Dear Emma,

I don’t want to minimize your husband’s suffering in any way, but it occurred to me that his extreme sensitivity and reactivity to certain scenes on TV is a little bit like having allergy to certain foods. When someone is allergic, they have an extreme negative reaction to things that other people have no reaction to whatsoever. In fact, other people can even like those same foods that the person suffering from allergy is terrified of.

If the husband is allergic to certain foods, is the wife a bad person for partaking in those foods sometimes, when she is alone, and when there is no way that he could be harmed? Mind you, she isn’t forcing him to eat those foods, she isn’t secretly putting those foods into his meals. Neither is she telling him that he is too sensitive and too weak for not wanting to eat those foods. She isn’t harming him in any way. Is she a bad person for that? Should she give up those foods completely, so that her husband wouldn’t feel betrayed?

You say:

He is alone. Everybody around him behaves how they want and he has to deal with the consequences of it while they just get on with their lives.

I guess everybody around him behaves as if he didn’t have food allergy. They treat him as an ordinary person, not someone who is super sensitive. Maybe they don’t even know that he is suffering so much in everyday situations?

He was always different to other children (he is highly sensitive and empathetic) and things affected him in a deep and violent way. He found it easier to avoid others as he got older, as they tended to affect him in a negative way.

I can imagine that he suffered a lot as a child, e.g. at school, because children can be cruel. And if he was super sensitive, it would have affected him a lot. But his withdrawal from people continued into adulthood too. And it’s probably not because everybody was nasty to him, but because he was extremely sensitive (“allergic”), and so everyday interactions with people (comments, jokes etc) affected him negatively.

I am sorry for his suffering, and I understand where he is coming from – but the problem is that he is coming from his wounded and traumatized self. As such, he wants to live in a world where everyone adapts to his condition, instead of trying to heal the condition. And he wants you, first and foremost, to adapt to his condition, to not partake of the foods he is allergic to, and to defend him before anyone who isn’t aware of his condition and might say something “insensitive” or “offensive”.

In short, I think he wants you to defend him from the nasty, insensitive and violent world – as he perceives it.

I want him to be happy and to be able to live his life in the way he wants.

Well, I think the above is what he wants. Are you sure that you want it too?

Dear zaredkhan,

I am sorry that you had bad luck with your computer, which took away 7 days out of your time to prepare for the exam. Also, that you hurt your leg. Have you had it checked with a doctor, btw? If it’s swollen and you cannot step on it, it could be sprained ankle – you better get an X-ray for that.

It seems you are ambitious and want to perform well in your studies, but you feel there are forces against you that are preventing you. And that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never succeed.

I understand your frustration but, if we look at it objectively, the mishaps you had to face in the last month are not a proof that you are “destined to fail” (I’ve been destined for much less. I’ve been destined to not succeed.). They are just temporary problems, which you’ll recover from (but do check your leg and get proper treatment if necessary!) Even if you fail this one exam because you didn’t have enough time to prepare, you can pass it next time, which I assume is in a few months from now?

What I am saying is that in reality, these mishaps aren’t so huge as to come up with such dramatic conclusions, such as that you’ll never make it in life. However, what could be the reason for such pessimistic thinking is that you adopted a false belief about yourself, e.g. “I’ll never succeed”, “I am destined to fail”, based on the experiences you had so far in life, starting from your childhood. You said:

I had lots of unlucky moments in the past, but I don’t remember much of them very easily, I just remember them vaguely.

And also:

my father had to torture me just at that time, wasted my 3-4 days of productivity and slowed down my focus.

Perhaps you have a demanding father, who makes your life harder, not easier? Also, if you had lots of “unlucky moments” in your childhood, and no one to help you and protect you, you would have started believing that you have bad luck and are destined to fail, because there were these outside forces (be it poor treatment by family members, or adverse outside events) all lined up against you, and you feeling helpless? And so now, when you encounter an obstacle, you start feeling helpless and desperate, even if it’s something you can easily resolve?

Dear Laura,

there are so many examples of beautiful women being cheated on. One that gained worldwide attention is when in 1995, a famous actor cheated on his famous and amazingly beautiful girlfriend, with a prostitute. In a most recent gossip, another famous actor has just abandoned his very attractive girlfriend because she’s turned 25.

I tend to agree with the second poster here (Ade), who said that men (and women) cheat mostly because they feel some of their emotional needs aren’t met. It doesn’t necessarily mean that their partner isn’t fulfilling those needs, but that the person who is cheating has emotional scars which lead them to seek excitement, validation, appreciation etc outside the committed relationship.

Have you yourself experienced being cheated on? If you have, I am very sorry. You are welcome to share some more, if you feel like it.

Dear W,

You are very welcome. You’ve said some very important things, which suggest that you have been hurt in relationships, and you are afraid not to be hurt again:

The loneliest times in my life are when I am in a relationship

My last relationship was about 17 years ago about 20 years ago a very important relationship that meant a lot to me ended.

