super supportive and understanding because you wanted to believe that he’d overcome his problems… and that’s why the relationship dragged for so long. But as you said it yourself, every day was a struggle for the entire 2.5 years. He was struggling with his demons and his insecurities and was pushing you away (indirectly, with his ambivalence), and you were struggling to keep him “afloat”, to convince him that things will be better some day. You didn’t want to let go of your dream of a perfect relationship with a man you love – and you persisted for 2.5 years. Eventually, he realized he can’t give you false hopes any more, i.e. that he won’t get rid of his demons any time soon, so he told you to go for an arranged marriage (as if you were desperate to marry just anyone – so this in itself was a little bit of an under belt hit, and it hurt you).

This is my view of the dynamic between you. In any case, he’s a troubled man, and if he’s unwilling to work on his traumas, he’ll only spiral further down. You can’t be his savior, when he doesn’t even want to save himself.

Dear lpkR09,

moving ahead. Please be with me. I feel really alone these days.

You’re not alone, please feel free to share whatever you might be feeling and going through, because it’s not easy for you, you’re in a vulnerable spot right now. Please take care of yourself, but also reach out, either to us here or to other people you trust.

Dear lpkR09,

I told him then itself, its time we split. I cannot take this stress anymore. I can’t convince someone that they love me especially when they just say but don’t reflect in their actions.

You did well, it’s obvious that he’s very troubled and doesn’t really want to deal with his addictions. You say he’d refuse to talk about it every time you’ve tried, and he went to one therapy session but immediately dismissed it as not working. He probably doesn’t want to face his deeper issues, and he doesn’t want to give up addiction because it makes him feel good, as you say. Such a person isn’t capable of engaging in a healthy relationship because he’s a slave to his addictions. I understand he might be a good man otherwise, but to no avail – his addictions are stronger.

I forgot to say in my first post, that it’s great that you’ve moved out from your parents’ flat and are now living on your own, and also that you’ve reduced contact with your sister to a minimum. She unfortunately doesn’t wish you well, and you shouldn’t expect any kind of support or “blessing” from her. And I’d encourage you to work on your own issues, so that you can meet a solid, emotionally healthy man who’ll be able to love and cherish you as you deserve.

There were never issues between us- we understood one another well but these addictions were always the bone of contention.

Based on what you’ve written before, I believe there were issues between you, but you chose not to look at them. You said your long-distance relationship got cold after a while, e.g. when you’d send him love emojis, he’d send back nervous emojis, because he wasn’t comfortable to reciprocate. It might be because he was in the grip of his addiction and would have felt dishonest to send you love and kisses and pretend that everything is fine – but in any case, he wasn’t really showing the enthusiasm that you were showing. He was withdrawing already then. It was you who chose to believe that things will get better, because you couldn’t imagine losing him.

That’s why I said in my previous post that you were looking at your relationship through rose-colored glassed. You decided to ignore or minimize the signs of trouble, you believed addictions “could be fixed”, you chose to ignore his lack of affection and his refusal to talk about his problems. You believed that he was “the One”, the fulfillment of your dream to marry out of love and have that perfect relationship that you craved for.

You told him in your goodbye letter last April:

I think it was my obsession to have a guy in my life who truly loved me. One who loved my weirdness, my craziness,
my dramatic self, one who wasn’t ashamed to hold my hand and show me to the world that I am his.

You needed him to love you and accept you as you are, the whole of you, and not to be ashamed of you, but be proud to show to the world that you are his. I believe this is because you felt/feel rejected by your family, you felt they were ashamed of you, they don’t accept you for who you are, they don’t value you. And you needed him to give you that what you’ve never received from them.

The background of your feeling of rejection could very well be the fact that your family gave you away because you weren’t a boy, and you spent the first 5-6 years of your life away from your parents.

This is what you said about it earlier:

“I am am Indian girl…and although I belong to a well educated family but still…my late paternal grandfather was not very receptive to a second girl child in my family….he wanted my parents to give me up for adoption….there was a lot of stress so my mother requested my maternal grandmother to keep me… I stayed there till I was 5-6 years old…. My maternal uncle and aunt hadn’t been blessed by a child then so they decided to adopt me…but then for some reason they changed their my mind later… A year later… My parents were able to convince my paternal grandfather to bring me back home and he agreed…

All through my childhood, I worked hard just to prove that I am worthy. Now I realise how weak it made me from within…”

Yes, and a part of you is still feeling unworthy and seeking that love and validation – from a romantic partner. You’d need to process and heal that wound, to get in touch with your inner child and give her that love and validation that she needs. You need to embrace her and tell her she is wanted and she’s special and you’re proud of her. All that you wanted your boyfriend to tell you, you should tell to the little girl inside of you.

