Hey Anita

A few days have past and I’ve gone up to my hometown with my family. Right before I left, me and my girlfriend had a conversation about how she felt like too often, almost every day, small things would blow up to huge problems because I felt hurt and didn’t manage to “snap” out of it or “get on” when we were together. She said she didn’t feel like the relationship was working as of now, and said that I agreed and that it had been hard for me as well. We didn’t break up yet.

I thought I would feel better when I got home, and that this time being home would feel a lot better. That’s something I always think before coming here, but just a few days in I can already feel my energy dropping way low, like when I used to be depressed. When I see my dad behaving like I do with my girlfriend, making himself into a smaller version of himself asking for approval from my mom for everything he says I just get so angry at him for behaving this way. He does it with me as well, and it’s really exhausting having to validate everything he says instead of him having his own validation and being able to also validate me when we’re conversing.
Going through some of my stuff from my old house I found a letter written between my mother and my old teacher, where she had written something about me to my teacher that she didn’t want me to see, supposedly something about why I acted the way I acted in school. I still feel like she views me as something broken or small which she wants to change, but she never ever speaks up about it and our conversations are always very superficial; sometimes we don’t even speak for days when I’m here.

I know there’s two things going on here, my relationship with my family and hometown and my girlfriend, sorry if it’s confusing, but I feel like these two things have a connection, so I hope you can forgive me for jumping between these two subjects.
Me and my girlfriend have been texting a little bit back and forth, and I tried to call her some days ago, but she quickly found an excuse to hang up. I feel like she has lost all respect for me and honestly I don’t know how to behave for this to feel good again. I’ve lost all my integrity and self-esteem in relation to her, and the only thing keeping me from ending it is how fucked up my life is outside the relationship; my relationship to my family, my lack of true connection to other people and my anxiety keeping me away from writing music and doing creative work.
My mentor also says that if I leave my girlfriend, I will go back into “nothing”, and that this relationship is a great opportunity to practice coming forth as myself with other people, since without this relationship, I will be back in my room, gaming and doing nothing.
The things he says makes me fear that unless I manage to “fix” myself and just go 100% into this relationship, I’ll go back to being alone and miserable, and that it’s pretty much my fault how things aren’t working.
I keep thinking if I would only “go for it” 100 % and snap out of my own miserable negative thought patterns it would start working, but my feelings are saying “I don’t want to”. I don’t want to go 100% into it, I feel like there’s something more fitting out there, and something that would allow me to be me even more.

Sometimes I wonder if I have an identity around being hurtful, small and negative, and that I long for somebody to validate that identity instead of building my identity on something positive and have people validate those sides. It seems like it’s so hard for people to validate how I feel because they somehow feel threatened by or feel the urge to change those negative aspects of me. Especially my mom, and also my girlfriend. They can’t stand my negativity, and I wonder if that negativity is a “blown up” one, or if it’s a natural dose of it, and if I deserve to be validated even for my hurtful feelings.
I feel so hopeless right now. I don’t know what to do, I feel like everybody is against me wanting me to “snap out of it”.

Anita, thank you so much for these replies, they’re really helping me!

I’m not sure about the mentor, he hasn’t answered my texts yet; but he says he doesn’t understand why I’m making this so hard and what the problem is. He asks me why I can’t just love her.
I think my girlfriend can notice my distancing, and my shame for being distant and unsure. I make myself really small and I talk in an uncertain and submissive manner. Because of all the bad conscience I’m feeling I’m pretty sure I come across as pretty small and submissive because I’m not owning up to what I feel or to “who I am”. This being small is making her angry, though mostly she doesn’t express it directly, she answers by distancing herself too, which makes me feel even more small.

