Dear Belle:

You wrote: “I am so ashamed and embarrassed of who I have become…all the names you think I am and wish to call me…”- I remember when I felt  so ashamed and embarrassed, and I did, a whole lot, I imagined other people were those pure and proper people, authority over proper behavior, and their judgment of me, therefore, right and righteous.

It is only later that I understood it isn’t so, that if I am to consider the validity of another person’s judgment of me, I want to know who that person is, that is doing the judgment, how does he or she conduct his life, what are her choices? I don’t automatically take another’s imagined or real criticism of me as the truth.

As to your retroactive jealousy (I like the term), I believe it is about what you wrote here:

“but what do I believe?”

I think it is not only about what you believe regarding Jason, but what should you believe about people before him, all the way back to the people in your childhood. So many lies, so many pretenses, what to believe?

The obsession with Jason is that need in you, I believe, to know what really happened, who really were these people in your life?

We see “that vulnerable scared boy who is insecure” in a man, or that vulnerable scared girl in a woman, a mother, let’s say and think he or she is a good person, but is he? Is she?

How to figure this out…

Am I making sense to you, in my understanding of your post?

anita