Dear Ed:

June 29: “I am desperate for a judgment about my past… I am desperate to know if I did wrong and deserved what I experienced, or if I am allowed to free myself and move on… only I can decide that” – I hope that you decide to free yourself and to move on.

I hope that you decide to free yourself and to move on even though you didn’t understand everything right and even though you didn’t do everything right.

No one understand everything right and no one does everything right every day, day after day. If the only way for a person to free themselves and to move on was to always be right and do right… then no one will ever be free and  no one will move on.

In the relationship with your ex, she did some things that were right and other things that were wrong, and you did some things that were right and other things that were wrong.

On June 18, in your original post, you wrote: “During this relationship I was in therapy because of my chronic depression and ptsd“-

– during the whole relationship you suffered from chronic depression and from ptsd symptoms. This means that your ability to have a healthy relationship (with any woman) was greatly compromised.

On June 23, you wrote: “In the first year I managed her through an intense depression and supported her finding a psychiatric clinic”, and yesterday, you mentioned self injury aka self harm: “helping her regarding her habit of self-injury during the first year“) – for a whole year, and likely longer, she suffered from intense depression and self-harm. This means that her ability to have a healthy relationship (with any man) was greatly compromised.

“I am afraid of me being wrong all along..  I feel so unsure about whether I understood things right or if my ex was right and I got everything wrong“-

– it is not one way or the other: you were not wrong all along, you didn’t get everything wrong,  and same is true for your ex. Your excessive fear about being wrong causes your thinking to be distorted (it is called all-or-nothing thinking, or black-and-white thinking). Accurate thinking needs to be balanced, which in this case means that both of you did some things that were right and other things that were wrong.

When you wrote about your ex that she was “passive-aggressive, controlling and full of lies“, you were under the influence of all-or-nothing thinking,  and therefore your view of her was extreme: that of an almost evil person.

I think that during the relationship you were often confused (“a constant state of confusion“, you wrote)- not because of who she was- but because of your c-ptsd, but you held her responsible for your confusion in the following two ways: (1) you incorrectly accused her of gaslighting you, that is, you accused her of purposefully causing your confusion: “She chose to lie to me for a year… gaslighting me“, and (2) you kept asking her to clarify your confusion even though it was not in her power to do so: “I asked her for so long (1 year) what she was discontent about, regarding the relationship or myself”.

“but she did hurt me” – at times maybe she was rude and hurtful and therefore caused your hurt. I want to point to 2nd distorted thinking called emotional-reasoning: what it means in this context is that sometimes, maybe often (I don’t know the frequency), you felt hurt even though she was not rude or hurtful, but because you felt hurt, you believed that she was rude and hurtful, and therefore, that she caused your hurt.

Your most recent words: “I miss her so much. But I see now that its better this way, because I was not the partner she needed, and she was not the girlfriend I wanted” – I hope that this sentence means that you are indeed freeing yourself and moving on. Remember to take what you positively learn with you as you move on!

anita