Dear Mikki:

From your share, I don’t perceive your boyfriend as dishonest or untrustworthy. I don’t see evidence for such an evaluation. Him hiding his phone can easily be a response to your anxiety and suspicions, not that he has something to hide. Living with his ex girlfriend can be just an arrangement and nothing more (as unpleasant as it feels to you and would to me as well).

You started your post with feeling crazy for seeking validation from strangers. I believe it is more sane to seek validation from strangers than from family members who have proved to be invalidating. Actually, I wasted decades of my life trying to earn my mother’s validation. I would have had better results aiming at strangers.

But that’s beside the point. I read your history and it makes your trust issues very understandable. No, I do not believe that you are “too broken… beyond repair”- you can learn how to manage your anxiety, your distress, without reacting to it by damaging your relationship with your boyfriend or behave destructively otherwise. There is also psychotherapy with a competent therapist and/ or support groups that can help you heal from your traumatic early life events.

Back to my mother- you wrote that your mother committed suicide when you were five and that “She was my entire world… 42 years later, I still remember. When she died, my life instantly became this big black hole of fear, loneliness and uncertainty.” That caught my attention because when I was five my mother threatened to commit suicide and that (with repeated threats of suicide over 20 or 30 years on her part), did create a “big black hole of fear, loneliness and uncertainty” in my life. I used to wonder if it would have been better for me if she did carry it through, so I wouldn’t keep being scared. And I wondered if I would have been adopted then, and how better my life would have been if I was adopted.

For a little girl, the mother is the most important person in the whole wide world.

anita

Hi Mikki,

I write this post with a huge caveat which is that I’m not an expert on these things and I tend to have a pretty negative outlook on things. This is just one person’s take, but based on your story I don’t think you’re crazy and I agree this guy’s being a jerk. If I had a girlfriend who was living with an ex I’d be a little alarmed. It’d be odd not to be, at least a little. And if that’s causing you discomfort you’d hope your significant other would rectify that. And he’s not. Also, if I brought it up (as it seems reasonable to) and she responded like your boyfriend did, that’d be bad for us. I agree that’s a problem.

I also believe that 99% of relationships are f’ed up like this where people don’t actually, truly, deeply love each other and are together based on something else — convenience, laziness, settling — other than true love. Basically you have two options. Stay with him, accepting that he’s going to occasionally act dismissive and possibly hurt you. Or leave and be alone. I can’t tell you what’s better. I’m a complete failure myself, which is why I’m on this site to begin with. I don’t know what else to tell you. No one except you can really figure it out for real.

I’ll just make one more recommendation which is a book called “Unworthy” by Anneli Rufus which is written for people who hate themselves (particularly the audiobook, which is read by someone with a perfect voice for the book). It may not apply to you — if so, you can ignore this obviously like you can anything else I’ve written — but if it does then all I can say is the book was an amazing help for me, putting into words complex things I had only vaguely known about myself and making me feel a little less alone/insane about myself.

Good luck

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Scott.