Dear DaveF,

it appears the major thing that keeps you in the relationship is your feeling of guilt, which she is amplifying by desperate begging, telling you you’ll regret it, telling you you can’t leave her, insulting you, and the pressure you feel from her family too. You’re made to be the bad guy, and she sees herself as the victim. You’re afraid of yet another confrontation and being condemned by her.

On top of that, you say you fear to be on your own again, and it seems it’s a theme for you, because when your ex broke up with you, you were “desperate to be in a relationship at the time”. Also, there’s a practical problem that you’re renting a house together. If you break up, are you afraid that she’d be in an unfavorable situation financially/existentially?

At the moment, it appears that your feeling of guilt is stronger than your fear of loneliness. You feel trapped in the relationship and “feel like crying every time I see her in the house”. It appears you feel helpless because you can’t bear her accusations, and I think it’s probably because there’s a part of you that believes those accusations. A part of you that believes you’re guilty of something.

Does this sound true to you?

Dear DaveF:

You are welcome and thank you for your appreciation and grace. Following your suggestion that the woman you are living with (I will refer to her as W) is not aggressive, and stating that you have no fear for your safety, I studied your original post and the following two posts with the consideration that W is not aggressive, looking for the reasons for your current emotional struggle being elsewhere. I hope that you are okay with me developing my thoughts here, and that what is to follow will be somewhat, somehow helpful to you (but I understand that it may not).

In your original post, you wrote about the break-up conversation you had with W: “I didn’t expect it to be a massive surprise, but it was not taken well, with begging and very hurtful and difficult statements such as ‘you will regret this’…  I fear that another break-up conversation would be too difficult for both of us.. fear that I will then be on the receiving end of many insults, desperate pleas, hurtful comments (from her and her family), and overall life-wrenching anxious times”-

– I am paying attention to your choice of the adverbs and adjectives the words they modify, in the quote above: massive surprise, very hurtful and difficult, too difficult, many insults, desperate pleas, life-wrenching anxious times.

Looks to me that you tend to magnify unpleasant/ negative experiences and perceive them as much bigger and worse than they really are. Maybe W’s insults and hurtful comments.. were not really insults or hurtful.

Here are more of your choice of adverbs and adjectives, and the words they modify: “we both came out of very hurtful and painful relationships…After moving in together, I noticed acutely the red flags of the relationship.. We have both suffered terrible family tragedies in the last 18 months..  I noticed early in our relationship, that sex seemed awkward, difficult, painful”-

– very hurtful and painful, acutely noticed red flags, terrible family tragedies, painful sex. If it’s unpleasant- it is magnified in your mind.

* I am assuming sex was emotionally painful to you, not physically painful.

Before the recent break-up conversation, you shared: “I fear.. another  break-up conversation.. fear that I will then be on the receiving end of many insults..  terrified of another confrontation”-

– You magnify the negatives and expect the negatives to be further magnified in the future, escalating into greater negatives and overwhelming you, terrified of what is to come (“fear.. fear.. terrified”).

You shared about your experience before you met this woman: “I.. have had struggles with depression, anxiety, and loneliness in the past”, and about your childhood, you shared: “I had a difficult time with a divorced mum and dad as a kid – a mother who was very comforting and loving, and a father who was very distant emotionally and tough on me”-

– this is all you shared about your childhood. Absent are the sounds you heard as a child: perhaps there were arguments between your parents (before they separated and divorced), maybe angry and loud, maybe angry and quiet, maybe the silence between them was tense and threatening. Maybe you were afraid of their next argument, or the next silence treatment one imposed on the other.. Maybe you walked on egg shells, so to speak, waiting for the other shoe to drop, scared, sometimes angry. Maybe in the silence of the home, alert to every sound, your hearing became acute, each sound magnified, so to prepare for danger to come. This can explain your current magnification of potential threats, threats that often do not materialize (do they?):

“I was terrified of another confrontation, but.. I actually brought up the subject the other day with my concerns for the relationship, which I was met with less hurtful comments, but with a suggestion to live separately to try to resolve issues”- terrified of a potential threat that did not materialize.

You wrote in regard to living with this woman: “I feel trapped”- trapped as a child perhaps, in the home where you grew up. The child that you were wanted perhaps to take action and run away from home, but he was too scared: (1) he will be so lonely away from home, (2) his mother will be very, very sad if he runs away, and she does not deserve to be hurt.

Fast forward more than 20 years: “I..  feel like crying every time I see her in the house, as she does not deserve to be hurt… I feel so sorry for my partner and my feelings make it hard to hold back the tears most days. I am so scared that if I do take action, I would feel so lonely and regretful, but breaking up is also all I’ve thought about for months”.

anita

Dear DaveF:

You are welcome. It is a pleasure for me to communicate with a person as kind and gracious as you. This will be a long post because I want to attend to different things before I answer your question best I can. You may be less grateful to me as you read this post because I will bring up things that I imagine will disturb you. Please take your time reading, and you are welcome to stop reading at any time. My purpose is not to disturb you, but to bring up ideas that may improve your life-experience long- term if you evaluate, process and accept them to be true or partly true.

