Anita-
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond! Yes I believe you are understanding things correctly–I edited to make the story shorter so thank you for mentioning the parts about my relationships with family.
Our relationship was an instant connection, and we grew very close very quickly. I met him through mutual friends. We had frequent fights about 4 months in. I can be very conflict avoidant, and my ex would take this very personally and these issues would often build up and blow up at inconvenient times (holidays, with friends). The issues were often only small things that built up over time, but the fighting was frequent, extremely unproductive and hurtful. It mostly happened at the middle of our relationship. A lot of our fights were because one of his close friends disliked me and would try to convince my ex to break up with me, and would talk badly about me to our mutual friends, which caused a lot of emotional fights and arguments between us.

Towards the end, our disagreements were about breaking up; I was getting into emotional arguments with my ex because I still feel/felt the connection between us and he said that he no longer was sure about anything, including our relationship. we had discussed the feeling that he had (similar to what I’ve described feeling), but I did not want to end the relationship at all. He had a very difficult past with a lot of family issues/death and drug abuse, and was feeling more lost than I am. The ending was hard for me because I did not want to let go, and he still holds resentment toward me for pushing him to hold out hope for our relationship for the last 2 months of us being together. I hold no more resentment, or anger, and have been working on being compassionate towards myself for holding on even when I knew that our current relationship had run its course. My current state of mind is that while looking at our past and looking toward the future, I think there’s a likelihood that we will get back together, but I am trying to remind myself that living fully in the present moment and letting go means acknowledging that it doesn’t matter.

I feel like I became desperate and codependent because I was afraid of my ex leaving, when I should have acknowledged that the whole time I already knew what his decision would be because it was what he felt in his gut. I feel like giving into this fear response has made me lose a lot of self confidence and self respect, and that’s making my problem much worse.

Thanks so much to all of you for your kind replies!

Inky – I know you are right. I will feel so much better once I take forward action.

Matty – I appreciate your response so much. You are so right. It is an identity issue. I will try this exercise and use that for reflections 🙂 It feels good to have just a few things that my ex and I didn’t share and I do want to have some more things that are just mine. And Elle, yoga practice makes me feel amazing and has me realizing that while we practiced together all the time, it had really become my own thing without me even realizing it until I was doing it alone. I know exactly what you are saying about the 3 PM start too, I also slip into zen mode and it’s just great 🙂

I already feel much better putting out my thoughts into writing! It’s very hard for me to bring myself to write/journal, and when I do it doesn’t feel honest, but all the words came out in this post and it feels so relieving. Luckily today is unseasonably warm and sunny where I am and it’s a good day to try to have a fresh perspective.

Thank you all xoxo

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by zenstrawberry.

anita-

I think you are hitting the nail on the head. My ex would get very angry with me during our relationship over this subject and it caused a lot of stress that I’m reminded of frequently now that we’re broken up. He would notice things in me that I was squashing down (sometimes I feel like I don’t even know what they are now) and I would be very avoidant if he tried to help, because I felt very sensitive to what I perceived as criticism. He in response would feel shut down. Then we would argue.

I feel now that I don’t know what steps to take, or how to approach my internal struggles for myself. I have a tendency to do things for the validation of another person and feel lost on my own sometimes. And often I feel that I can’t see my internal issues as well as other people can.

Anita-

Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. It certainly feels better to express these things and I meditated on what these issues may be today…
One thing is that I have an intense need for approval. I mentioned above that I often need the validation of others. I already know that this stems from persistent bullying and feelings of exclusion during childhood. I brought up these issues a few times with my ex, but would usually get very emotional and begin to shut down. Related to that, I also have a fear/avoidance of criticism, am extremely sensitive, and have an emotional/shut down response to arguments because of constant fighting between my parents before my father’s death at a young age. I don’t get into many relationships and developed a need for independence, but I don’t open up about these issues even to close friends. I feel frustrated with myself for my emotional/shut down responses to conflict and it intensifies my feelings of being alone, which is something I’ve felt since childhood. that despite a deep need to connect with others, I would never be able to adequately earn another person’s love, and I would have to accept that no one will accept or understand me for the person I truly am. My ex pushed me to be genuinely myself instead of filtering who I am around other people out of a need to be liked, but this is so difficult and feels even harder now. I also feel like that while I “know” I don’t have to earn love, in action I still made my ex’s life my own, made his problems my problems, and towards the end told myself my displays of love (buying gifts, lunches, surprises) would be enough to keep my relationship going. And my self esteem is rather tenuous because of this, so I avoid vulnerability to keep up the self esteem that I cultivate from my personal achievements. I feel good about myself so long as I have a path to go down and can come to feel confident in my ability to check those things off. I find myself doing this even in the midst of our breakup: finding ways to achieve ‘milestones’ of ‘recovery’. I want to be happy being on a path that can be completely internal, but I just end up feeling lost and further away from resolving these issues. I want to think that I want to live an authentic, true life but end up covering up my internal issues focusing on personal relationships/accomplishments/goals as my primary satisfaction in life because I don’t know where to begin… I only hope that the healthy behaviors and attitudes I try to cultivate can help with a natural shift toward accepting these internal issues, but I also wouldn’t know what to do with them so sometimes I feel like it’s not worth it to try and resolve my internal problems.

Anita,

I spent a lot of time thinking of what you had to say over the past day, and will definitely continue thinking about it… I have often thought about finding a psychotherapist but never have. I really don’t want fear to be my guiding force in life and really want to make some headway on this. I really can’t thank you enough because all your messages (and everyone else’s above!) have been extremely helpful for me. I hope lots of goodness comes your way.

🙂

Anita,
I would like to add that I spent a significant amount of time chewing over your responses and also taking into consideration some of the other things you’ve posted (I am new to this forum). I was, with no exaggeration, blown away that I had such thoughtful and wise comments coming my way after just taking a chance posting online! After reading through your posts for a while I feel almost like I’ve come to know you a little bit and I think it’s wonderful that you see your comments as a helpful tool for yourself at the same time as they are helping other people enormously.

Whether or not astrological signs hold any weight, I have always been a stereotypical perfectionist Virgo and I think my perfectionist nature is kind of funny because it produces both very healthy and very unhealthy behaviors. On one hand, I hold myself to an impossible standard, build a sense of self-esteem based on goals I’ve achieved, and develop compulsive behaviors naturally. On the other hand, my strong interest in wellness combined with my perfectionism lets me cultivate these healthy behaviors and make them regular practice (thinking subconsciously, perhaps, that enough healthy behaviors will make me ‘perfect’). Of course, these healthy behaviors (meditations, yoga, etc.) are having a positive effect totally unrelated to this unattainable concept of ‘perfection’! I’m not sure if that made any sense but it makes me think of the distinction between the inner self and the ego, which we’ve talked about up-thread a bit. The outer, public self may express some less desirable, unhealthy behaviors, but becomes more reflective of the true self as the conception of the true self strengthens. This has been on my mind since coincidentally after our conversation in this thread, I had a yoga class focusing on this relationship and its manifestation as the front of the body (public persona) and the back of the body (inner self) (according to Ayurveda).

I hope you find this interesting and not too difficult to read (this was a little stream-of-consciousness).