Your question about the anger:
Last time this happened was some days ago when she told me I was “nice and weird”. I got a bit unsure what she meant about weird, it hurt me a bit, so I asked her what she meant about it. Then she became quite angry at me for getting hurt and being negative about it and making it into a big deal, or “a never ending negativity”.
Another time was when she had been doing some homework with a classmate of hers, and I got kind of jealous since they have a pretty good tone, and also jealous of the fact that she seemed much happier after having been together with him than she was with me. I didn’t listen properly to what she said when I met her, and I asked her to repeat it and she yelled it at me. I told her this hurt me. Telling her didn’t really resolve the way I was feeling though.. At first it made her sad that she had hurt me, and I felt bad for it immediately, since I realized that the hurt from her yelling at me wasn’t the real problem, it was something that was already there when I walked into the room. At this point my negative self-talk really started to get momentum and I just shut down into myself since I didn’t want to share my negative self-talk, because the last time I did this she got pretty frustrated because she didn’t know what to do about it and felt responsible for helping me.
I ended up saying I had to go for a walk alone to calm down, and we agreed to meet later. This was when I realized I had to start working on my self-talk and self-image.
This feeling of bad conscience keeps reoccurring and keeps me feeling small and ashamed, making me behave in a way that really irritates her. I think that’s when her anger comes in, when that ashamed and bad conscience-feeling just takes over and I shut down because I don’t know what to say to her. That feeling is also what keeps making me feeling hurt from her small sarcastic comments, almost as a way to find faults or to stick to negative aspects of the relationship to justify my doubts about the whole thing in general. When I talk to her about how I feel jealous or my insecurities, it never seems to resolve, and I always end up feeling even more like an idiot or ashamed or bad conscience than before I brought it up, so I’ve kind of stopped bringing things up, and I’ve also started to question where these feelings come from, and whether they’re actually resolvable together with her, if they origin from an intuitive feeling saying I shouldn’t be together with her, or whether they have something to do with something even deeper than that, some fear of intimacy or connection.
I feel like I can’t really blame her for getting angry at me, since I’m not able (or I don’t dare) to fully communicate and take responsibility for what I’m feeling. Sometimes I wonder if I ask her to resolve some of these feelings for me in a very indirect way, hoping that she’ll say something that will make it better. I can understand that this makes her really confused and helpless and therefore angry. The thing is that I’m feeling just as confused and can’t really wrap my head around whether these feelings of bad conscience and guilt come from me knowing that I really want to leave but just haven’t found the guts to tell her, or if they come from something else, or if there could be some way for us (or me) to work / look at the relationship that would stop making me doubt what we have together all the time.

Hey Anita

I think you’re very very right, and I still have a lot of shame when I come home to see my family. I feel like it’s my fault that we’re not connecting. I know my family also wants this connection, and I sometimes feel very guilty for not doing something about it and for the way it makes them feel. I know they feel lonely too.
Yes, I really wish I had a closer relationship with my mother, father and sister, and I’m going there to visit them in some days and I’m quite anxious about it, since what usually happens is we all escape into work, video-games, facebook, TV etc. and it recreates all the feelings of loneliness and guilt.
My usual tactics when this happen is to either play video-games, talk negatively about myself and lock myself up in my room with loads of shame, or play piano all day long so I don’t have to be around my family.
I think you might be right that this lack of connection and shame around feeling this way is what I frequently find “wrong” in my relationships. Right now me and my girlfriend are at the point of never really talking or connecting anymore, we just do things like making food, eating and sleeping at night.

I often think about wanting the other person to open up and be “together” with me and open up about how they feel. This is especially true for my parents. Sometimes I feel like I can’t do it on my own, only being open from my side, I feel like I need the other person to also be open and share their feelings and thoughts.
This was a big theme earlier in my current relationship, me having to share my thoughts and feelings more, but I haven’t shared this feeling of being disconnected and empty. Could it be that this feeling comes from the other person not sharing their feelings, or could it be that I’m also not sharing myself? I don’t know how to open up for this kind of connection. With a few people, it has just happened, but in my relationship to her I rarely feel it.
Sometimes I wonder if her perfectionism about cleaning and tidyness, and her shoping-habits are a way of getting away from her feelings, but I’m afraid of being rude about this and just projecting my own fears and lack of sharing and connection over onto her.
I would love to feel connected more than anything in the world, it’s something that I’ve always wanted but I’m not sure how I can do it in this relationship, or with my family.