And you have all the reasons to be proud of yourself because you’re an intelligent, accomplished, compassionate, talented, courageous young woman, who isn’t willing to compromise her ideals and dreams. You’re true to yourself, and that’s wonderful. Now what you’d need to learn is to love and cherish your inner child too, so that you can truly heal, in the relationship aspect as well.

Dear lpkR09,

I’m not Anita 🙂 I’ve joined this forum a couple of months ago, and have been catching up with some of the topics here.

I don’t know why i meet people who don’t want to stay.

I believe you’d need to learn to love and value yourself first. Then you’d meet people who also love and value you more than your previous boyfriends. You say both of them said they want to explore other women as well, as if they’d be missing something if they got married. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, but with them.

He wasn’t an addict earlier, it became worse during lockdown…

Possibly he wasn’t addicted to porn, but didn’t you mention he used to drink but he gave that up when the two of you met? He might have an addictive personality, i.e. a tendency to get addicted, and that’s due to some childhood trauma. He’d need to work on that in therapy. If his first counselor wasn’t a good match, he should look further. I’m sure he can find someone to help him,  if he truly wants help.

But kept coming back to me because he said he felt like he could never like anyone else the way he liked me.

You said you could understand each other very well, so probably he felt understood by you, and probably not judged by you either, since you were tolerant about his porn addiction.

I am trying to focus more on work so that I think less of this, obviously, it doesn’t work but trying hard it would.

You said the same thing while you were together – that you should try to focus more on work, rather than thinking about your relationship problems:

“I don’t like the way I am spending too much time thinking about his moves and his behavior. I have my own work and studies to look after but then I am getting bothered.  I want to not care and be as casual as possible.  If it works,  it works.  Doesn’t then doesn’t.”

On the rational level, you don’t want to care, you want to focus on your work. And it appears your work is very important to you because it will allow you to do something worthwhile, and when you achieve that, it will give you the right to marry by your own choice:

“I always knew that I wanted to love and marry by my choice and I also know that to do that I need to assert my place by doing something worthwhile.  So,  getting a job and at least getting one novel published even if it is not very great was on my list.”

So it’s almost as if you believed that a success at work will grant you the right to marry someone you love. Is that right? It appears that when you’re in a relationship with someone you love, and there are problems, you don’t allow yourself to look deeper into those problems, but you look away, becoming somewhat ambivalent, saying “If it works,  it works.  Doesn’t then doesn’t”. You escape into work because subconsciously, you believe that work comes before love, i.e. that success at work will allow you to be with your true love. So if you just focus on work, you believe that the love part will sort itself out somehow. But it doesn’t. It would need to be looked at, and if you see there are problems, they would need to be addressed. Pushing problems under a rug won’t make them go away. I think you’d need to look at this dichotomy in you, where you almost sabotage your relationship by not looking deeper into its problems.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear Sofioula,

what you said about the conditions of your birth could be potentially important:

“we had to fight together to stay alive at my birth, because she had complications that could kill us both. Maybe that was imprinted in my subconscious”

It’s possible, because there is such a thing as body or implicit memory, where we don’t remember the situation since we were too little to remember, but our body and our nervous system does. That, coupled with the fact that your mother later told you about the event, might have formed an image in your mind, that you’re somehow responsible for your mother’s life, for her survival.

You later agreed to adopt her submissive style, as she was pleading with you not to upset your father with any problems – so not to make him angry. If your mother pleads with you to stay silent, and you have an unconscious belief that your rebelling might not only upset her, but endanger her life – then of course, you’d want to stay silent. In other words, if you believe that you raising your voice might literally kill her – it’s a very strong incentive for you to stay silent and accept all the injustice and mistreatment and wrongdoings against yourself. Because your mother’s life is more important.

