Dear Eva:

I wonder — have you sought professional help regarding your intrusive thoughts? I suffered from OCD for decades before receiving medical support (SSRI treatment), which brought me much relief from obsessive and intrusive thinking.

What you expressed here is not “annoying repetition” — it’s trauma echoing through your nervous system.

In this post, you described a partner who offered minimal emotional presence (“just asking so it’s asked”), gave crumbs of affection then withdrew, keeping you emotionally hooked. He avoided being seen with you socially, consistently prioritized others over you, and framed basic relational gestures as burdens or favors (“I even let you invite your friends…”).

This is not mutual care — it’s conditional engagement, where you were made to feel like you were asking too much for wanting basic emotional connection. Your valid needs were framed as unreasonable, making you feel guilty for expressing them.

His language flipped the script: he claimed you weren’t patient — despite you waiting five years for emotional availability. He implied you ruined the relationship by expressing frustration, ignoring the chronic neglect that led to it. He weaponized your emotional needs as unreasonable demands. This is emotional reversal: making you feel guilty for reacting to mistreatment.

As a result, you ended up blaming yourself: “Maybe if I hadn’t done this…”, “I ruined it again…”, “I’m such a chaos…” This is heartbreaking. You’ve absorbed the emotional labor, the responsibility, and the shame — internalizing the failure of the relationship as your fault. But in truth, you’ve been starved of reciprocity and respect.

Your pain is real, Eva. Your needs were not excessive. You are not “chaos.” You are someone who tried to love and be loved in a space that didn’t honor you.

With care and solidarity, Anita

Dear Eva,

I’m sorry you’re hurting and cannot stop thinking about him, even if rationally you know he wasn’t good for you.

He may have promised to change how he’s treating you, but those were just some cosmetic changes. There was no deeper awareness of why he should behave differently in a relationship, or that he is wrong in any way.

The way he phrased it “I allowed you to invite your friends” says a lot about his mindset: as if he is doing you a big favor and a big concession by treating you as an equal partner, rather than his subordinate, or even his property, or something to that effect.

His attitude and his mindset are very worrying, to be honest, and it’s not something he can change at will. Nor does he want to change it, since he believes there’s nothing wrong with him. So rest assured that he would always fall back on treating you like this – because that’s his “modus operandi”. That’s who he is.

He told you something very deceptive:

And in the end he told me that if I had been understanding, patient, there would have been no one like me, I would have been perfect.

Yeah right. Then why has he been hiding you from the world for 5 years?

This either shows his hypocrisy, or that he sincerely believes that a “perfect” partner is someone who is obedient and fulfills his wishes, while he can treat her like a doormat. Again, a very worrying (and toxic) mindset.

But I understand that even though you’re rationally aware of all of this, emotionally it’s still very hard for you to let him go. When we can’t let go emotionally, even though we know it rationally, it’s usually something to do with our inner child.

The inner child is a part of us that carries our longing to be loved, appreciated, validated, seen as special,etc. We should ideally get all those needs met in our childhood, by our parents or caretakers.

But when this doesn’t happen, those unmet needs are still in us, and they cause us deep longing for those same things (love, appreciation, validation) – but not from our parents, but our romantic partner(s).

Often we get blinded by those longings, and even if we rationally know that the person isn’t good for us, our irrational part (our inner child) cannot let go. This could explain why you’re so attached to him, even if you know he’s not good for you.

This is just a suggestion, of course. It doesn’t mean it’s true for you. But if it rings true, we can talk about it more, if you’re interested.

Dear Eva,

I’m glad you find the concept of the inner child helpful. It certainly helped me achieve some significant healing, after some other methods haven’t succeeded.

The idea is that we as children have basic needs, both physical and emotional, and if those needs weren’t properly met by our parents or caretakers, we will have various consequences as adults. We might feel anxious, unworthy of love, believing we don’t deserve happiness. We might get involved in toxic relationships, looking for love from people unable to give it, etc.

Bottom line: we’ll have an unhealthy relationship with ourselves, believing that we’re not good enough. Our inner child will believe that, because that’s the message we’ve received while growing up. We’ll have the inner critical voice (so-called inner critic) constantly telling us that we’re bad and deficient, and our self-criticism will be really high.

To counter that, we need to go through a process called re-parenting, where we develop a positive relationship with ourselves and our inner child. Instead of bombarding ourselves with criticism and self-hatred, we need to develop a positive, supportive, compassionate inner voice, which would be equivalent to the voice of a good parent.

Instead of blaming ourselves all the time for our perceived failures, we have much more understanding and empathy for ourselves, even when we make mistakes. We tell ourselves that we’re good enough, that we’re lovable, that we’re worthy. Everything that a loving, supportive parent would say.

This process is described in more detail in a video titled “Reparenting” on Barbara Heffernan’s youtube channel (she is a psychotherapist and a coach). She is talking about our basic emotional needs and how to figure out if those needs were met or not, and what do if they were not.

Lots of love <3