Dear Elizabeth,

I feel the need to add something to your conversation with anita, and further expand on something that anita has touched upon already. It’s about the way you see Christopher, specially you believing that he betrayed you so awfully. He has indeed treated you badly, specially while you were struggling with problematic pregnancy and later miscarriage. I am sorry about that.

But what you expressed in your other thread “Heart broken”, is that you already felt his withdrawing from you and being selfish much before you got pregnant. But nevertheless you decided to try to get pregnant with him:

The moment he realized I had less and less to offer him he pulled back, because things were not going so well for me at the moment. It felt like every problem on earth was targeting me. I felt lost and confused and needed him more than before. This is not what he bargained for and so he did everything to avoid me. I did notice this and it was terribly heart breaking. I chose to ignore. I thought if I was patient with him he would come around. Didn’t realize I was dealing with a narcissistic person.

I decided I needed to get myself off of him. At the same time, I got a not so clever idea in my head that if I got pregnant and had a baby instead I would feel a whole lot better and it would give me a new purpose since at the time I felt like my life was spiraling out of control. I could hardly go through the day without crying at this point. I was utterly miserable.

I completely understand you and am not judging you at all for making that decision. You had mixed feelings – a part of you recognized he’s not so loving as you first thought, but a part of you still hoped that you may be able to change him, to win him over. And so you chose to ignore his selfishness, and not only that, but you also convinced yourself that having a baby with him would help. Maybe it wasn’t completely conscious in you, but probably a part of you believed that if you had a baby together, this might win him over. Even though a rational part of you knew he wasn’t interested in having a child with you:

So early this year January I finally fell pregnant. I was very excited and I felt like all my plans where coming to fruition.  I had made up my mind I was going to do this all by myself. That was my plan to begin with anyway. So after much deliberation I finally got around to telling Christopher that I was pregnant. To be honest I didn’t expect him to be ecstatic.

His reaction didn’t surprise me at all and I thought I was ready for it.

You knew what his reaction would be. As a side note, how come he agreed to have unprotected sex all that time? Have you talked about what would happen if you get pregnant?

So, his reaction was expected, and you too expected it. But still, when he asked you 2 weeks later who you would say is responsible for your pregnancy, if people asked you – you were shattered (It threw me completely off guard I was shell shocked to be honest.  This is someone I believed was my friend. How could he ask me something like that?)

You were very surprised and hurt and offended by his remark, as if you didn’t know that he didn’t want to have a baby with you. It was like a disconnect between your heart and your mind, because although your mind knew it, your heart desperately wanted him to accept and love both you and the baby. The pain and anger took you over, although in part, you brought yourself into this situation, by ignoring the warning signs (I did notice this and it was terribly heart breaking. I chose to ignore.)

I am writing this so you could see the two sides in you – one that believes she is strong and independent, and can take care of herself (she thought you would be able to raise your child alone), and the other side, who is fragile and needy and desperate for a man’s love, even if that man is unworthy of it. That other side is your inner child, that you’d need to heal, if you truly want to move on.

We can talk more about healing your inner child, if you’d like and are open to it.

Dear Peace,

I haven’t seen your message from October 31, thanking me and anita for the progress you’ve made – you are very welcome!

i dint understand alot of things and i used to feel guilty mostly ., i still do feel guilty but now i m able differentiate about healthy guilt feeling ( which makes me a human ,if i m unfair about a thing i guess) and unhealthy one .. and much more ..

You have indeed made an incredible progress and I am so happy for you!!

Regarding your other sister’s visit, you say:

actually i dint tell her about my bf yet as far as i know my other sister ( may be ) hasnt told her yet ..

i still dint think about telling her as she is kind of very cultural kind a person and i m not sure ,how would she react ..

at this stage of my life ..i want no drama in my life and no emotional manipulation from anyone..i want to have a peace of mind and dont want tp be mentally disturb …bcz i have alot of things to focus on my study, job and my mental health ..

The thing is that even if you haven’t told your sister about your wedding plans, the drama is still happening in your own mind. You fear your sister’s reaction, you don’t want her (or other family members) to condemn you, and the fear of their rejection is so strong that you started questioning your decision to marry the man you love (why is it so that sometimes we know that we took the right decision but suddenly we start to doubt ourselves and our Decisions ??)

To answer your question: you started doubting your decision because you fear your family’s rejection. It’s the inner child that fears to be rejected, unloved and left alone… like you were once, when you suffered alone, in the corner, no one noticing that something’s bothering you…. It’s the same little girl afraid that this would happen again…

You need to metaphorically take her in your arms and tell her she is not alone, that you’ll be there for her always. You need to tell her that you love her and will always protect her and care for her. You can give yourself a big hug, to embrace that little girl.