In my life I don’t want to feel loss anymore

Since you feel most lonely while in a relationship, no wonder you’re hesitating to enter one.

Very often, our romantic relationships are the mirror of the relationship we had as children with our parents or care-takers. We might feel very similar emotions, e.g. that of feeling lonely, that we felt while growing up. If you felt lonely while growing up, it is very likely that you would feel similarly as an adult – because the wound of feeling lonely and not being given enough care and attention is still in you.

You would like your partner to be “just yours” (I don’t feel like she would just be mine). This is how we feel as children: we want our mother (or care-taker) to be just ours. If she isn’t present, or she is present but absent-minded, or giving attention to someone or something else – we feel angry and hurt.

The fact that your girlfriend has a social life outside of spending time with you, made you very upset. I am not saying you should be happy if she is someone who goes to bars frequently and gets drunk often (does she?). But it seems that a bigger problem here is your fear of having to “share” her with other people – that she is spending time and giving attention to people other than you. Which would be a reaction to a childhood wound.

Does this sound like a plausible explanation to you?

Dear aVoid,

I feel so lost and alone. I don’t know where to start. It’s like some supernatural power such as a dark cloud is hanging about my head.

I know the feeling. I first started feeling it consciously in my teenage years. It continued into my adolescence and beyond – the cloud was always there. No matter how perfect the outer circumstances where, even when I was loved and cared for by my then boyfriend, I could never be happy because of that cloud.

Later I’ve realized that the cloud – which was the relentless, ever-present sadness – wasn’t above my head, but it was deep within me, in my heart, in my soul. I was sad because I felt unloved. And not only unloved, but unlovable. There was an emptiness, a longing in my heart, which no amount of outer love and care could fill (and no amount of food either – I was suffering from an eating disorder).

This happens if we haven’t received enough love, care and appreciation as children. I certainly haven’t, I was criticized a lot and was never good enough for my mother. She wasn’t absent like your mother was, but her presence was toxic. My father was much more benign, but allowed my mother to spill her toxicity on me. He didn’t protect me.

You worry that “the monsters I’ve been fighting my whole life are who I’ve now become“.

I can relate, because I believed I was a freak. A monster. I thought I was a freak because of my addiction, but much later I’ve realized that I believed I was a freak because my mother told me so. Because she only saw bad in me, she never praised me but only scolded me. That’s how I became a freak, a pathetic loser undeserving of love – in my own eyes.

Our childhood defines us. It shapes how we see ourselves later in life.

You had a very rough childhood, aVoid, with very little love and care. And the image you’ve adopted about yourself is that of a loser, a monster, a nobody. But that image is false. It’s the reaction to the lack of love and the abuse that you’ve experienced. Because the child always blames themselves if they are treated poorly.  The child never blames the parents.

But all I want is to be a man. Is to have control over my life. I want to stop this. I want to quit smoking. I want to quit porn. I want to get out of the video games and come back to reality. But how?

First, understand that there is a child part in you – called the inner child. He is an innocent little boy, who believes that he is unworthy of love. The pain of this self-image, of this false belief, is so strong that you need to numb it with alcohol, porn, video games, and any other addiction. All of your addictions served one purpose: to numb this unbearable pain.

If you understand that this little boy needs love and appreciation, you can provide it to him. You can provide what you have never received from your parents. Once the little boy receives what he is longing for, the pain will diminish and you won’t have to numb it with addictions. It will all sort it self out, slowly but surely.

I do believe that therapy is very important, but I’d suggest you find someone who knows how to work the inner child and complex trauma (complex PTSD).

There is a way out, aVoid. You can make it, same as I did. You are not a terrible person. You are only wounded. Wounded people don’t need to be judged, they need compassion, so they can heal. Compassion is the first step…

Let me know how this sounds to you…

Dear Anonymouscat,

You said on another thread (“Emotional blackmail by Indian father against love marriage”) that you are in a similar situation like the original poster there. Here on your thread you said: “her parents won’t approve and she never gives me a timeline on when she willing to come over to me.”

Does it mean that her parents are against your relationship due to religious/cultural reasons, and they will never approve of it, no matter what? If so, and if she tends to abide by her parents’ will, then I am afraid you don’t have much prospects to be with her.

However, if there is a chance that their parents would change their mind, or that she would become more willing to stand up for herself and go against their will – then it makes sense to try and deepen the relationship. In that case, I think the first sensible step would be for you to visit her – not to expect her to visit you, because the latter will be much more difficult. If you visit her, you’ll both have the chance to see if you are compatible and decide on further steps.

Basically she would be giving up everything her family/frds to come be with me. Am I being selfish ?

If you expect her to visit you or to even move to your country without ever having met in person, and with her parents objecting – that would be asking too much of her and putting her in a very difficult situation. So yes, that might be selfish. But if you travel to visit her (provided she agrees to it), you put the pressure off of her, and are doing what you can to take the relationship to the next level. That in my eyes would be the best next step, if it’s feasible to you.

