Dear c:

I read your reply to another member and your original post. You read like a reasonable, decent, wise woman who sees the different angles to a story, the bigger picture, knows what works and what doesn’t. And so, when you write: “I feel very loved and seen by him… I feel chosen”, I trust it to be true, that he indeed sees you and chooses you and loves you as you are.

“He holds a lot of regret over how he behaved in his last relationship and feels responsible for how it ended… he carries some regret and pain though regarding his last relationship. Like he’s still grieving it in some ways.. a part of him would like to go back to fix it. But.. his last girlfriend is single, lives near him.. He doesn’t reach out to her”-

– Reads to me that his regret, grief, pain, sense of over-responsibility, wanting to fix it- all that is about his childhood, not about his last adult relationship. His last relationship, seems to me, awakened an old, deep wound.

anita

Dear c:

In your post to me you wrote: “I want to be aware of what I’m feeling and why”- in this post I will try to look into what you are feeling in regard to your boyfriend’s ex girlfriend, and why.

What you feel/ about feelings: “I have had some pretty frequent anxiety around thoughts about his most recent ex girlfriend… it isn’t jealousy I’m feeling..  I still feel like he carries some regret and pain… it’s still just been hard for me. Almost like a burden…  It’s hard to trust someone new… it bugs me and I can’t ‘let it go’… I just wish at this point it was kind of just gone for me and I didn’t almost experience the pain of it..  my burden“.

In your reply yesterday to a member on another thread, you shared about your feelings in the context of your previous marriage: “it then became a constant theme in our marriage that I’d catch him smoking over the years.. he would always lie about it to me… smoking wasn’t the only ‘bad habit’ he had that he hid from me… So we had a constant state of kind of mistrust… it was a HUGE burden on our relationship.. it would be hard for me to date someone that hid something like that from me. BUT if I did I would need to go in fully accepting that they might have other similar things they have trouble revealing to me.. he would of had to completely on his own decide.. about being transparent”.

My thoughts and wondering about possibilities: in your marriage you carried a huge burden of mistrust- it was “a constant theme”- upset that he hid something from you, or lied to you; anxious about the next time you will uncover something hidden.

Fast forward, like you wrote yourself: “It’s hard to trust someone new”, meaning it is hard for you to trust your current boyfriend. You intellectually know that he is trustworthy, and you feel some comfort because of this knowing, but the old mistrust found its way into this one area of your boyfriend’s life: his past relationship with his ex long term girlfriend.

I am thinking that the nature of your current burden is the same as the burden you experienced in your marriage, the burden of mistrust. And because for very few people mistrust is experienced for the first time in marriage, it could be that you have carried this burden from an early age… maybe a parent hiding things, not being transparent with you;  things hidden, threatening things, “things they have trouble revealing to me”.

About shame and regret in your marriage, you wrote: “It was a source of shame for him… He in general had a hard time showing me anything that he perceived as shameful… I am SURE my ex-husband.. carries enormous shame and regret about our divorce. I don’t”, and when sharing about your boyfriend, you wrote: “I know a lot of men carry shame and regret”-

– I wonder about shame and  being your own, but hidden from your awareness. I understand that each man has felt or is feeling shame and regret, but maybe not as intensely as you imagine them to feel these emotions. It may be that the intensity of shame and/or regret is what you feel, projected into them.

You shared regarding your marriage that you weren’t “the easiest person to be transparent with”- I wonder what you mean by it, and I have a feeling that it is very relevant to the topic.

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by .

Dear c:

You are welcome. Like I wrote to you in my previous post, I am bringing possibilities to you at this step of the exploration of why you feel the way you do, particularly about your boyfriend’s past relationship. As we communicate over time, as long as you are willing, we will figure out more and more, and move from possibilities to certainties. I need to be more focused before I reply further to your recent post. I will be back to your thread therefore Tues morning, which is in about 16 hours from now.