If this is the case, you’d need to accept that your speaking up and protecting yourself from abuse will not endanger your mother. You setting healthy boundaries isn’t dangerous for her whatsoever, but it’s vital for you to have a healthy life.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear soma,

so if I understand correctly, your parents don’t pressure you to choose a particular university, or a particular field, they just want you to choose a good uni, is that right? And you want that too, so that you can have a life and career abroad. Is that correct? What is it about the university choice that is making you uneasy and that you’re unsure about – is it the field (e.g. science or art, engineering or medicine or law, etc), or something else? Are you afraid you’re not good enough and won’t be able to enroll a particular uni, or won’t be able to perform well later? Try to list all the expectations and fears/dilemmas about the uni, and see what the biggest fear is.

I am sorry about your father being a volatile factor in your life. How is he manipulating you? I understand he’s not living with you and your mother at the moment – is that right?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Tee.

Dear Maven,

I’m relatively new to this forum and have just now read your thread. How are you doing at the moment?

I do hope your physical symptoms were just temporary. Sometimes a high heart rate may be a result of a panic attack or anxiety. Have you been to a doctor since?

The marijuana was also a core part of the healing process too, as strange as that sounds. It felt as if getting high would activate an old bridge between the left and right hemispheres of my brain, as I was suddenly experiencing a flood of different emotions that I never noticed while sober. Even simple things like worrying about my job, feeling accomplished, worried about what I said to someone, or my unhappiness with my then girlfriend – all of that was revealed to me while high. I suddenly had to acknowledge long held emotions that I was never consciously aware of sober. My emotional flashbacks only ever occurred while high.

From what you’ve shared about your healing with the help of marijuana, it appears to me that marijuana did indeed help you feel a range of emotions, which you weren’t able to feel before. You probably have the tendency to suppress your emotions, and marijuana helped you unlock those stifled emotions. However, I don’t think that you actually healed and processed your painful memories while being high, even though you believe you did:

Crying and reconnecting with my inner-self happened while high. I was able to process a lot of painful memories and realizations while high.

I don’t think it’s possible to properly process emotional wounds while high, because in order to heal, we need to be in touch with our wounded inner child, as well as our inner good parent (the opposite of the inner critic), and then put those two – the inner child and the inner parent into a dialogue. I don’t think this is possible while being high.

My guess is that you might have applied a shortcut to healing, and I get this impression because of this what you’ve said:

“I’m in the process of reframing my past traumas from specifically targeting me (why me?) to understanding that I am just a node in a complex casual web of traumas being spread from individual to individual.”

It’s true that trauma is trans-generational, and that we shouldn’t be stuck in the victim mentality (“why me?”). However if you generalize and diffuse your own experience, saying “trauma happens to everyone, not just to me”, and you don’t pay a closer look to your own particular trauma, in which particular individuals (your parents or care-takers) took part, you can’t really heal. So when you say that trauma is spread from individual to individual, yes it’s true, but it doesn’t spread among random individuals, but within families. And it’s caused by the child being physically or emotionally abused or neglected by its parents or care-takers. So a very concrete person (or persons) cause us trauma, and we need to process this very particular trauma (or traumas) in order to heal.

From the way you’ve described it, this might not have happened completely for you. You might have jumped from feeling a lot of emotions and having certain flashbacks to sort of processing it all in one fell swoop, which isn’t how healing happens. That would explain why you were still feeling a lack of joy and pleasure, and experienced depression again, even though you’ve accomplished a lot on your healing journey in a relatively short amount of time.

Dear Ilyana,

you’re very welcome.

I would really love to find a way to be nicer to myself. It just hurts so much to be always finding fault with myself.

What can help you to be gentler with yourself is to remember that there’s a wounded inner child in you, and when you’re judgmental with yourself, you’re actually judging and condemning her. When the child is in pain, she doesn’t need your scolding but your soothing and compassion. This helped me a lot to develop self-compassion and tone down my harsh inner critic.

I have had lots of therapy before, but this therapist seems to have a very different approach, which is more focused on healing than insight.

I’ve had experience with body-oriented therapy too, and it definitely helps to process emotions and create a new emotional and bodily experience, rather than just staying in my head. Because we may know and understand everything, all the reasons for our trauma, but still be unable to change our behavior. That’s usually because the inner child – who is stuck in the past, in a particular emotional wound – needs to be healed first. For that, we need to get in touch with our inner child and give it a corrective emotional experience, which helps her get unstuck.