Dear Readers,

I recently posted a few questions up here and got amazing response from everyone. Thank you for taking the time to read my post. Lately, I am slowly recovering and healing from a long and torturous relationship . I have been trying to focus on myself and have had no contact with the person for a month or so. However, I do keep getting frequent email messages from him after I decided that I will maintain no contact. The emails are nothing but short one liners of ” how are you? please talk to me ” ect I strongly feel that this person is not missing the person that he was in relationship with (me) but the person that he always had around him, bending over backwards ( me again) . I was always a project fix for him, never being enough in totality. He always looked at me as weak and someone in need of help . Eventually over the years, I did develop a victim mentality for myself fulling that self fulling prophecy of his. Even though deep down my inner self knew it was lethal to stay around, I stayed because he was “helping me” on issues that only he recognized .

Long story short only when I stepped out and decided to completely cut contact I realized my own shortcomings and work I had to do on myself to change my own image of not being good enough and of someone in need of help and fixing by this person.

After some crazy amount of work on myself and a lot of determination, I am beginning to finally get back up and be comfortable in my own skin. But lately after having this realization few days ago and sort of like an epiphany, I have been wanting to respond to his emails and tell him that he can no longer treat people as projects to be fixed. I notice some of us tend to go overboard in fixing others / helping them by being overly critical. Putting everything in retrospect, In reality I realize he was struggling with a lot lower self esteem and I was nothing but a project that gave him a sense of self control over his own life. Fixing me was like fixing himself – he did mention this a few times that he often looked at his own self as a failure. Coming back to now when everything is over and I am not in any contact with him. My mind has been preoccupied with writing him one last email and telling him that it was very wrong unfair and messed up that he treated me like a project. Tell him that ‘I didn’t need fixing – not at least the way he saw I.e everything from my physical appearance to my personality traits. Even if I did need to improve on certain things for example – (being a little indecisive about my career, having a sense of uncertainty ect Gee I was only a student back then) even if I did need to work on certain things. I think it’s only fair that we allow each other to make our own discoveries in life . That is how we form our identity and realize our passions after all . Don’t we ?

Being here and now , I fluctuate between moments of calmness ( healing moments ) and sheer anger where I must write back to his email telling him to find himself first and then try and attempt fixing others. Off course sometimes we help ourselves by helping others but there is a fine line between genuinely helping someone when they are reaching out and making them feel really low and weak to the point they are completely broken.

I have conflicting feelings about this – If it is a good idea for me to write this email as much as it’s bothering me, I also think it can be a bad idea if he responds back then it will just drag on back and forth. Given I am already recovering from mental fatigue and exhaustion I don’t have the energy to tell him anything beyond this last letter. But then again deep down, I know his intentions weren’t to hurt me ( atleast I would like to give him the benefit of doubt ) and maybe I should bring this to his attention, perhaps in time he will give it a thought and control his urge to fix others . I don’t know for certain. I almost want to respond and tell him about my discovery about how he had a need to fix me but then again, I also have to allow him to make his own discoveries in due time . And perhaps he will come to an understanding that how he treated me, has roots in some underlying disturbance within himself. At this point he is so closed and arrogant, I don’t expect an understanding from him . But I am so restless and almost feel the need to tell him off . I don’t know if its my mind playing games with me ( I know it sounds awful but somewhere my mind is like ” zita he always told you what’s wrong with you now it’s your turn, do it genuinely and politely though ” but i do feel my mind is tricking me. Or perhaps the purpose of his email was to instigate a response after I went cold turkey and that’s exactly what I am about to do. He got me thinking about it for sure ..

What do you guys think @jasmine-3, @elliedodge, @theruminant and others please feel free to share any wisdom/ advice you might have. I will really appreciate your insight.

• This topic was modified 10 years, 6 months ago by Zita.