Dear Tineoidea,

Our general relationship was mostly carefree but also loaded with conflicts which ranged from small to big, and I did have to take a stern or distant stance during those. Like I said before, he was very bad at respecting boundaries and my wishes.

It cannot be both carefree and loaded with conflicts. And it cannot be carefree when he was threatening to kill himself…

When it comes to my project, he wanted to help and so of course I let him in. Sure there were times where he helped or tried to, but in the end he mostly kept causing issues, stirring conflicts with other people and always let me down when I tried to rely on him for actual work. Likewise he often challenged my authority while overblowing his own even though he wasn’t contributing much if anything. I’ve had a lot of people complain about his conduct and how he was sabotaging things with his thoughtless behavior, which in turn devalued my own work, which is also what my ex kept saying about him.

And in spite of his bad conduct and him causing more harm than good, you still got him involved in your latest project too (where he is now slandering you)? Or it’s one and the same project, which is still ongoing?

She wanted me to mediate so I don’t lose a friend over her, while constantly provoking him. He wanted me to get rid of her and cave into his demands while constantly disrespecting her and me both. As to how, I’ve no idea, but I truly tried.

BTW you earlier said he thought she was an impostor. In what way? What exactly did he have against her?

Not only financially but also logistically, and to help us with the relocation to a better place.

Does it mean she promised to help your mother too to relocate to her country, together with you? Your mother would come to live with the two of you, in the big house that was being built, or something like that?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Tee.

Dear Tineoidea,

I’d like to revisit this fact that you’d treated him like a child:

although there were many times where I did sort of have to treat him like a child due to his behavior. This is one of the complaints that my ex voiced when it comes to my “poor treatment” of him, that I treat him like a child.

In general, when we treat someone like a child, we feel superior to them and we feel it’s our right to lecture them, tell them what to do, how to behave etc. You might have been very much invested in keeping him “on the right track” and saving him from himself, and in doing that you might have been patronizing him and treating him like a child. Would you say this is what happened?

She actively involved my mother in those empty “plans and promises” she made, which made her compromise her health, time and happiness for a long time, working towards that ultimate goal which was never going to happen.

I don’t really understand what kind of promise she gave to your mother, which would require your mother to compromise her health and happiness? Was your mother required to take up extra work, so that the “ultimate goal” would come to fruition?

Dear Candice88,

Except 3/4 of my boyfriends presented as stable, put together, healed. I was never attracted to someone who needed to be fixed, yet they eventually showed themselves as people who don’t know themselves. Or know how to lie and what people want to hear. I always felt fooled when their toxicity reared up after a slow reveal.

Right. Your initial attraction might have been to men that seemed put together and healed. But when you realized they are not, you still stayed with them. At least that’s what happened with M. He was treating you poorly, he’s been promising things and never kept his word, he told you he quit using in April but his behavior hardly changed. And yet, you kept hoping that he isn’t lying, that he’d change eventually. And even now, when you’ve found out he is still using, you believed that perhaps there is a way to get together again, once he gets sober:

Before I learned about the cheating, I felt more balanced – that if he gets sober long term maybe we can try again if I feel like it could work.

You wanted desperately to be with him, even though you knew what he was like. You’d rather not see the warning signs (even when they were out in plain sight) than accept that this guy will never be able to truly love you and respect you, and that he doesn’t deserve your love. Do you see that?

It’s not about the initial attraction, it’s about the inability to let go of a toxic person when their toxicity becomes obvious. This inability to let go of toxic love is due to the little girl unable to let go of her need for her mother. It’s very natural that the girl wouldn’t want to let go, because staying attached is a survival need. This same need was active with M: the little girl would do anything to stay attached (i.e. save the relationship). She’d even look away and pretend she doesn’t see things. And she’d convince herself that it’s her fault that he can’t love her properly. She wasn’t willing to let go of him, even if he was treating you like trash.

So the real challenge is not in the beginning of the relationship, but when the troubles start (and the lies and manipulations) – what do you do then? Do you try saving the relationship at all costs, allowing yourself to be manipulated and disrespected, or you say – farewell, I am not tolerating this, I deserve better. And you step away, without looking back.

Dear Tineoidea,

His mother basically dumped him when he was little and his father eloped shortly after he was born if I remember correctly, so he was raised by his grandparents.

So he was almost an orphan.

