Dear sossi:

“When in doubt you refer to your instinct about situations and coincidences rarely exist do they?”- I don’t believe in destiny (a predetermined course of events in a person’s life, a predetermined future), therefore I don’t believe in coincidences being evidence of a destiny.

In regard to instinct (how a person feels and behaves in a particular situation without having to think or learn about it)- sometimes instinct is reliable, such as when a person touches a hot stove, feels the burn and removes his hand from the stove (having made the correct evaluation that indeed the stove was hot and therefore dangerous), and  sometimes instinct is not reliable, such as when a person who has a phobia regarding spiders sees a spider, or a picture of spider, feels intense fear, screams and yells (having made the wrong evaluation of an image of the spider being dangerous).

“And my ex is long gone. I’ve hung on and on with the dream-like imagining that I am special.. I wanted to feel wanted by someone I was attracted to”- your instinct was to hang on to him, or to your idea of him (to what he represented to you). I guess this instinct fits the spider phobia example above in that you made the wrong, overly positive evaluation of your ex and reacted to that wrong evaluation.

“he is a narcissist”- that’s your most current evaluation of your ex. He may fit the diagnosis or not, you might be making an overly negative evaluation of him, I don’t know. But he definitely does not fit the overly positive evaluation you had of him when you hung on to him for so long. Do you agree?

anita