Dear Hella:

“I feel in a way less entitled to harbor these feelings”- but you are entitled to harbor the feelings that you experience. We are emotional animals, we can’t help our emotions. We don’t choose them, any more than any other emotional animal.

Our emotions don’t or shouldn’t pass a test of entitlement, doesn’t matter if we knew better before getting involved with someone, doesn’t matter if it is a sister or parent that did us wrong compared to a stranger.

There is always a valid message in what we feel and that message should be listened to. Once we listen to that message, once the emotion successfully delivered its message, the emotion will quiet down.

It is the same as this: an animal feels hunger, it eats, the hunger quiets down. The animal feels fear, it runs away from perceived danger and arrives at a safe destination, the fear quiets down, and so forth.

If you want to examine the valid message in your anger toward your sisters or toward this man, please do and I will try to help you doing that.

anita

Dear Hella:

Maybe it is not that you weren’t enough for him. Maybe you were too much for him. What I mean by it is that many people don’t feel comfortable with intense emotions, they rather be calm than excited. Maybe he chose this other woman because she doesn’t excite him that much.

You wrote that his girlfriend lives in another country, therefore his relationship with her is long distance. It may suit him, the distance, this way he gets to be cool, literally cool, not hot with emotions, with excitation.

It is a possibility, what do you think?

anita

Dear Hella:

Tell me more about that intense connection, how was it different for you than any other connection you had before?

anita

Hella,

It seems there are several things going on with you: 1) your sense of betrayal and anger towards your ex, 2) the common social group that embraces him which reminds you of your anger because they don’t know the “real” him and that his gf is part of this same group.

It sounds really hard to move on since he and his girlfriend is ever present in your common social group. I can understand the anger since he not only broke up with you for a girl that he never really seemed to have left, he took away your social group as well.  Plus you are angry because he never took responsibility for his part that contributed to your pain.

Did I get that right?

Mark

Hi Hella,

I apologize if you’ve answered this question before, I haven’t read through every comment, but were you both in this same friend group before you started dating? and if not, was it your friend group and he then integrated into it?

Dear Hella:

I ask because there is more for me to understand. I don’t always feel comfortable asking questions but there are times there is no  other way for me to understand enough:

The group may not know much if anything about the on-again-off-again two year relationship between you and him, but they do know about the few months official part of your relationship with him, correct? I mean, didn’t you and him present yourselves as a couple for a few months,  in the past?

Also, what is his narrative, what he has been telling the group about the nature of his relationship with you?

anita

Dear Hella:

I may not get more answers from you, so I re-read your posts and formulate my best understanding of what is happening. Reads to me that the main thing that has happened is that you experienced a deep, emotional/ physical connection with him that meant a whole lot to you, that has been very special to you. What followed was your experience of him betraying this very special connection.

The extent of your hurt over this betrayal is enormous, and so  is your anger. It feels like a great injustice that keeps happening, an injustice that goes on and on and on.

It is “as if things never happened between us”- your experience of a very intimate, very special connection is being ignored, discounted. This is infuriating.

“he doesn’t offer any kind of clear explanation or even empathy”- he allows this great injustice, this betrayal, to go unexplained, unattended  to. Not even deserving empathy.

In his presence and in the presence of the group of  people, you “have kind of been blurred out and disappeared”, your innermost, most intense feelings ignored, discounted, unattended to, as if they meant nothing to anyone.

Your “visceral anger towards him” is about being ignored, discounted, as if “what (you) are going through is not important”.

“Even though I hate him now, he was once very close to me”- the intensity of your anger toward him is proportional to the extent of your connection with him, the connection, or love that you felt with him.

It enrages you that he categorizes you “as an ‘other”‘ in front of the members of the group while you remember so well and still feel that deep connection with him, those times when you were close to being almost the same person, not two others.

You “feel insignificant… weak.. too weak because of him” in his presence and in the group. You wish “someone else had the guts to stand up to him and support me instead of  silently supporting him”, support him in silencing you.

My closing thoughts for now: I believe that there is only one relationship that produces this intensity of betrayal that you feel, and that is the relationship of a child with a parent. The child’s connection to the parent is real, pure, honest, and complete, unconditional and uncompromising.

Oftentimes, the parent does not reciprocate and betrays the child. It is a heart breaking experience, one that many never overcome. What you experienced with this man, that connection, I believe,  was similar to the connection you felt to a parent, minus the sexual element.

With him you re-experienced that very painful, yet common betrayal, that  of a parent betraying his or her child.

anita