Dear Lindsey:

The following requires reading (or re-reading) at a place and time when you are calm and comfortable:

When you were a child, your mother paid a lot of positive attention to you. For a whole decade you were her only child. Then when you were a preteen and a teenager she had a second child and a third child.

What happened during that first decade, when it was just you and her?

Imagine the following- you are small and you can’t sit by yourself, you are hungry. You cry a bit,  she picks you up, her warm, strong hands holding your small, weak body, and she takes you close to her chest, feeding you. You don’t have words so you don’t think- you just feel. What is it that you are feeling toward those hands and that chest your face is touching as your hunger for food gets satisfied?

You are lying there,  uncomfortable, wet and itchy, you cry. She comes to you, and those same warm, strong hands pick you up and remove that itchy thing from you, the wet diaper, cleaning you and placing you in a dry, comfortable diaper- what a relief! She talks to  you a bit, you don’t know what she is saying, but her voice sounds gentle and kind. What is that baby feeling about those hands and that voice?

The baby grows up, what does her mother mean to  her? Food, and warmth, comfort, help, everything.

An then came the other child and you watch her taking care of someone else, it is no longer you and her. You feel jealous because someone is taking away from you what was only yours, before. Then there is a third child, and soon after—

— game-over: “she pretty much said you are on your own now and they moved into a new house without a room for me. She emotionally cut herself off from me overnight”- they moved to a new house, meaning your mother and her other two young children. How did it feel?

This is what I believe you felt and thought when the above happened: “I feel sick to my stomach… Everything about that situation.. makes me feel sick to my stomach.. I get upset all over again.. (She) probably does not think of me at all..  glad (she) doesn’t see me anymore… I feel like someone is punching me in the stomach.. I feel hurt.. I feel betrayed besides hurt…I feel like (she) it trying to hurt me… It’s unfair. (She) has set up a new life/ new family.. moving things along.. at ‘warp speed'”.

The quotes in the above paragraph are taken from what you shared in March-April 2019 regarding M, a co-worker you were involved with for a short time who bought a drink at a bar for “a tall blonde female at  our office”, and from what you wrote Feb 2020 regarding the father of your children having a girlfriend. (I changed the pronoun he to she in the quotes above).

The reason you felt so very jealous, so very upset about the blonde woman in M’s life and about the girlfriend in your ex husband’s life, is not because you were wanted either one so badly, not because the relationship with either one was great, but because the two women in the lives of these two men activated your great jealousy and distress over your mother abandoning you and betraying your trust in her- for her new family, a family that didn’t include you.

You are re-experiencing the same upset that you experienced in your second decade of life. If you understand this thoroughly, you will no longer be so reactive to your ex husband, and so upset about him having a girlfriend. You will be way less upset, and at one point on, not upset at all, because your awareness will take all that upset and place it where it belongs, where it originated, in that life changing, real life experience of abandonment and betrayal.

anita

Dear Lindsey:

Here is what I am not saying: I am not saying that there are no valid reasons for you to be angry at your ex.

What I am saying is that your intense upset over him replacing you with another woman is not about the kind of relationship you had with him for 12 years or so. After all, you experienced the same upset about M replacing you with another woman even though you had a very short relationship with M, a couple of months or so, a relationship that wasn’t even public.

Your mother replaced you with her two younger children and then moved to a place where there was enough space for the younger two, but none for you.

The hurt, the anger, the feeling of being punched in the stomach that you experienced with your mother is like hot magma underground. The feelings you experienced regarding M buying a drink for another woman/  regarding ex husband having a girlfriend is like that magma erupting above ground as lava.

Yes, there are different circumstances to M and ex husband that didn’t exist with your mother, sex is one such thing. Another thing is that your own two children exist now but didn’t exist then- but at the core of your emotional experience is indeed what happened then, your mother abandoning and betraying you.

Remove that core experience from being directed against your ex, and you will be left with the valid reasons to be angry with him, and that would be overall.. way less anger and way less upset.

anita

Dear Lindsey

You described your anger very well: “like a thick fog in the early morning. I can’t think or see righting front of me”-

– here is what you do:

1. Remind yourself that the fog dissipates later in the day, it happened yesterday, it will happen again today.

2. Make sure that no matter how you feel, you will not abuse anyone. For example: you will not scream at your daughter when she talks about her father’s girlfriend.

3. Enforce strict rules for minimal contact with your ex and keep those rules yourself- do not communicate with him unless it is absolutely necessary in the context of co-parenting.

4. “it’s not fair that my ex is happy- he doesn’t deserve to be happy”-

– reminds me of two lines from the movie The Unforgiven: “deserves got nothing to do with it” and  “we all have it coming, kid”. The first is what Clint Eastwood said before he shot the sheriff who said: “I don’t deserve to die like this”, and the second was in the context of two men, a younger guy and an older (Clint Eastwood), having been hired to kill a guy who cut the face of a woman. After the younger guy killed that man, he felt badly about having killed a person for the first time in his life, so to comfort himself he said: “well, he had it coming”. Eastwood replied: we all have it coming. What he meant by it is that we will all suffer, we will all die: the good, the bad, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, all of us, everyone.

Your ex, he is not in a happily-ever-after situation. Deserving or not, he has a girlfriend now, and deserving or not, the relationship will have problems soon enough. And your ex sometimes feels that anxiety too, that terrible unease as he thinks once in a while about getting sick and dying, as we all do, and he will get sick.. and die, so he has it coming too, like everyone else.

When you feel that intense anger at him, reminds yourself that he has it coming too, it will make you feel better. Of course, don’t do anything to harm him, but rest in the knowing that he will suffer like everyone else.

Did you watch The Unforgiven?

anita

You are welcome, Lindsey, and thank you for wishing me a good Sunday. I wish you a fog-less Sunday. Post again whenever you want to.

anita