Not sure if this affected anything though.

It almost certainly contributed to his possessiveness. And it could be that you sympathized with him, because you too were abandoned by your father when you were very young. You two are similar in that sense, only you had the luck that you had a loving and caring mother, and he didn’t.

It seems to me that you took pity on him, but also saw yourself in him. As you were caring for him, you probably were also caring for your own inner child – the little boy who was abandoned by his father. You didn’t want to be like your father, so you could never abandon him. That’s why loyalty was so important to you.

So it’s not that you didn’t have a healthy model of love, as I assumed earlier (you did, thanks to your mother), but rather, you loved him as your own child, because you recognized yourself in him.

Does that make sense?

Dear Tineoidea,

“To whom was she absolutely loyal and caring, no matter what?”

To me of course.

Have you done something that would warrant her to stop being absolutely loyal and caring to her own child? The way you phrased it, it sounds as if you caused problems to her, but she remained loyal and loving to you regardless.

Dear Tineoidea,

My question is, why? Did I actually do something monstrous to deserve all of this?

No, you haven’t done anything to deserve this. You as a toddler who was abandoned by his father and left behind without the bare necessities in a cold winter – didn’t do anything to deserve it. You were an innocent little boy, who needed and deserved love and affection. You as a little boy who, together with his mother was hurt and threatened by the members of his own family – didn’t do anything to deserve it.

Why did it happen? Maybe you heard the phrase “hurt people hurt people”: people who suffered abuse in their childhood are prone to become abusers as adults. If your father had been abused as a child (which is possible since he had a cruel mother), it wouldn’t be a surprise if he’d turn into a cruel, heartless man, who would even harm his own son. It’s not your fault whatsoever, it’s his blindness and his emotional scars that made him behave like that.

Are all the wonderful experiences of the past and all I have contributed to those two, just nothing at all now, as if it none of it ever happened?

We can have wonderful experiences even with people who will later harm us. It’s known for example that narcissists love-bomb the person in the beginning of the relationship, to get the person open up and get attached to them, only to later start displaying their selfishness. Or if someone is emotionally wounded like your ex, she was wonderful and selfless for a while, until her wound got triggered. Once it got triggered, she became very defensive, almost like a different person.

With your former friend, you also said you had precious memories, but they were interspersed with his possessive behavior, as well as irresponsible behavior which endangered your livelihood. The relationship with him was a mix of pleasurable moments (I guess when you did everything like he wanted) and frustrating moments, when he was emotionally abusive to you.

You allowed this abuse to happen because you didn’t even register it as abuse, and I believe it’s because you thought that’s how love looks like. Growing up, you didn’t have an experience of a healthy, loving relationship, but it was interspersed with harm, suffering and abuse. So having a friend like that probably felt familiar to you. At least he was loyal to you, he wouldn’t abandon you like your father did. And you valued that a lot.

Now, after all this, you would need healing. The little boy in you needs healing. Because probably a part of you (that little boy) believes that he did something to deserve all the abuse he’s been put through. You’d need to tell him he did nothing wrong. And you’d need to give him the love and appreciation you never received as a child.

How do you feel about this?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Tee.

Dear Tineoidea,

I don’t really recall when it started but it may go back to when my father abandoned us during a cold winter, taking with him things such as my clothes, toys, my mother’s stuff.

This is rather heart-breaking and very very unfair. First, your father cheating on your mother, and then leaving you without even the basic necessities in the cold winter.

When I saw myself, my friends or my mother being subjected to treatment I considered unjust, it made me feel pretty bad.

And you’ve experienced such a treatment quite a lot while growing up. You said you’ve experienced humiliation, slander by your father’s family and his new woman, and even a murder attempt (“his side of the family plus his new woman always tried to hurt and slander us in one way or another, going as far as trying to kill my mother and me“).

You have also shared that your “best friend” is now slandering you (my “friend” is now slandering me to people involved in my project). During your conflict over your ex, you said he even wished you were dead (“At a point, he even wished that I died“). Do you see the commonalities here: slander, humiliation and even the feeling that someone wants you dead?

Also, you mentioned that your livelihood might be in jeopardy, and that it has been before too. So that too is similar to your childhood situation, where you lived in poverty and starvation.

So for me, I cannot not notice the similarities to your childhood. It’s like your childhood experience being repeated again. Have you thought about it before?