Dear Carla:

You wrote: “He got angry and proceeded to tell me I was crazy and he wished he’d been able to break up with me the first time, and the only reason he stayed with me was because I guilted him in to it.  He said I pressured him by saying I loved him…He said never to contact him again.”

He was angry at you. When a person is angry at another, he or she has the intent to hurt the other. It is the same with other animals: the natural motivation in anger is to hurt another. Reason may be to protect one’s territory, an example.

This is what he tried to do, to hurt you and he succeeded.

Later you wrote:  “I told him how much it hurt to know he stayed with me out of pity and if I’d known that I would have left. He softened and said something like ‘I never would have spent so much time with you and talked with you about so much if you didn’t mean something,’ and asked me to believe him. I don’t believe him”

Notice, he softened, being less angry or not angry at this point. He is not motivated therefore to hurt you. And so he told you that his relationship meant for him more than pity, that it meant “something”.

What is true? Clearly the relationship with you meant something to him, from your sharing, I figure that. Maybe he felt guilty and maybe he felt pressure at this or that point in time, during the relationship. I would trust way more what he told you in the second quote than what he did in the first. What he told you when angry was in its entirety an untruth.

anita