Dear Natie:

Good to read from you again! We communicated last 1.5 years ago, Dec 2021, I think, but for some reason your previous thread does not appear when I click on your screen name. Can you locate it for me, or share again about the relationship in question?

anita

Dear Natie:

I located your fist thread of June 16 2021 titled “My soul is shattered I need an honest advice please”. There you shared that the day before (June 15 2021, almost a year ago), you broke up with your boyfriend of 3 years.

In your second thread of July 2 2021 titled “I Think I’m the devil in this relationship- help!”, you asked me: “What if… he is right and I am the devil or this kind of a horrible human… was this breakup wrong.. am I wrong for letting go… I don’t know…  what’s real anymore”.  I answered that you are not the devil or any kind of horrible person, that the breakup was right and I added that when a person is under the influence of false guilt, one’s thinking is distorted and one doesn’t know “what’s real anymore”.

On Dec 18 2021, you started your third thread titled “ex wants another try”. On that day in a very long, detailed post I put together all that you previously shared about yourself and the relationship. Toward the end of that post, I wrote: “No matter what I write here, you will continue to doubt yourself, overthink and complicate things, if not right now, then later.. endure the stress involved in doubting yourself and still do what is right for you… anti depressants of the SSRI group.. are often prescribed for the purpose of alleviating obsessive thinking/ overthinking”. You posted there last on Dec 20, 2021.

Next time you posted was today, five months and 16 days after your last post: “not a day goes by that I don’t hate myself, or that I trust myself. That guilt, that heavy weight feeling just ruminates over me 24/7…. Sometimes I wonder if this sour relationship was all my fault and if I lost a gem or .. I never got to know the real him”.

So, I was correct when on Dec 18 last year when I suggested that no matter what I wrote to you by then (and I wrote a lot),  you will continue to doubt yourself and overthink.

As I re-read your previous posts today I figured that you didn’t really like him much when dating him, that you looked down at him- literally and figuratively-  being that he is short and thin, and yet you are still tortured with doubt and guilt in regard to the relationship ending. Are you regretting breaking up with him and not going back to him because he has a good, solid job while you (still?) struggle in regard to your career?

anita

Dear Natie:

You are welcome. Congratulations for having a stable, thriving career for the last 11 months and for feeling stable in it!

“Sometimes I just feel like I’m back to point zero… maybe I deserve .. pain because I hurt someone who is good. The thing is, I don’t know if good is the word anymore.. maybe he just put a show to please me, not to lose me and maybe if he showed me his real personality I would have cut it short from the start. I hope I make sense” –

– Upon re-reading your posts yesterday, something new occurred to me. It did not occur to me before that you really did mistreat him and that’s why you feel guilty. I assumed that your guilt was false guilt, but now I can see that a significant portion of your guilt in regard to this relationship is valid, and that the reason you keep going back to point zero is that you are struggling with accepting that you are indeed guilty of some wrongdoing in this relationship.

You wrote in your most recent post: “maybe he just put a show” – maybe you did! You wrote: “Maybe if he showed me his real personality”- maybe if you showed him (and me, in the context of your thread) your real personality, your struggles will resolve. Maybe more honesty and taking responsibility for what you are guilty of (not for what you are not guilty of) will resolve your conflicts and struggles.  So please be calm and patient as I develop my thoughts:

You wrote yesterday, June 5, 2022 in this new thread: “maybe .. I hurt someone who is good… I don’t know if good is the word anymore”. You started your very first thread on June 16, 2021 with the words: “I broke up with my boyfriend of 3 years not because he is bad but because I am”- you’ve been struggling with the concept of good and bad for a long time.

When I answered you last year, I assumed/ jumped to the conclusion that your guilt must be invalid as I thought something like: if Natie thinks that she is a bad person, that means she is probably not bad because a bad person will not admit she/ he is bad. And because you were so polite communicating with me and with other members, often addressing me and other members as “Dearest (name)”, I didn’t consider that maybe you really were significantly guilty in regard to this relationship, after all, how can such a nice person be guilty, my thinking went.

