Dear everyone,

Took me long time to sit through messages, read them carefully and carefully consider your words. Jennifer hit it on the spot too – it takes a lots of gut to admit our weaknesses, especially the ugly ones. Just reading my message again made me feel uneasy and after reading the responses, my heart sank. I am a monster after all, born from an unattended child. But as easy as it is to push blame onto others (in this case my father), it’ll do me no good. It is me who broke that poor girl and not my father. It is me who failed to teach myself in older years value of honesty, assertiveness and courage required to build healthy relationships.

It is painfully true too, that in this relationship my role has already been established as The Abuser. I get pulled into that role too often, whatever I say, The Abused sees it as an invisible threat, she seems to think “somewhere there hidden are lies, hate, agression” and thus simple questions become igniting points for hours long arguments, where I said something completely insensitive, showed that I don’t care or made her feel like poop. All that while I’m clueless as to how I offended her, how I have not cared about her, so on and so on. Is it possible that anything I’ll say she will interpret as abusive or at least will attempt (very hard) to find that “abusive load” in my words? I certainly believe so!

The problem is, I am too weak to follow this through the way you are suggesting. Break up requires too much willpower from me. Or maybe that’s not lack of willpower but overwhelming guilt, or even worse – sense of duty, feeling that I shouldn’t do it. It’d set me free, maybe it’d set her free too, but whenever that “we break up and cut contact, this time for real” comes up, I can’t follow through. Because she will say things that make my heart sink deeper into guilt, she tells me she has not a single reason to live now that I leave her, that after all I leave her with all the damage I’ve done and now she’s alone with her problems, that I failed and she never deserved it – and she is right to say these things.

She seems absolutely powerless in these times, crying her eyes out, seemingly phasing out and becoming a hollow form without a human soul. And I never wished that fate upon her, so I stay, I make amends and I genuinely try hard to fix at least something in her life. And the cycle repeats, oh how I wish I was free from it, but what of her then? What if she fails to recover or even worse, does something to her out of desperation or depression? I want her to heal, to thrive, to be happy, not sink deeper into despair or harm herself. Am I not responsible for her misery? Is it not my responsibility to support her in these dark times then? Her family is far from perfect, her friends are none, and her therapy is not helping. Should I really leave her alone with all this?

And I am not looking for place of comfort, Bambi, nor for return to my comfort zone. I know very well that only outside these changes happen. But the stress I’ve been living in for one and a half year now has taken its toll on me. In the morning I struggle to exercise, trying to lose weight. After that there’s eight hours of work which I need to support myself financially. After that there’s usually six or more hours spent with her. Inbetween I try to fit house chores. Four times a month maybe I’ll get a chance to meet with a friend, but sometimes I’d rather stay at home and relax in solitude. I am overwhelmed and unsure how to follow this routine.

This just seems like a place of no escape as of now. A very dark place with many very wrong choices:

stay with her and possibly hurt her more or even cause harm just by being normal person, because what if she’s reinterpreting everything I do as abusive
bless her and let her go, and know for rest of my life that she’s drowning even more in her despair, because I broke her and then chose my healing over her healing
supress my identity and become more of a obedient servant than a partner in order to let her heal, in the process probably causing harm to myself (which option out of three sounds most fair and just, but what if I break before she heals?)

And I don’t know how to proceed anymore. I’m feeling completely blocked.