Dear Soul-searcher:

If you helped this man be better father to his son, then you did help his son a great deal, and that’s a wonderful thing that you did, for his son.

This is what you wrote about how you felt as a child (same quote as in my previous post to you): “very rejected and abandoned.. alone.. like no one wanted me.. I craved feeling loved and wanted”. But you felt loved and wanted, or almost loved and wanted, when the father of your two older sisters visited you through the years: “he would take me to the beach to pick shells, to the parks, to his house to play with his expensive China and take me to meals”. When you were six, you were told that he wasn’t your (biological) father, and that was “quite a blow”, for you, and your older sister reminding  you of that repeatedly made that blow worse.

Regarding your boyfriend, you wrote: “when things are good between us, things can’t be any more beautiful… We are kind to one another, we are romantic, we listen to one another”.

Putting together the above: every time things are good between you and your boyfriend, it activates the very good feeling you had when your non-bio father visited you and took you to the beach and to his house, etc. This very good feeling is what keeps you in this relationship. You are chasing that good feeling, waiting for it, needing it and this motivation is what’s keeping you in this relationship throughout all the many, many depressing times.

You get the good feeling when things are going well with him, but you also  get angry sooner than later. Not only because of his behavior, but because you’ve been angry as a child. It is the old anger that gets activated: “I get angry and frustrated and then the fights begin.. I do suffer from emotional tantrums, and they are so hard to control… I will become hurtful.. and say things such as, ‘the only man who ever accepted me or loved me was my dad, but he’s dead”-

– you are angry now, and have been angry since a young child, because you weren’t loved as a child (“I didn’t receive the love I needed as a child”), and what you received from your non-bio father, was simply not enough.

In summary: I believe that what is keeping you in this relationship while miserable in it most of the time, is the very good feeling you experience with him from time to time, as rarely as it may be. The reason this good feeling does not last, is because you are still angry for not having been loved as a child.

At this point, I don’t know how much of the trouble in the relationship is because of his behavior, and how much of it is because your pre-existing anger that leads into fights.

anita