Hi Anita,

Thank you, your words resonate a lot with me. It feels like a weight has been lifted to finally feel understood.  I agree, I did feel like the intern liked me and saw my good qualities right from the start. He never made me feel shamed/stupid and that helped me a lot.

I also see a spiritual teacher/practitioner and I mentioned in therapy how the practitioner told me I was a good/loving person and that helped disrupt the tapes I have running in my head of all the things my ex said about me. When I told my therapist this she said she thinks those things also, but once again I just felt uncomfortable and didn’t really believe her. Despite all of the things I’ve told her about my ex she never named it as abuse, I had to learn that on my own. At the beginning of our work together, she said that she’s sure my ex did love me and just did some harmful things sometimes, when I was certain that my ex did not love me at all, not really. I wish someone would have told me to leave her and that she was abusing me. I’ve felt misunderstood from the beginning but I thought maybe I am not seeing things clearly because I’ve been so confused. For example, I was telling her about my boss at my former job and how I didn’t know whether or not she was a safe person. My boss kept wanting to be friends with me and something told me not to open up to her. I told my therapist how when I meet people I try to observe them to see if they’re judging me and whether or not they’re safe/good, and she told me that no one is all good or bad, that’s she was sure my boss did care about me, and that meant I was judgmental too. That broke my heart and I cried a lot about it. I wasn’t trying to say that my boss was all bad, I was just trying to discern whether or not she were a safe person to connect with. It turned out later that I was right about my boss, I did open up to her against my better judgement and I thought maybe I had found a friend. Later she started treating me very badly while I worked myself to death, sometimes even working for free. Eventually the boss screamed and cursed at me and called me lazy, so I ended up quitting.

I hid a lot of my suffering from my therapist for a long time. Now I’m talking about it more but I’m forcing myself because supposedly that’s what I’m supposed to do, and I’ve been told I’m closed off and I don’t let people help me. I wrote her a long email the other day about things I’d experienced with my ex, trying to get more stuff out. She did send a nice email back and I’ve said more in session with her but she hasn’t really said much about the things I’ve experienced, even though I’ve asked her to share more thoughts. I’m waiting for an emotional reaction to show me she actually understands how horrible what I’ve been through is. With the intern I remember I could see the reaction on his face and that helped me feel seen, it helped me feel like my pain was real and mattered to someone. I really need empathy and compassion, and that’s easy to talk about but it’s different actually doing it. While she says she feels empathy for me I do not feel it. I also think there’s a difference between learning about healing from a book/school and having lived experience. She is only a few years older than me and I think that has something to do with it too. I feel bad for feeling this way because she does help me sometimes, and I’ve stayed with her hoping that things would get better, and I have gotten better in some ways. I just want to be known and seen on a deeper level and I’m just not getting that from her, I don’t really want to be told what to do or what’s wrong with me, I just need an emotional connection with someone.

In regards to my ex, I finally blocked her from contacting me a few weeks ago. It took me a very long time to do that because of the guilt tripping. She would send pages of text about how she was in the hospital and had developed MS and how she wanted to move back with me because there was no one to take care of her. I felt heartless if I didn’t answer and I did consider letting her come back. She also blamed her behavior on MS and said that was the reason she acted the way she did and that she was sorry, but because of that she “didn’t stand a chance”. The whole time we were in contact I still felt like the relationship was ongoing, she refused to acknowledge we had broken up. Every time I mentioned that we were now broken up she would get upset. She was even dating/living with someone else (within three months of us breaking up) and telling me the new girl was just a rebound and she wanted to get back with me. But right after we broke up she said she didn’t want to get back together with me, she was relentlessly contacting me because “she genuinely cared about me”. She also twisted things around and said the breakup was mutual and she left because I didn’t spend enough time with her. Once again, when I told her I didn’t want to get back together because she had haunted me with her horrible words she didn’t take any responsibility, she just said “well, you said stuff too”.

I agree, seeing reality is the only gift I need, but I find it very difficult. I used to be pretty smart/opinionated but I find myself getting confused about just about everything. Even at work I struggle to do anything and I always feel very uncertain. I agree with you on some level that I wasn’t responsible for how she treated me but I still blame myself for my reactions and think that maybe I should have given or done more. My parents were very angry people and as a result I am very adverse to expressing anger and usually just dismiss it within myself when it comes up. In fact, I dismiss any negative emotion (sadness/fear/anxiety/anger). I think this is a huge part of why I feel so disconnected, I feel like I have to be happy all of the time. I wish I could reconnect with myself and my intuition but I find it so difficult. I keep running around trying all sorts of different things to “fix” myself. Some days I feel okay but most of the time I’m just all over the place.