And also, you’re not alone now, you have a man who loves you and cares about you… so tell the little girl she has nothing to worry about, that she will be safe and loved, even if her family rejects her for their stupid and short-sighted reasons.

Do you think you can do that? Do you think you can talk to your inner child like that?

Dear aphroitte1,

thank you for sharing some more. I’ve also read what you’ve written almost 4 years ago about your turbulent relationship with  your previous ex. A lot of things make sense now, and it seems to me that you desperately want to be loved by men who remind you of your father.

Your father was angry with you and giving you silent treatments, and your previous ex did the same. Your father was never pleased with you – he expected perfection from you and straight As, and he would punish you for any “lesser” performance (not physically but emotionally: by being angry and giving you silent treatment). I imagine you tried to please him best you could, but you never succeeded. With your previous ex, you said you did everything to make him happy, you tried everything to make the relationship work, sometimes you were even begging him to return to you, but to no avail. So again, it’s the same pattern of trying to please an angry, cold, distant, judgmental father.

Your father would threaten to leave, to commit suicide, and I imagine that you felt the urge to stop him, and perhaps even felt partly responsible for him wanting to leave? Your previous ex would always be leaving you, then coming back, then leaving again, telling you how awful you are and that you are destroying his life. Most probably a part of you believed it was your fault that he was treating you poorly, and that indeed you were “destroying” him. Same as with your father – you probably believed it was partly your responsibility that he was unhappy and wanted to leave. And then you tried everything to please him, so he wouldn’t leave…

Would you say that this is true?

With your latest ex, you also tried everything to keep him, you agreed to keep your relationship secret, you agreed to his terms – because you couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving. It was a similar pattern of you begging and him retreating and rejecting you.

As far as the fling you had in between the breakups with your previous ex:

The boy was doing everything to make me happy, he was sincere and he would do literally everything, but I was not attracted to that. So after month of dating my ex showed up and I dumped this boy to be back with my ex who broke up with me again after sometime.

You needed to be with someone, so you wouldn’t feel alone and unloved. But you weren’t attracted to him, because as anita said, you were craving for love of someone who reminds you of your father… that’s why you agreed to get back with your previous ex so many times, because there was always a hope that he would finally change… And even now, when he contacted you again, there is probably a hope again.. But he probably hasn’t changed but feels bad at the moment and needs someone’s attention (maybe he is at a low point in his life, and he remembered you?). But if you get back with him, it will be the same as before – he’ll get angry with you and send you away within a week or so.

How are you feeling right now about all of this? It’s okay to feel sadness and anger and disappointment and all of the emotions…

You said you’ve started working on your inner child – what kind of work have you done?

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.

Dear sossi,

I feel for you, really. I hear you and your struggles.

Basically its lonely to deal with all this and accept, my life is not going to be like others. I know that most women my age are dealing with family issues of their own, kids and husbands and so on,

You were expected to get married, have kids, have an amazing social circle etc… and these expectations came from your mother. You not having what other women have makes you so bad about yourself. You feel like a disappointment (ive always disappointed people), and a large part of it is that you haven’t met the expectations of your mother. And I believe you’re still trying, but then failing, and it just makes you feel worse each time.

But you know what? Even if you had a perfect life and ticked all the boxes, you still wouldn’t make your mother happy and proud of you. She is unable to be truly happy for you – on the contrary, she tends to get jealous at you because that’s how narcissistic mothers are. She would find ways to bring you down and put the attention on herself.

My mother wasn’t narcissistic but she was/is wounded in different ways, and it took me a long time to realize that no matter what I do, how great successes in life I might have, she’ll never be happy. Because she was inherently miserable, and there was nothing I could do to make her happy. And boy did I try, all of my childhood and adolescence…

You wrote earlier:

But my mother was depressive and certainly in my teens i remember spending hours sorting out her problems with her. I think i believed in my early teens that i could fix these things. She must have felt very alone herself but is also a very complicated and demanding person.

I too spent hours sorting my mother’s problems, trying to make her happy, trying to make her realize that her life is good, that she has all the reasons for happiness… but to no avail, nothing I said or did could make her happy. This made me felt like a failure, like I wasn’t good enough. And it created a big wound in me… I believe something similar might have happened to you – no matter what you did and how “perfect” you were, it was never good enough, it was never acknowledged… it’s traumatic for a child.

I didnt think i had to make the choice to stay away from my parents but i see i should have instead of seeking any comfort there which was a bad choice. My mother´s negative interpretations colour my own.

That’s very true. After your breakups, you sought comfort from your parents – which is a logical thing to do – but with narcissistic or otherwise toxic parents, it doesn’t work. They aren’t able to truly empathize – they end up hurting us even more!

