Dear Ryan,

All I can say is that everything I’ve written here is true.

I do hope it is. It never occurred to me it isn’t. It kind of shook me when anita suggested it. We can keep communicating if you’d like to. I did want to continue our discussion…

Dear Ryan,

you are welcome.

I do feel that I’m “worthy” of being loved and praised.

Do you? You said you feel like garbage.

Where I selfishly erred was not telling her from the start that I would be leaving.

I know my selfishness or unwillingness to be truthful with her from the start allowed her to develop strong feelings for me.

Here you also say you are selfish and manipulative (unwillingness to be truthful).

Do you really love and value yourself, believing these things about yourself?

Another thing I notice is that in this relationship too, like in your previous relationship, you wanted to be a “positive influence” in the woman’s life (“While I wanted to be a positive influence in her life”,  “I’ve shown her a bit of what’s possible”). You stayed with her even though you knew you would be leaving and you also knew that she isn’t “what you truly want”. So you thought she could still profit from your “positive influence”, even if you knew you would be leaving her sometime down the road.

I see a dichotomy here: on one hand you believe you’re praise-worthy and in fact so wonderful that it’s better you stay with a woman whom you intend to leave, so she could benefit from your presence. On the other hand, you believe you are like garbage, selfish and will cause disappointment sooner or later. So it seems to me there is an inflated, superior sense of self, and an inferior, self-deprecating sense of self, both living in you simultaneously.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Tee.

Dear Charity,

I don’t know why exactly your husband doesn’t want to invite his friend to your house. There can be a number of reasons, maybe even that his friend is a womanizer and that’s why he wants to keep him away from you. Or he might be using bad language or makes inappropriate comments, or something like that. So the reason might be that he doesn’t want to embarrass himself in front of you for having such a dumb or impolite friend… who knows. The problem is that you immediately jump into conclusions that there is something wrong with you:

I feel hard to love. I feel worthless. I feel like I’ll never be with anyone that can love me and respect me the way I believe a wife should be. Am I being dumb? What is so wrong with me?

The reason for this is I believe your childhood wound. This is from your previous thread:

Because I am pro-choice and support gay marriage and people living their lives the way they want my brother and his wife have said they do not want me around them or their children. It’s been over a year (almost two years) since I have had any contact with them. I feel like I should have healed and accepted this by now, yet my daily thoughts always go back to their rejection. Almost like I cannot allow myself to be happy until I am accepted by them. None of it makes sense to me though. I love them but every time I was around them I was the butt of the jokes. I always left in tears and feeling less than because my brother loved to make fun of me so much. I am constantly telling myself that this is the week I focus on being happy and finding joy in my life yet my thoughts always go back to the rejection and the raw pain I still feel.

You feel rejected by your family, believing there is something wrong with you. And now you feel rejected by your husband too.

You said about your ex husband:

I spent 12 years begging him to respect me and love me and be honest with me but he could never do that. My emotions were funny to him.

Again, you were begging him to respect you and couldn’t leave him for 12 years, and I think it’s because a part of you believed you don’t deserve respect.

So I believe you’d need to work on healing that wound – of being undeserving of love and less than.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Tee.

Sure, go ahead…

Dear canary,

Thank you for speaking with me, I appreciate everyone that has commented. I feel much better and at peace after speaking and being honest

You are welcome, and I am glad you are feeling better now. And that you see that you are enough and don’t need others to validate you:

I realize that whenever I feel inadequate, I need to bring the attention back towards myself. I need reminders of who I am and what my strengths are. I don’t need others to validate me and agree with me.

And also, that you don’t need to take advice from people who are harsh and criticizing:

I know that the only opinion and advice that I should take is from those I look up to. Someone who I look up to will never criticize me in a hard way because they are loving and gentle.

These are all important realizations!

In this last post of yours it also transpired that your father was rather a bully in the family, whom everyone feared, including your mother. You perhaps received less of his yelling and open aggression than your siblings, but still you grew up afraid and hiding your anxiety and your school problems from him, because you were afraid of his anger (My father would never see me cry, only my mother would. I didn’t speak to my father about my anxiety as a child, so he didn’t know what I was dealing with. I was too afraid to ask him for permission to remove my facial hair because I assumed he would get angry and say no, so I never did.).

Your mother was afraid of his anger too:

She did not agree, she was willing to let me remove my facial and body hair but she was afraid to speak to my father about it because he would become angry.

