Dear Umaz:

You figured that he didn’t invite you to the funeral, saying that he wants to protect you from the pain- because he doesn’t consider you as part of his family, that he considers you a liability instead, but what if you are wrong and.. he considers his family (not you) a liability?

Why don’t you ask him what he meant by protecting you from the pain? Ask him kindly to explain what he means by it?

anita

Dear Umaz:

You are welcome. “it just feels like it’s not a good time to create any issues“- I thought that asking him what he meant by protecting you from pain, if you ask him curiously, just for information, as in honestly wanting to understand (not angrily, and not for the purpose of starting an argument) will be okay because it hopefully will resolve issues, not create issues.

“I just feel really abandoned and lonely (I haven’t told him this) and feel like he’s not thought about me at all. Is it a bad time to communicate this?“- depending on the tone of your communication: if the tone is not angry but empathetic, being concerned for his well-being as well as for your own, not trying to argue.. just to understand and strengthen your bond with him through honest and empathetic communication, then it’s fine, and not at all narcissistic!

anita

Dear Umaz:

You are welcome. You wrote in your recent post to me that it may help you to ask him a question, “but I am not sure I will be able to do it without feeling hurt and sad“- you can’t help what you feel, and you can’t help if some hurt and sadness is in your voice. It’s okay to ask him a question with a bit of a hurt and sad voice.

You can’t help feeling “really abandoned and lonely.. hurt and sad“, but when you feel these feelings it doesn’t mean that your boyfriend really abandoned you, it could just feel this way  because the current event awakens an early life experience of having been really abandoned, physically or emotionally

You wrote in your original post that he didn’t want you at the funeral “because he wanted to ‘protect me from the pain“- if he knows you as a person who often gets hurt and sad, it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to expose you to an event where there is so much hurt and sadness, especially since he probably noticed the massive sense of loss that you already experienced about his dad’s sickness and death (“I felt a massive sense of loss too, even though I didn’t know his dad that well“).

anita

Dear Umaz:

You are welcome. For a daughter to feel  “really abandoned and lonely.. hurt and sad” when rejected by her family is an understandable combination of emotions . If you process, express.. work through these emotions, you will be sad for a while.. but then one day you will notice that you are not that sad anymore, that it doesn’t hurt that much anymore. I wish you well and please post anytime you want to post!

anita

Dear Umaz:

You are welcome. On Sept 25, you wrote about your boyfriend not inviting you to his father’s funeral: “He’s an amazing person and he would never hurt me intentionally. But I still feel betrayed“. Today, you are angry at him so you suspect that he is gaslighting you, which suggests that he is intentionally hurting you, and that he is not amazing after all.

What I think happened most recently, after he returned from the funeral, is that you were still hurt about him not inviting you to the funeral, and then when you found out that  his ex’s mother and sister were at the funeral, you got very angry, as if he chose his.. ex over you and invited her/ her family to the funeral, but did not invite you.

So, you got very angry and said hurtful things to him. He reacted angrily by calling you a narcissist, and next, you are suggesting that he is a narcissist (gaslighting is a term used for narcissists).

Thing is, his ex’s mother and sister live in that country and he didn’t invite them to the funeral, did he? He had nothing to do with them being there. But in your mind, it is as if .. he invited his ex herself to the funeral but did not invite you, so you felt left-out, hurt, and then angry for having been betrayed…   as if he had an affair with his ex while attending his father’s funeral. Does it feel this way to you?

Like I suggested to you earlier, I think that it is the hurt and betrayal that you experienced when your family rejected you that keeps awakening in the context of your relationship with your boyfriend, and this is why I suggested that you work through your emotions about having  been rejected by your family. Do you want to share about that rejection here.. what happened and how you felt/ feel about it? It may help. If you do, I will read attentively and reply further.

anita