Dear Anita,

“-yes, the text exchange about 2 weeks ago impacted you a lot…The result: his efforts to make you feel badly have succeeded, and for 2 weeks you felt doubtful, guilty and exhausted”

• How I also felt many times in the relationship but couldn’t pinpoint why.

“-N repeated F’s message that you don’t know how to love”

• This is a loaded statement. I don’t like this for myself, that I have been in two long relationships where I was told this, told so many times that I believe it, but I don’t want to. I do and don’t believe it, it is an argument I have with myself.

“I think that the fantasy that pulls you toward trying to change N is the same fantasy involving F: the fantasy of hearing F/N say something like: I was wrong about you, Seaturtale, you do know how to love!”

• I think so too because even imagining one of this saying this feels satisfying to me. Fantasy.

“I now understand why you agreed with N when he said that you have no clue what love is: F said the same thing in his ways (those housecleaning sessions) and you believed him (F.. and N).”

• I have always been a “coachable” person. I remember, my first love, soccer, my coach told me this and I adapted it to who I was. I am coachable. But in soccer, it was true I didn’t know how to play and that coach taught me how and I did so very well, following instructions well and natural talents supporting me. When told I wasn’t loving right, by my dad, I think I just looked at it the same as a sport, he’s right and I can be taught. But his attempts to teach me at “house cleanings” weren’t working, as they happened every couple months for years…so maybe some part of me accepted I just didn’t know how to love, I couldn’t learn.

“ you still don’t see that you have plenty of clue what love is. It was only 2 weeks ago, that you agreed with N that you have no clue.”

• I do know how to love – My affirmation.

“I now understand why you presented yourself as a self-centered, selfish (Narcissistic, your word)  person in your original posts on both threads (right from the start of each thread): not because you are these things but because F told you that you are these things and you believed him.”

• This feels true, F has told me that. When my parents separated, I became this role of “trip mom” to my sisters. It was terrible. It created a rift in my relationship with my sisters and still to this day I have anger towards my dad for the position he put me in. I have a vivid memory that still brings me anger: We went to a ski lodge, and I was to share a room with my two little sisters, a room with two beds. My sister P, (A is the one I am close with, the younger one). P and I always fought, she was very stubborn and created havok everywhere, throwing fits at restaurants and embarrassing my whole family in front of my friends or babysitters. F also did not like her, he would get angry with her and she would get disciplined more than the rest of us, and harsher.. Anyways at the ski lodge she starts her sass and says something like she wants her own bed, and I said no you and A will share, I went to my dad to confirm this and he says “what you think you are better than her? Why should you get your own bed?” I still remember how I felt in that moment, I was confused and humiliated infront of everyone, as my dad repeated on other occasions, scolding me infront of others. In front of P. We ended up alternating our own beds but I still felt it was so unfair. I was in charge of my sisters, I had to keep track of them skiing, I had to pack their food, I had to do all the motherly things yet didn’t get the privilege of my own bed. I felt no appreciation for what I was forced to do, I say forced because I would be in trouble if one of them were lost on my hands. This story is just a moment I remember him telling me I was self centered but I had no words to express myself, F took advantage of that.

“And maybe it is your child-like loyalty to F that motivates you to repeat his message to other people (here… and in-real-life?).”

• If it is I am ready to end this, I don’t owe him loyalty. Although he does have a way of making me feel like I do. Even his words, he told me and my siblings all our successes are due to him, what we earn in life is because of where he started us. He loves the baseball analogy “you can’t say you hit a home run if you were born on third.” A and I talk about this to this day and resent that he said this to us.

“But you are not that person.. if you were, you wouldn’t be so negatively impacted by that message. It was a false/ untrue message all along.”

• Although I know this I still feel it engrained in my “inner world” as I mentioned in my last post. Just as when I was in the relationship with N, some part of me knew truths that my inner world had not accepted yet, my inner world is in motion and knows there’s this bump in the road but keeps going over it. As I wrote in my last post “I am attempting to undo some of the inner world that was created incorrectly/misleading.” Getting rid of these road bumps/these untrue messages, is the hard part that I am trying to do now. I guess this brings me full circle to why I brought up that whole analysis of “the untethered soul” that I mentioned in my last post, how do I get rid of these bumps, now that they are spotted.

“see yourself as a loving person who has been a loving person from your very beginning. This is what I see.”

• Having an ah-ha moment here; this is exactly what I mean when I say I wanted N to see me. When I said “my mom sees me, why can’t he?” this is the seeing I was talking about, or at least a major part of it, that I am loving. I am.

• This brings me to an ah-ha moment I had last night. I am watching a show called “the bachelor” with my roommate M. The premise is one person, this seasons it is a man, dates multiple (women) and narrows down to one. There was this one girl that I was rooting for, she was so much fun but she definitely had a big struggle to be vulnerable and tell the guy how she felt. I told M, ‘ I want her to win I want her to be vulnerable for him and he will pick her!” The struggle to get her to be vulnerable was intriguing to me and I wanted so badly for her to open up to him and let him see her, as he so badly wanted her to do but she was not able to, despite his efforts to show her how he felt and who he was. As I was rooting for her, M made a comment to me, she said ‘maybe this is why you go for men that are not available to you, you like it!’ ………. (wide eyes emoji). I am now asking myself why do I find an attraction to the type of relationship where one person tries to get the other to be vulnerable… my parents had this relationship, my mom begging my dad to be vulnerable. I wonder what I witnessed as a child that I don’t remember.
• Another ah-ha moment I had with M: We were talking about the importance of feeling safe in a relationship. And I told her I actually didn’t feel the safest with N. As our roadtrip that he took a non-tested (out of use for years sitting on his dads farm) truck across three states with no heat, and brought me along. The trip was a huge struggle but also very bonding, and those were experiences he enjoyed having. Similar to the shrooms incident. As we spoke about before, he felt bonded in war, in hard times. But the ah-ha moment was that he began to create those experiences, by putting us in risky situations. A year after the experience with his truck, getting stranded in the dessert for ours, spinning out and losing transmission, a year later he told me that the truck was out of use on his dads farm for years…used for only towing heavy items and that he knew it would have issues on our trip. He did this a few times in the relationship, just like his nicotine use, that he told me a year into dating he did before he met me but was too embarrassed to tell me, but he felt guilty since he had recently been using it again. He made me feel uneasy. But sometimes it paid off and I was proud of myself for having made it through certain situations, like when we went backpacking and we had to cross a running river bare foot. I was so afraid and did not want to but felt courageous once I made it across. Or when he encouraged me to climb a tree I thought was dangerously high but once I made it up I felt an adrenaline rush, and proud of myself. I don’t necessarily think that all of these were unsafe positions to be in, but if there was a spectrum from safe adversities and unsafe, he went all over the spectrum. On our roadtrip we were in a few risky scenarios that seemed avoidable but he wanted the thrill. In that conversation with M I just concluded that I did not feel safe with him. Even when I first saw him with a child, with his nephew, I felt uneasy that he would accidentally harm him by being too risky, he put him in the shopping cart then ran in the store with the cart as he stood on the rim and I was terrified it would tip. Somehow N’s Teflon is different than F’s in that sometimes N craves feeling, but maybe to feel past his Teflon he must enter into risky scenarios, whereas F is fine staying in a comfortable resort for all of his trips.

Seaturtle