Dear Tanya:

From personal experience, when you witness as a child your mother being hurt by your father cheating on her, this is as if you were cheated on yourself. A young girl is so close to her mother, there is hardly a mental separation in the girls’ brain between her and her mother, that her hurt is your hurt. I believe that even without having a boyfriend later in life who cheated  on you, you carried your childhood experience of being  cheated on by proxy, with you into your adulthood.

The journaling method works for you, excellent, so is going to the  gym. Problem is the suspicion will return soon enough, the distrust will raise its head with a  decent, trustworthy man! Sooner or later, it will be back with the first “sign” of something going wrong. You are doing  well… until he is late calling you back and the thought occurs to you: why is he late, what is he doing…?

It takes healing best  you can, not only from being cheated   on by your ex  boyfriend, but being  cheated on, by proxy,  by your own father. It also takes  the ability and patience it  takes  to evaluate a man over time, is he  trustworthy or not? And then it takes talking sense  to yourself again and again… and yet again whenever suspicion occurs.

It also takes accepting certain realities, that even trustworthy men feel attracted to other  women  at times while in a committed relationship, and the attraction in itself is  not cheating.

What do you think?

anita