Dear  Manda:

You are welcome. I didn’t realize you answered me until a moment ago, otherwise, I would have posted to you earlier.

You promised to “never kick him out at a moment’s notice no matter what”. The law says he had the right for a 3-days notice in writing to leave. Well, his behavior 1-10, his compounded  betrayal of you and his dishonest mind games he is still using against you, these give you the moral right, I say, to give him that three day notice, and use the police if he doesn’t  leave in those three days.

You wrote: “I feel like I’m broken”- this is a reason to not make it possible  for him to break you further with his dishonest  mental manipulation, the lies, the blaming, and so on.

You wrote that you were never  betrayed this deeply. But I think that when your mother “often disappeared for days at a time leaving me with (your) dad”, a father who was an alcoholic and “incapable of  caring for (you) properly” is quite a betrayal of the  young child who she chose to bring into the world. I don’t know if there is a bigger betrayal than that done by a parent.

Yes, I do think your childhood experience has something to do  with “why (you’re) struggling so much letting this man  go out of  (your) life”. Maybe you are too afraid to be alone.

A child, abandoned by her mother, is  too desperate, she wants her mother back no matter who the mother is. In a similar  way, I think that you want this  man in your life not matter who he   is. It doesn’t matter that he lied, 1-10 don’t matter. The only thing that matters is that he stays.

Do you think this is so, for you?

anita