Dear John:

I re-read your posts. This is a summary of your situation as I understand it:

You were married before for 12 years. Now divorced. You had a relationship with your ex girlfriend for a year. That relationship ended  about six months ago . Since the breakup you’ve been having a relationship with your current girlfriend and she’s been having a relationship with her current boyfriend. There was no contact between you and your ex for a while and recently contact was resumed mostly if not solely through texting.

This is my current understanding of what may be happening:

You have been depressed for quite a while, many years perhaps. Sometimes more intensely than at other times. You wrote that after your ex left you, you fell “into a bad depression… lasted about 3 months”.

I think you were depressed before you met your ex, throughout your relationship with your ex and currently. I think that what attracted you to your ex girlfriend was all the drama in her life, that was a wonderful-to-you distraction from your depression, it kept you going, high on her drama.

You wrote about your ex: “She had a perfect storm of life drama around the same time” (of your relationship with her). You wrote that you “tried to ‘help  out’ too much” and then “It all came crashing down… it got ugly. Real ugly. She told me never to contact her or her friends/family ever again!”

I think you loved her drama and you added more drama to her life, excited by drama. And recently, for no reason, seems like, you have been experiencing lots of post relationship drama. Nothing significant has happened: you have a relationship with your current girlfriend, your ex has her own relationship, nothing happened and yet, you are riding a roller coaster of emotions.

What happened, I think, is that following the initial excitement of your new relationship, you experienced the depression again. So you re-created the drama of your past relationship, all  in your brain (nothing happened recently in real life), and so you get the break you need from the monotony of your depression, a mania of sorts, the extreme end of the depressive mood before.

When in the drama of your previous relationship, you wrote: “I had drive, motivation, self respect, everything was boosted!”-

your words, “everything was boosted!” with an exclamation mark. That was that mania-like state of mind.

Then the depression returned and you “feel like I do the minimum to get by”-

And so, you re-created the excitement, the drama.

anita