Hello Irene,

I’m sorry for the pain you’re going through. I know it hurts a lot.

The pain is one thing, the narration for that pain is another. The reality is that a relationship ended and that he is now with someone else. That is what we know. However, any explanations that you start to give yourself may or may not correspond with reality. Right now you see it from the perspective that he was with you with four years and now he has replaced you with someone else so fast afterwards. Another perspective would be that he was with you for four years and he can’t stand the pain of separation either and wanted a rebound as soon as possible. There’s your side of the story, his side of the story and then there’s the truth.

In any case, the problem with your approach is that you are looking at it from the perspective of being this poor victim who’s somehow completely unloveable and so you reach out, from this stance, to other people and ask them to validate your perspective. That is essentially what you are doing by asking other people to tell you two things that are good about you. What if they don’t want to play this game with you? What if they don’t want to feed the self-pity? Of course there are good things about you, you wouldn’t have been in a four year relationship and had a 11 year friendship if that was not the case. Come on. Drop the self-pity narration and focus on healing yourself. It does hurt when you separate from another person and so you need to take time to tend to yourself and love yourself.

Instead of asking other people to join you in misery, why not ask them to join you in healing? Go for a walk in a garden together, cook together, etc. Fill your senses with the sights and sounds of life. Or do those things by yourself. Just get out of your head and into the world!