Hi Julia–

It might seem like I have some great insight into this person, but as you can see from your recent reading on the personality disorder, all these stories go pretty much the same way.

These kinds of people often know how to get close to us and appeal to our natural need for love and sensuality and for a while we seem like we’re the center of their universe. But in the end, they are more like casting directors auditioning and actor/actress to play a part in their own pathologies than boyfriends or girlfriends. It’ a great trip, but afterwards we’re left wondering how it could have been SO intimate and then gone to nothing. They on the other hand, think they have ‘moved on’ just to repeat the process. In the end, somewhere deep down they know they’re not capable of sustaining anything more, but a big part of them is ‘normal’ in that they too are just looking for love like the rest of us, blind to/willfully ignorant of their own limitation and the harm they do. They got what they needed; the incredible high of approval and intimacy – and that’s as far as they’re capable of going. Their latest ex on the other hand is left processing the emotions, whereas incapable of processing emotions responsibly, they skip that part.

If you took a ride on the Orient Express, it might be the most wonderful, interesting, sensual trip of your life and you might look back on it with nostalgia forever, but the train would make the same trip over and over again with different passengers, and wouldn’t miss you at all. It’s kind of like that in my experience.

Two weeks is nothing in the scope of things, though sorry it has been a painful two weeks for you. We take this wonderful ride (and indeed there’s always something to be learned) we become invested in it, and want it to go further and then we’re dumped off at the nearest stop. Because there just is no ‘further’ with them. There never was.

For some reason we feel like after this deeply felt emotional experience that has just ended traumatically we should be able to immediately snap back to our normal, driven lives the way we were before without a hitch, and if we can’t there’s something wrong with us. But it just doesn’t work that way. Processing those emotions is natural and it’s natural for you to be heartbroken, because you’re a human, feeling person. So don’t be hard on yourself. Allow yourself the time, and explore things that make you feel better.

I think it’s in Chinese medicine that they call the spot between your breastbones, at the intersection of your rib cage the ‘grieving point’. When you press there, if it’s kind of sore or inflamed that means you’re still grieving. Yoga breathing and meditation have helped me with releasing this.

Everything’s normal here and you have all the answers. Not you just have to process it and get back to yourself without worrying that it’s taking too long.