Dear lana:

I replied to you quickly yesterday and decided to spend more time on your thread this morning. You shared: “we met at school… a few months later he told me that he loved me… one moment I love him and i just wanna be with him all the time and the next one I just wanna run away and isolate myself.. when I’m madly in love with him, I would  go and talk to him all the time and then I would have that ‘isolating feeling’ so I would just stop talking to him, the littlest things upset me.. I felt trapped in a vicious cycle,, without him I felt sad and missing something.. he then thought that I played with him for fun.. now he hates me and I just hate me too for hurting someone I really care about”.

First, a comment: it is hurtful for a person to be rejected repeatedly, particularly when, as you wrote, “he never really did anything wrong”. A person in a relationship needs consistency, not inconsistency, on-again-off-again. And so, he did the right thing to end the relationship with you, if this is what he did.

Here are five possibilities as to what has been fueling this behavior, on your part. You provided very little information, so a lot of what follow is my guessing. The truth may in any one of the following or a combination of these:

1. Maybe you don’t really like him. You like that a guy is interested in you, it feels good to be wanted, but you don’t like him very much. You wish someone taller/shorter/more popular/whatever was after you, not him.

2. Maybe he did something wrong (although you wrote “he never really did anything wrong”), but you like the idea of a relationship so much that you turned a blind eye to  it. For example, he may be nice to you but he gossips about his friends, being nice to them in person but then he complains about them behind their backs. You figure he may be complaining about you too behind your back. (Again, I am just guessing and this is a maybe-kind of example).

3. Maybe you feel that there is something wrong about yourself, a defect or an inferiority that if you let him be close for too long, he’ll find out about that wrongness and reject you, so every time you get anxious about him finding out your defect, you isolate yourself from him.

4. Maybe this “vicious cycle” is an activation of a childhood relationship you had (and may still  be having), as in one of your parents showed you some attention or affection and then withdrew, then after a while, repeated the same. Fast forward, as the teenager or young adult that you are, you are afraid that a boyfriend will withdraw, same as your parent did, so you withdraw first. Then you miss him and repeat. You are not only afraid that he will withdraw, you are also angry at him even though he didn’t withdraw from you yet (before he finally did). The anger is an activation of your anger at a parent who  did withdraw from you repeatedly.

Examples of a parent’s withdrawal: regularly paying more attention to a sibling, talking about how wonderful a sibling or any other child is, but not about you, maybe even being critical of you while glorifying other children. Another example: a parent being affectionate with you but then distant when distracted by other things- be it the computer, or drinking or anything else they do, not wanting to pay attention to you anymore.

– if you spent a lot of time as a child in a day care or a babysitter’s home, the affection/ withdrawal may have been done by the caretaker there.

5. Maybe you are testing him each time you withdraw- will he go after me? is the test, will he pursue me, wanting to affirm and reaffirm to yourself that he really, really wants you or loves you.

— what do you think?

anita