Dear c:

In your post to me you wrote: “I want to be aware of what I’m feeling and why”- in this post I will try to look into what you are feeling in regard to your boyfriend’s ex girlfriend, and why.

What you feel/ about feelings: “I have had some pretty frequent anxiety around thoughts about his most recent ex girlfriend… it isn’t jealousy I’m feeling..  I still feel like he carries some regret and pain… it’s still just been hard for me. Almost like a burden…  It’s hard to trust someone new… it bugs me and I can’t ‘let it go’… I just wish at this point it was kind of just gone for me and I didn’t almost experience the pain of it..  my burden“.

In your reply yesterday to a member on another thread, you shared about your feelings in the context of your previous marriage: “it then became a constant theme in our marriage that I’d catch him smoking over the years.. he would always lie about it to me… smoking wasn’t the only ‘bad habit’ he had that he hid from me… So we had a constant state of kind of mistrust… it was a HUGE burden on our relationship.. it would be hard for me to date someone that hid something like that from me. BUT if I did I would need to go in fully accepting that they might have other similar things they have trouble revealing to me.. he would of had to completely on his own decide.. about being transparent”.

My thoughts and wondering about possibilities: in your marriage you carried a huge burden of mistrust- it was “a constant theme”- upset that he hid something from you, or lied to you; anxious about the next time you will uncover something hidden.

Fast forward, like you wrote yourself: “It’s hard to trust someone new”, meaning it is hard for you to trust your current boyfriend. You intellectually know that he is trustworthy, and you feel some comfort because of this knowing, but the old mistrust found its way into this one area of your boyfriend’s life: his past relationship with his ex long term girlfriend.

I am thinking that the nature of your current burden is the same as the burden you experienced in your marriage, the burden of mistrust. And because for very few people mistrust is experienced for the first time in marriage, it could be that you have carried this burden from an early age… maybe a parent hiding things, not being transparent with you;  things hidden, threatening things, “things they have trouble revealing to me”.

About shame and regret in your marriage, you wrote: “It was a source of shame for him… He in general had a hard time showing me anything that he perceived as shameful… I am SURE my ex-husband.. carries enormous shame and regret about our divorce. I don’t”, and when sharing about your boyfriend, you wrote: “I know a lot of men carry shame and regret”-

– I wonder about shame and  being your own, but hidden from your awareness. I understand that each man has felt or is feeling shame and regret, but maybe not as intensely as you imagine them to feel these emotions. It may be that the intensity of shame and/or regret is what you feel, projected into them.

You shared regarding your marriage that you weren’t “the easiest person to be transparent with”- I wonder what you mean by it, and I have a feeling that it is very relevant to the topic.

anita

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