If you want to post again before I return, you are welcome to- maybe give me a few examples of lies that your ex husband told you, and if you want to, please share a bit about your “very chaotic home with almost every type of childhood trauma that can be experienced”.

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by .

Dear c:

You wrote about your mother: “She is very good at putting on the right look and making things appear normal still today and was in my childhood”. When you were a child you were a victim of her “explosive temper.. physical but mostly emotional abuse (lots of really hateful and awful things were said”, but in the presence of most other people, she put on “the right look”.

I imagine that at first, seeing the right look on your mother, you relaxed, only to see the Right Look change into a very Wrong Look: her explosive temper again, her abuse again, so you learned that you cannot trust a Right Look. When you see a Right Look, you .. look for the hidden wrong look: “I do find myself worrying about that in  many of my relationships like when will this person change or flip on me?”- when will this person flip from the Right Look (I’ll refer to it as RL) to the Wrong Look (WL).

– “when will this person change or flip on me? What clues do I need to watch for”-

1) Your ex husband’s RL: “overall.. decent..  very hard working”, the clues/ evidence of the WL: “drinking, smoking, porn issues, video game use etc.” Finding each clue or piece of evidence, you tried to eliminate it by telling him in so many words and in a harsh way: No! Don’t do that! Don’t be bad, be good! (“I reacted really judgmentally and I really was a hard NO on things that now at almost 40 I have a more balanced view of”)-

You were trying to protect yourself from the WL, from the abuse to come. He was scared of your harsh judgement and constant asking him questions about anything and everything, and checking on him, so much asking and so much checking on him (?), that he lied to you (“I was constantly being lied to… being lied to so much“).

You “rarely could ever get the whole story of virtually anything.. couldn’t tell for sure”, sometimes wondering if you are “just so paranoid by the end”. He knew, I imagine, that the more details he gives you, the more of the story he gives you, the more new questions and the more harsh judgment were to follow.

2) Your current boyfriend’s RL: no information given other than that he loves you and sees you (“I feel very loved and seen by him”), his WL: what’s hidden behind his regret regarding his last relationship… if he regrets it, he must have done something wrong, and since he “holds a lot of regret”, there must be a lot of hidden WL that needs to be uncovered.

His hidden WL is your burden, it is like carrying a heavy load of mistrust, suspicion, anxiety, “always waiting for the shoe to drop… a never-ending sense of dread and mistrust”, a burden that takes so much away from you.

* You wrote: “I learn to see myself as more human and get curious instead of judge myself harshly for my thoughts/ emotions, I can do the same for others. I don’t see issues in relationship as back and white anymore and I try hard not to react.. as a harsh parent version of myself. I think I’m doing a good job in my current relationship”- excellent insight, understanding and work in your current relationship, keep it up.

“Ultimately I am frustrated that these nagging thoughts just won’t go away for me and I want to do the work to discover what’s under them”- what’s under them, according to my current understanding (yet to improve and evolve) is that burden. The burden is a mental habit of looking for and focusing on the hidden wrong look. We are habitual creatures- we are strongly inclined to think, feel and behave the same as we are in the habit of thinking, feeling and doing. Habits are enforced by chemical processes in the brain and body. Changing chemical processes takes a lot of time, practice and patience.

When you notice the nagging thoughts returning (and they will), remind yourself that you understand what drives this mental habit, you understand how it came to be, that it is not about the current situation, but about a past, long gone situation. Tell yourself that you are safe, that if there is a hidden WL, you are a woman now, practically independent of this man, and therefore, he can not hurt you like your mother hurt you.

Then disengage from the thoughts. Do it again and again, every time the nagging thoughts return. It takes lots of practice, patience and time to change a mental habit, but you’ve already done such work and succeeded; its’ just that.. there is more work to do.

anita

Dear c:

You are welcome. Reading your recent post I see that indeed you need to “take some time to process all of this”, so take all the time that you need and post again later.

anita