Dear Umaz:

You are welcome. On Sept 25, you wrote about your boyfriend not inviting you to his father’s funeral: “He’s an amazing person and he would never hurt me intentionally. But I still feel betrayed“. Today, you are angry at him so you suspect that he is gaslighting you, which suggests that he is intentionally hurting you, and that he is not amazing after all.

What I think happened most recently, after he returned from the funeral, is that you were still hurt about him not inviting you to the funeral, and then when you found out that  his ex’s mother and sister were at the funeral, you got very angry, as if he chose his.. ex over you and invited her/ her family to the funeral, but did not invite you.

So, you got very angry and said hurtful things to him. He reacted angrily by calling you a narcissist, and next, you are suggesting that he is a narcissist (gaslighting is a term used for narcissists).

Thing is, his ex’s mother and sister live in that country and he didn’t invite them to the funeral, did he? He had nothing to do with them being there. But in your mind, it is as if .. he invited his ex herself to the funeral but did not invite you, so you felt left-out, hurt, and then angry for having been betrayed…   as if he had an affair with his ex while attending his father’s funeral. Does it feel this way to you?

Like I suggested to you earlier, I think that it is the hurt and betrayal that you experienced when your family rejected you that keeps awakening in the context of your relationship with your boyfriend, and this is why I suggested that you work through your emotions about having  been rejected by your family. Do you want to share about that rejection here.. what happened and how you felt/ feel about it? It may help. If you do, I will read attentively and reply further.

anita