Dear Kkasxo:

It has been quite a different experience for me to follow your story because so much of it is untold. I don’t know if you live alone. I know very little about your life circumstances. I know nothing about your childhood and almost nothing about your current relationships with your family members. Not only that, I know so very little about your relationship with your ex boyfriend. And I don’t know if he is indeed your ex boyfriend or a current boyfriend. The trauma of June of last year, you shared very little about that (it being a difference of opinions between you and him, a difference of opinion on a subject matter not related to your relationship with him).

So you see, I have so little information to look at. But I have some.

Nov 5, 2018 you wrote: “When the particular even occurred I shut it out of my brain completely so not to hurt those closest  to me by seeing me hurt. Almost like I had to put  on a brave face to support others who may be feeling my pain for me”

Feb 8, 2019, today: “My family for one have absolutely no  clue that I’ve been down in the gutter for so long and that I am indeed struggling because I am oh so good at putting on a brave face so not to worry them! I may need to consider opening up to a  family member at this rate”.

This is my understanding: there is a reason you don’t share with your mother/ parents. A young child naturally shares when she is hungry or sad or scared. The child learns to not share over time because  of  negative experience when she did share. She learns to hide her feelings, to put on a brave face, so to not be rejected, so to be a good girl.

So what I figure is that you have been emotionally alone for a long, long time. And you did well, managed well, adjusted well. A big part of your adjustment has been  this relationship of 2.5 years. This relationship became the biggest part of your adjustment to your emotional isolation. He became everything to you. But he was not everything, in actuality. He was and is a young man in his early twenties, still living at home with his mother. But he was all you had and you rested in what he meant to you.

The event in June shook that comfort and took it away. Since then you are hanging by a thread: no family comfort and no relationship comfort.

In my last year post to  you I suggested that if I was in your shoes I would forgive your boyfriend (for what wrongdoing I am not sure, having so little information), but I have changed my mind now and I will explain to you why:

-once your feeling of safety was shaken as badly as it has, June of last year, you can’t get that feeling of safety back. You wrote last year: “when we are together now all the feelings of hurt and betrayal arise again, there is an awful lot of resentment and anger towards him”- I think that this is what you will experience with him every time you are with him, sooner or later. Therefore I believe that you should end all contact with him.

Not because he doesn’t deserve forgiveness, not because he is a bad person or that he doesn’t love you, but because he meant to you more than he actually was or can ever be. And you can’t get back that which he meant to you, that feeling you had with him. Every time you see him, you re-experience that shock: the safety is gone, the comfort is gone.

If you would like to consider what I wrote here, please do and if you want, we can continue to communicate.

anita