She was afraid of him, he thought he knew better how to raise children, and she didn’t dare to say anything.

I wouldn’t say my dad lacks empathy, he is very emotional and loving but he was just blinded by his own mindset at the time.

Well, he certainly wasn’t emotional and loving when you were a child, since he kept you all in fear. Your mother didn’t dare to mention that you have problems at school and that you were being bullied. Neither you or your mother dared to say anything to him, lest he explodes in anger. Your siblings were terrified of him, even more than you were, because he yelled at them much more.

So you grew up with a bully father, and I believe you’d need to acknowledge it. Even if he has changed since, he did inflict a wound, and I believe his behavior contributed to your anxiety. Because if you needed to hide your fears, if you couldn’t speak openly about your feelings and about being bullied, no wonder this would exacerbate your anxiety and your sense of helplessness. If you were told to be strong and not a crybaby, while this terrifying man is looming over you – how else would you react? And you knew that your mother couldn’t protect you either.

It is very difficult to bring all the focus towards myself because I realize that I care about everyone’s opinion of me. Even a stranger’s opinion of me matters to me, and I’m not exactly sure why.

Maybe strangers’ opinions matter to you because you’re still subconsciously seeking approval from people who remind you of your father – from fear inducing, judgmental and strict people? From people who lack empathy? Or just in general, you seek approval because growing up, you never received it with a father like that?

If you had to hide a part of yourself (your weak, vulnerable, fearful side – which every child has), of course you didn’t feel validated and appreciated. Of course you felt unseen and not completely understood.

It’s much clearer to me now where your sense of not being seen, understood and appreciated is coming from. It’s from your father. It’s fine that he’s changed since, but your mental health is suffering now because of how he treated you in your formative years. You’d need to be aware of that in order to heal it…

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Tee.

Dear Speaklow,

I have found myself in an unhealthy relationship which started 3 years ago. I am 32, and he is 39. A gulf exists between us, exacerbated not only with drastically different lives but also cultures.

I think that the relationship is beyond salvaging. Sometimes one must know when to quit, and actually stick to it. Too much toxicity, too much pain, and he won’t end it, so I must for us both to hopefully heal.

I agree, it does seem like your relationship is beyond salvaging, and the very setup in which he is your life and business partner, but he refuses to divorce his wife is unhealthy. You work full time in both of your business, and he doesn’t work at all but is taking out the money though? (I work in both full time; he is currently unemployed and has been for months, but does not put in effort beyond what seems to be mostly criticism. I take on most, if not all, of the mental load in both businesses because if I didn’t, no one else would. A further update is that I see that he is starting to draw money out of both businesses politely)

He wants to sell you his share (although at a too high price), which means he too knows the end is approaching and he is preparing for that. And he wants to extract as much money as possible from you, so I believe you’re right when you say: “I no longer feel like there will be any kindness or fairness, not even basic respect and residual love from him anymore”. He knows you want out, so he wants to maximize his profit, even though the deal might not be fair for you.

Even posting here, makes me feel like I am in some way betraying him, because I am talking about him to others. It’s something he seems to feel keenly about; that I cannot talk about him to others, because he is a very private person. Him saying he has been backstabbed by me this time, is not the first. My heart is heavy, my eyes are swollen, and my tissue box is running low — if I am the horrible partner he is making me out to be, then why didn’t he leave, and why am I finding it so hard to leave?

Well, it seems to me that he has been a lousy partner all this time, both as a romantic and a business partner. He refused to get a divorce, and you tolerated it. Also, he was minimally engaged in your businesses, and yet was drawing income? And now he is accusing you of complaining to someone about his bad behavior? Now you are the bad guy, and he is innocent?

No, you’re not a horrible partner, but a too tolerant one. You allow yourself to be blamed, when the blame should be on him. He didn’t leave because it suits him to draw money while not contributing to the business at all. I think he didn’t leave for selfish reasons.

why am I finding it so hard to leave?

Because you don’t respect yourself enough and a part of you believes that you indeed are to blame?

Dear Felix,

I think my sense of worthlessness develops throughout the year because i experience numerous scenarios which triggers it.

You seem to not want to see how your upbringing and your mother’s treatment lead to your sense of worthlessness. You get triggered in even the most innocent situations, so it’s not the situation that’s problematic, but it is how you react to the situation.