Every time my relationships have broken down, i have lost everything i built…my home, friends, work and social status, this last relationship was the only one where i did not move country afterwards.

This means you made the man you were involved in the center of your life and you actually built your life around him. With your ex you had not only a romantic but also a professional  relationship, right? Maybe his friends became your friends? You were attracted to people similar to your mother, whom you dedicated yourself completely, believing that they would finally give you the love and appreciation you deserve. Bit they never did in the end, did they? And you ended up without everything, because you built everything around them…

Built everything around a person who reminds you of your mother…. who will never give you the love and appreciation that you crave for… and that’s why you suffered great losses.

But none of that is your fault. You were just a little girl wanting her mother’s approval. Even as a grown woman, you were still that little girl.

That’s why I say, please try to forgive yourself. Have compassion for yourself. You didn’t have it easy. But you can turn your life around, slowly but surely. You can learn how to build your life around yourself and your own needs and preferences. You can learn how to let go of trying to please your mother… and how to make your life about yourself, not about her.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.

Dear Bananananananer,

you are very welcome!

I do realize that that is a lot of moving for a growing person, especially with moving to numerous schools and making and re-making new friends every time. I’m not exactly sure how it’s affected me, but I know it has. It had to have affected me, right?

Yes, it most probably had an effect. We as children need a sense of security, stability, a sense of belonging. If you had to change schools several times per year, that can be really frustrating! I remember I didn’t want to move not even once during my elementary school, because I had good friends, my class mates, one of which I am still friends with to this day. It was a truly non-judgmental relationship, which meant so much for me and gave me a sense of strength, since my own mother was so judgmental. I haven’t even realized how much those early friendships meant to me until much later in life. If you didn’t have that, if you always needed to leave just as you started making friends, I can imagine it could affect you negatively because we thrive on healthy relationships, on strong bonds with people…

After reading your and others’ replies, I am definitely going to be attending therapy. If moving around or having anxiety or anything else has made pursuing my goals that much more of a difficult task, then I believe I need to learn how to cope with it and grow, instead of simply sitting stagnant with self pity and frustration.

Yes, it’s a very good decision to seek therapy and heal and manage those problems. Because it’s doable, you can heal and you can thrive. You don’t need to suffer till the rest of your life. So by all means, work on understanding yourself and what you were missing as a child, and how to repair it now… and if you have any questions or dilemmas, I’ll be happy to answer. I wish you luck!

P.S. You don’t necessarily need to look for a job in the corporate world, if this is something very foreign to you (it is to me too!) But you’d need to work on improving your self-confidence, so you can find a better job – a job that you’ll care about but where you’ll also be properly rewarded!

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.

Dear  Bananananananer (this was hard to replicate 🙂 )

reading your post, this part caught my attention:

I have pretty bad social anxiety, my family moved more than 50 times before I even turned 18 and I consequently attended several different schools a year,

This is a lot of moving, specially for a child! If you were uprooted so many times from your friends and the things and people you got attached to, it leaves a mark. Perhaps that’s why you can’t keep a job either, because subconsciously you just don’t want to get attached to anything, knowing that you’ll be leaving anyway? The pattern of leaving things and people and projects might be deeply embedded in your subconscious mind…

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.

Dear Emma,

I agree with Sarah – he is manipulating you to get what he wants. He seems to have found a way to trick you into having sex without your consent:

And I observed with him, a series of manipulation… at first he would not stop when I said no, and keeps trying. Then his words don’t match his actions in the moment, he reassures me the opposite of what he is doing. Then if I say no, he asks for innocent things first and works his way up to what he wants like a ladder.

Each time I did not know what happened until 24 hours later, I have flashbacks to the night before and I confront him. And he says it was a mistake, he was caught up in the moment and now he knows better.

He says he knows better, but he keeps doing it, as it happened multiple times. He can’t say he is dumb or inexperienced, if he keeps repeating the same pattern, consciously.

The only thing that bothers me is he seems to never consider my opinion,

This is a big red flag. He doesn’t consider either your opinion, or your wish to not have sex and to go slowly. He doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself. The following just proves it further:

He wanted me to be in the same mood as him all the time, he couldn’t tolerate it if he was outgoing and I was tired, or he was stressed and I was not.

It’s all about him and none about you. He is using your vulnerability and your trauma to hurt you even more.

I asked him then – are you sure, this is what you want, to be with someone who needs to go slow physically. And he said yes, it is my choice.

Is it his choice then to repeatedly hurt you, to cross your boundaries and then pretend he got caught up in the moment? Maybe it’s like a game for him, where he is proving to himself that he can manipulate a woman into doing his bid? I don’t know his reasons, but what’s for sure, you are getting hurt in it. So as Sarah said, please get out…

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Tee.