Dear Myra:

I will be re-writing some of what you shared in your three threads for the purpose of getting a better understanding of you, so that I am better able to reply to your current, third thread.

About your childhood and its significance in your adult life, you shared: “My dad made me feel very unwanted. He was a cheater and eventually left my mom for a lady that befriended us. My step dad as well, we got in an argument and he told me I wasn’t his daughter, and lived with years not wanting to be there and uncomfortable… Now I’m older and know that this is affecting my life”.

About therapy: “I had therapy when I was young, but I don’t remember much”.

About a previous relationship: by February 2018 you were working 5 days a week, while your fiancé was not working and he was getting drunk every day. You worked five days a week, and you took care of him. You had him go to rehab, he got sober and “it was really nice”, but then he started drinking again. You eventually broke up with him. “I’ve been so busy trying to take care of him I forgot about my self… I’ve given him everything I have. I’m a mess”, you wrote then.

About the recent relationship:  in January 2019, you shared that a month earlier, you moved in with a boyfriend whom you started dating shortly after the breakup of your previous relationship. You wrote about him, “he does not give me reason to not trust him.. he’s the best guy I’ve ever been with”, and about the relationship, “this relationship is too good to be true.. our relationship is great”.

During the month of living together, you couldn’t enjoy the relationship because you felt “like it’s just going to end… like he was hiding something from me… like maybe I’m not enough of I’m too much to handle and he’s looking for someone else or talking to someone else”.  A month after moving in with him, the two of you decided that it was best that you move out so that you can be happy again and have fun again in the relationship. You were going to see a therapist at the time to deal with what your trust issues, and you were hoping that moving out did not mean a breakup.

A year and 8 months later, today, you wrote that the two of you recently broke up, after 2.5 years relationship. The two of you “laughed and got along so well”, but you “always thought he was cheating and got jealous when he wasn’t around me”, as a result, “he stopped wanting to do things with me and I started to feel really unloved and unwanted… somewhere along the way he stopped loving me.. He told me he didn’t love me that way anymore”.

You shared that at this point, you are “so confused and really hurt… broken”.

* You are confused on the issue of fault: “I can’t get over the feeling of this breakup being my fault. He made it sound like it was all me but threw in that he had his own issues of being immature”.

My input: nothing much in a long term relationship is all one person’s doing (“all me”). You stated repeatedly that you had issues in the context of this relationship, and he stated the same (“he threw in that he had his own issues”). I didn’t read about his issues, I don’t know what he meant by “being immature”, or what you observed as him being immature.  But I did read about your issues, and your issues are significant enough to require quality psychotherapy if a relationship is to be healthy and functional.

Your issues, as I understand them to be, are the issues all of us who lived a miserable childhood have- we keep re-living, as adults, the same emotional experience of childhood:

“My dad made me feel very unwanted… My step dad as well.. he told me I wasn’t his daughter”–> You felt unwanted by your boyfriend  (while he still wanted you), and later, you “started to feel really unloved and unwanted”.

Your father “was a cheater and eventually left my mom for a lady that befriended us” (you experienced your own abandonment by your father, and you experienced your mother’s hurt of being cheated on because you felt so much empathy for her)–> You were afraid that your boyfriend was a cheater too, and that he will eventually leave you for a lady, and that the relationship will eventually end: “like it’s just going to end.. like he was hiding something from me.. he’s looking for someone else or talking to someone else… always thought he was cheating”.

As a  child, you “lived years not wanting to be there and uncomfortable”—> you were very uncomfortable living with your boyfriend (jealous, suspicious, anxious), and feeling so uncomfortable so much of the time, part of you didn’t want to be there.

As a child you figured that your father and step father didn’t want you because you were not good enough–> in the relationship, you felt, “maybe I am not good enough”, and “had no self esteem”.

Your relationship with your recent boyfriend was good for a while, but you felt that it was “too good to be true”, because what we experienced as children feels like the truth, we believe it is the truth. In this case, the truth was (and is,) that a man cheated, and the relationship ended.

In your previous relationship, you were so busy trying to take care of him, that you forgot about your issues of abandonment and jealously… much of the time, if not all of the time: “I’ve been so busy trying to take care of him I forgot about myself”.

* You shared that you don’t understand why your recent boyfriend stayed with you for so long even though “he didn’t see a future with me and my issues”, causing you to have “all these plans of getting better and being with him”, only to be broken up with, all your time and efforts wasted (as I understand it)- maybe he didn’t know that you will continue to have the same issues, maybe he hoped that you will change. If he did, he did not understand the principle of us adults, re-living our childhood experience, and when our childhood experience was bad enough, we need quality psychotherapy so to gradually and intentionally experience a different kind of life.

* You stated: “he just wanted the good parts of me but not the bad”- nobody wants the bad parts of anyone, of course. But we tolerate the parts that are not desirable, in the context of a healthy relationship when we perceive something healthy and meaningful in the relationship. For example, if in the relationship he worked on his issues alongside you working on your issues, and the two  of you helped each other with your respective issues, that would have inspire each one of you to accept or tolerate the undesirable parts of each other, for the purpose of the common good, so to speak, the good of the two of you.

anita

Dear Myra:

You are welcome. I agree, if you both tried together, working well together, like a team of two, helping each other- it would have worked out.

anita