A year later, re-visiting your threads and studying them, I realize that reality is more complex than my assumption a year ago. I now think that you really were significantly guilty in regard to this relationship and that you are struggling to accept your guilt. On one hand, you express your guilt in exaggerated ways (ex., “I Think I’m the devil in this relationship- help”- the title of your 2nd thread), and on the other hand, you defend yourself against being guilty by retroactively (post breakup, in your threads) misrepresenting your motives and emotions so to appear like a good person.

Back to your first post in your first thread, second sentence: “Sooner than later, I started noticing he had hearing problems.. and I didn’t care a bit, I loved him and his pain was my pain.. it broke me… and it made me the happiest person when he got a new pair of hearing aid” – seems to me that his hearing problems were a significant issue for you, otherwise, you wouldn’t start your first thread with the issue of his hearing problems, and it seems to me that you are going out of your way to say that it didn’t bother you and that it broke you etc.,  so to convince the reader that it didn’t bother you and that you were a good girlfriend and a good person.

In your third sentence in that first post, following bringing up his hearing problems, which I believe bothered you, you brought up more of your dissatisfaction in the relationship: “sometimes I felt like I’m his mom which I guess I did not have problems with at first” – I think that you did have problems with that at first as well, and this is why you brought it up in your 3rd sentence in your very first post. Again, you falsely claim that you didn’t have a problem with … what you did have a problem with.

It seems like you represent yourself in a defensive way which is not entirely honest, or better say, in a way that is dishonestly manipulative. You are saying something like: I am such a good person that it didn’t bother me that he had hearing problems: not only it didn’t bother me but it broke me and I was the happiest person in the world when he got a new pair of hearing aid- retroactively exaggerating and misrepresenting your motives and emotions so to appear like a good person.

Let’s skip to your second thread (“I think I’m the devil in this relationship”), you wrote ack in July 2, 2021: “I need to disclose this as it’s haunting me, he is short and very thin and that didn’t bother me ever” – again, you state that something about him didn’t bother you so to hide the fact that it did bother you… so to present yourself as a good person.

Continued, on the same post: “However… I told him ‘You and me being the same weight is really wrong, as a girl it would feel different to have someone who is bigger in body next to me, cause it might not feel physically attractive otherwise” – I understand you encouraging him to gain weight if he was underweight but when you met him he was already “short and very thin”, so him getting even thinner does not justify you using the strong, judgmental  “really wrong”, and adding, “not feel physically attractive”- it was unnecessary and cruel.

Not surprisingly, in that same paragraph you mentioned fights: “There was a fight once and recently as well, he mentioned his point as ‘me not accepting him the way he is’ and that if he wanted to and if he wanted to be with someone with better body features.. he ended up apologizing” – seems to me that you insulted him for his height and weight, which you shouldn’t have done. Hurt, he told you (in his words) that you don’t look that great either. Next, you argued with him and accused him of insulting you and finally, he apologized.

You didn’t apologize for insulting him, he apologized understandably defending himself against your insults.

I will stop here because I don’t know if you are receptive to this post.

anita

Dear Natie:

“I never saw myself as a good person. In fact, I asked multiple times if I’m narcissistic” – why the extreme of narcissism? What if you are a good person at heart and in need of becoming a better person?

It is a difficult job to distinguish between what you did wrong in a relationship (and therefore learn from it and correct your behavior) and what the other person did wrong (and therefore detect such behaviors in the future and make a better choice of a boyfriend in the future).

In your most recent post, you wrote: “I never saw myself as a good person”. In a July 2, 2021, you wrote: “I never felt guilt or shame as I was always there for him for 2.5 years, love, support and complete honesty and transparency” –

– meaning that you viewed yourself as a completely honest, good person … no worries about being narcissistic or manipulative before December 2020 (half a year before the breakup), and then Dec 2020 and onward, your self imaged drastically changed?

anita

anita

Dear Natie:

You mentioned “shadow self”. I want to do some reading and reply further on the topic of shadow self.

Regarding the abuse you mentioned suffering during the affair, you mentioned it before but gave no details. I didn’t want to ask for any details before, but seems like the details were a game changer in your psyche, one that triggered a shadow self to come out of its hiding and erupt to the surface. Would you like to share some about the nature of the abuse you suffered by that woman?

anita