You shared that you were “too young” when your mother and father divorced, that you and your mother lived in the U.K. while your father lived in a different country for 2.5 years, and you didn’t meet him until he moved to the U.K., when you were “a little older”. When you met him, you were “very scared and hesitant towards him”, your mother says.

“I always felt acutely sad for my mother when we were with my father and the woman that he had an affair with when with my mother.. I was always torn when going to my dad’s (and his new partner’s) house, because they both hurt my mother so much (affairs etc.)”-

– your father had an affair with a woman “when with (your) mother”- I don’t know how long your parents’ marriage lasted legally, but reads like practically, they lived together for a short time, a few years at the most, and were separated when you were too young to notice or remember (maybe you were only a  baby). And yet, you felt “acutely sad” because your father had an affair or affairs at a time you can’t remember, too long ago.

I am assuming that your mother told you about the affair or affairs when you were a young boy, otherwise, you wouldn’t have known. It would have been a good thing for you, to be shielded from this unnecessary information. If you were shielded from this information, you wouldn’t have felt acutely sad for your mother and perhaps feeling guilty for visiting your father, and having to be nice to the people you believed hurt your mother so badly.

If I am correct, and it is your mother who told you about an affair or affairs,  then she had burdened you unnecessarily, placing you in a very uncomfortable position whenever you were around your father, and otherwise, being acutely aware of what a child should not be made aware of. When a mother expresses to a child in his first decade of life, that she is very hurt and sad, if she does this excessively and repeatedly, the child is not mature or objective enough to not sink into his mother’s hurt and sadness, and drown in it, so to speak. A child feels too intensely for his mother, her hurt is magnified in his mind.

Acutely made aware of your mother’s hurt, you did not want to cause her further hurt, you wanted to make her happy and shower her with love  (“I did not want to cause my mother any further hurt.. I wanted to make happy and shower with love”)- you wanted to make it up to your mother for what she did not receive from your father, (or from any other man, I assume): (1) protect her from hurt, (2) shower her with love.

“I could not bare to upset her.. I felt responsible often for my mother’s happiness as a child because I knew how hurt she had been by my father”- this is a recipe for a bad childhood, to have things turned upside down: the child feeling responsible for the mother, instead of the other way around.

About your father, you wrote that during your visits at his home, he was very distant emotionally and tough on you, that he had a temper and disliked children, that he got “very angry at normal child-like things, such as dropping something”, that you “walked on egg-shells around him so as not to make him angry”, that you constantly fought for his approval and never felt you had it.

“I was a sensitive child”, “I am admittedly a sensitive person, and I feel emotions very acutely, especially empathy, and I often feel others’ sadness strongly”- I don’t think that you were born more sensitive than other babies, I think that you were made more sensitive than other children because your mother exposed you to information that would greatly disturb any child. She exposed you to too much of her hurt and sadness, and that would disturb any child as well. And you were then exposed to your father’s temper and dislike of children during your visits at his home.

Parents need to contain their strong emotions so to not overwhelm their child, because the child’s brain naturally magnifies his parents’ emotions. It seems to me that you were overwhelmed by your mother’s expressed hurt and during visits with your father- you were overwhelmed by his anger.

“I definitely wanted to run away from this, and I felt so lonely when away from my mother.. have been so emotionally distraught with being left by people and this definitely is compounded with friends and close relationships as well”-

–  when you started feeling responsible for your mother (to protect her from further hurt, to shower her with love), there was no longer anyone to acknowledge you as a child, a child who needs the protection and love of a protector. The child that you were was left alone while you tried to be an adult for your mother, an impossible task for any child.

“the comparison with my mother – the female care giver whom I didn’t want to upset, and my current partner, the now female care giver whom again, I do not want to upset. Knowing these things really is helping in understanding why I am struggling with these matters. Is there anything you would suggest that helps with these feelings?”-

– You shared earlier that you cannot afford therapy. If you could- therapy with a competent, quality therapist would be best. Other than that, let me know what you think/ feel about what I posted here today. Posting here in your thread may lead you to a better understand of yourself, and that will be a good thing. I suggest that you take it a post at a time, at your pace (no rush). Posting and reading will at times be distressing and maybe overwhelming, so take your time and remember: reading and posting here is a matter of your choice, you can stop any time.

anita

Dear Dave:

You are very welcome and I do have the time and space to read from you and reply to you, so please do post anytime you would like to.

I am glad that you benefited from our communication as well as from speaking with the counsellor you spoke to, and hope you continue your mindfulness practices and nurturing the child in you, helping him when he is scared. One exercise you can do for your inner child is to let him write or type away his thoughts using his words, that is, using the words of a five year old, or a nine year old- raw, organic, unaffected by adult-reading and education. Let him express himself when he is scared or happy.. or angry. You can do this in an Inner Child Journal/ Diary where he can draw and color as well, if he so chooses- something you can do at home, in private.

anita

How are you, Dave?

anita