Dear lk09,

How have you been? I hope you are fine, taking good care of yourself…

I keep thinking about you and your situation… trying to understand better. In my last post I was surprised that you weren’t hurt or angry, and that you’re feeling “normal” after what he did to you. But in the meanwhile I’ve realized that it could be because you have already experienced this kind of behavior from him, so it wasn’t such a shock for you.

In fact your second breakup, in April 2021, was very similar to this one – it happened after you’ve spent a week together in relative bliss. But soon thereafter he proclaimed that he still can’t make up his mind about marriage. This was similar, only you spent an entire month together, and he was initially very eager, professing his love for you – perhaps even more eager than last year.

But since he had already betrayed you in a similar way before, I can imagine that you don’t feel so much anger this time. Rather, what you might be feeling is perhaps a mix of resignation, disappointment but also acceptance. Finally facing and accepting the reality that you need to let go of the dream that some day he will be yours. Maybe this is the feeling of “normal” that you were talking about? Accepting and making peace with reality, although it hurts. And that’s why you are crying at night…

If I am sensing this correctly (and please correct me if I am wrong), what hurts you the most is exactly this acceptance of reality, of harsh and sad truth, that you won’t have a future with him. In all fairness, it’s actually for the best that you don’t marry him and suffer greatly being married to such an unstable and confused person. But for you, it’s the loss of a dream.

You say you feel at peace, and I believe you, but this “peace”, it seems to me, has elements of defeat and resignation in it, of accepting a less than optimal future for yourself. Because you’re now saying things like “I don’t think I should be choosing partners anymore. I don’t think I choose people well.” (July 20, 2022). 

But I don’t want you to accept a less than optimal future, a future where you settle for someone that your parents chose for you, a future where you’ve convinced yourself that you can’t choose a good partner for yourself. No! I care about you and I want the best possible future for you, in which you will choose someone you truly love and he loves you back! Someone who won’t be withholding his love from you, who won’t hesitate, who won’t be changing his mind all the time, whom you won’t have to chase for morsels of his love and attention. Someone who will give you his love freely, because he knows what mature, healthy love is.

Or, in your own words, someone who would “crave for me to hug him after a day of hard work, someone who would want to kiss me subtly good night…”

I want you to find such a person and not settle for someone who is not the choice of your heart.

But! And here comes a big BUT – you need to let go of the idea that Dandan is “The One” for you and wait for him until he makes up his mind (possibly forever). And second, even more important, you need to change something about the way you do relationships. And that is: you need to stop tolerating your partner’s negligence, ambivalence and lack of respect for you.

Maybe you have already realized it yourself, but I want to say it out loud anyway, because so far it was lacking in your relationships: You need to set boundaries of what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t, and how you would like to be treated, so that your partner cannot say or do hurtful things without any consequences.

For example, Dandan told you he got hooked on porn during covid, but he wasn’t really willing to do anything to stop it. Similarly with his drinking habit – he didn’t want to stop. You tolerated it and had understanding for him, instead of saying “I don’t want to be with someone suffering from addictions, which are ruining our relationship, while he refuses to do anything to stop it. I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t care about me enough to seek help for his addictions. I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t care that he is hurting me with his addictions.”

Or even in smaller things, like keeping in touch every day, you tolerated that he would go silent for multiple days. Last time it happened, you timidly pinged him, asking “don’t you miss me?” And he said, no I don’t. He said there was nothing going on, that’s why he wasn’t texting you. You accepted that too – you accepted his negligence, coldness and lack of care for you, instead of saying something like “Please, I would like to hear from you every day. Can we agree to chat every evening, unless something important comes up and either of us cannot make it?” Or something along those lines.

Dear lk09, please don’t think that I am judging you – that’s the last thing I’d want. I only want to help you see (if you haven’t seen it already) that this pattern of tolerance and endurance isn’t good for the relationship.

But I also know it wasn’t easy for you to be assertive, because of the history of bullying at the hands of your sister. We’ve talked about it already and can talk about it more, if you’d like… But what probably happened is that every time you expressed your preference or boundary around your sister, there was a retaliation. She attacked you and you needed to buckle down because your parents protected her, not you. And so you could never express your needs, desires and preferences freely. Everything had to be subordinate to her will. I think this is the pattern you carried over into your romantic relationships too…

As a result, you stayed for too long in relationships where you and your needs weren’t respected. Come to think of it, neither your sister nor Dandan respected your needs, so they were similar in that sense. But the way they went about it was different.

Anyway, to sum up this loong post: if you want a healthy relationship, you need to be assertive. That includes expressing your needs and desires, your preferences, and your boundaries. You don’t need to tolerate and endure things that hurt you.

And one more thing, dear lk09: don’t lose faith in finding love, in your ability to find a good and loving partner for yourself. You can do it, trust me. You only need more assertiveness. And assertiveness can be learned – maybe with the help of therapy or coaching, but it’s definitely not out of your reach!

If you wish to talk, I am here… <3