Home→Forums→Relationships→I constantly sabotage my own happiness
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November 11, 2019 at 12:41 pm #322539
DanielleParticipantHi all,
I used to post on here all the time, but I’ve been very good mentally and well, I haven’t felt the need. The last couple of weeks I’ve been struggling mentally really trying to understand why I’m like this and why it doesn’t go away.
So my boyfriend and I have almost been together for 5 years (we started dating at 18). The first year of our relationship was terrible. We were constantly breaking up and there was a lot of hurt and immaturity. After that first year, my boyfriend has changed for the better and become exactly the man I’ve always dreamed of, but here I am… still focusing on our first year of dating. All the mistakes he did that first year… four years ago. When I get caught up in my head, I don’t see any of the good things he does, only the bad. I victimize myself. I feel pity for myself. I tell myself why did I stay with him back then? Why did I give him a chance? I could find someone better that has been great since day one of our relationship, not day 400.
My issue is, I don’t think this all the time. Most of the time I’m so happy. When I’m not in my own head, I’m extremely happy. But then there are times where I can get out of it, and it goes for days and days on end. Me just focusing on the first year of our relationship. Me feeling like I’m settling. Me feeling like I could do better and find someone perfect. Me feeling like I shouldn’t have had to wait for him to become perfect.
What im starting to think is that I am obsessed with thought of breaking up and ruining my life, not sure if that makes sense. When I was a kid, I feared how much power I had. How I could just make up a lie and change my life, my parents life, anything. I was like oh I could say my mom does drugs and get taken away. I could say my aunt hit me and ruin our family dynamic. I could walk out of this classroom, and get in trouble. I could eat something toxic and end up in the hospital… crazy stupid things like fearing how much control I had of my own life or someone else’s! So now… that part of my life’s is gone. I’m grown up so I don’t think about stupid things like that anymore…. but now it’s a constant obsession of breaking up, losing the one I love, leaving, having to move out, etc.
I know this post is a mess but I’m just venting and trying to connect the dots. I feel like I live in the past and sabotage my own happiness constantly, I think very negative, I fear being in control, and I obsess about things that would change my life.
Not sure what what help I could get on here…. but hopefully someone can explain why I’m like this… or if those two situations (my fears as a kid) do correlate with my fears as an adult… which are clearly centered around my relationship.
November 11, 2019 at 1:43 pm #322549
NicoleParticipantI think you need to take a step back and just try to think positive. I’ve had boyfriends in the past that I wanted to change but ppl do not change. I took the courage to break up w my ex and was single for 5 long years. I met my current bf after 5 years and he was what I wanted. If you plan to stay w your bf here are my recommendations which I follow myself to have a happier relationship: 1) don’t expect them to read your mind. If you want a gift, purse, bracelet, food- ask him for it directly. Give them a chance to know what you want. 2) change yourself. My bf was a medical doctor n worked a lot! He also was a family guy. I only saw him once a week for a few hours for several years- I realized he had other priorities so I occupy my free time w school, shopping, getting a dog, friends— he married me after 7 years. 3) give. Give. Show him you care and don’t count pennies. Be genuine in your relationship and give it all you have so u don’t have regrets. 4) do not forget to be kind to ppl and happy. Being kind will manifest positive energy around you.
November 11, 2019 at 2:14 pm #322551
AnonymousGuestDear Danielle:
Good to read back from you, good to read that you’ve been doing better.
“Most of the time I’m so happy. When I’m not in my own head, I’m extremely happy”- this is more happy than most people get to be. That’s a whole lot of happy.
OCD is a difficult condition. If you are not on an SSRI medication aimed at relieving OCD, this is an option for you, it can do wonders cutting off those obsessive thinking loops. Psychotherapy is also an option. Point is to minimize the suffering of obsessing and maximize relief.
When you are distressed, let it be, don’t fight it. Instead, gently distract yourself (ex:a walk outdoors, a swim, your favorite music, a movie). Remind yourself, when you feel badly, that you will feel better, just as you have time and time again. Remind yourself: this distress is not forever. Soon there will be relief!
If your boyfriend has been a good boyfriend to you for four years, for crying out loud, appreciate him! The first year, when he was not so good of a boyfriend (I don’t remember how he was not a good boyfriend), it is not like you were perfect, is it? I mean, it is not easy to be a boyfriend to a woman who suffers from OCD, so cut him some slack!
anita
November 12, 2019 at 7:13 am #322627
InkyParticipantHi Danielle,
Maybe you can have a break from the relationship. It is possible you have outgrown your boyfriend and won’t admit that to yourself. Has he truly apologized for that rocky first year? Do you feel that he heard you, that he gets it?
Best,
Inky
November 12, 2019 at 12:02 pm #322659AnonymousGuestDear Danielle:
I read through our extensive communication March-December 2017, mostly your posts. Let me see if I came come up with something new today. First a short summary of events and lies:
At 18, May 2015, you started dating this 19 year old boy. The relationship was turbulent, on-and-off, many breakups. In one of those breakups, he had sex with an ex girlfriend (Oct 2015), in another breakup he had sex with another girl (August 2016) and during yet another breakup he kissed yet another girl (Oct 2016).
Throughout your relationship with him you asked him hundreds or thousands of times if he had sex with other women during the relationship (during the on-times and off-times) and he lied and said he hadn’t.
Let’s look at one of the breakups, Oct 2015: you called him names, told him that you “wanted nothing to do with him”, “kicked him out of (your) apartment”, “kept shutting him off… really, really breaking up”, and he had sex with an ex girlfriend (“went to a party she was all over him he was drinking”). For a whole year you asked him if he had sex with anther woman during that breakup and he lied to you.
After discovering that lie, you kept asking him if there were other women, and “after months of questioning him.. he finally admitted he was lying”, August 2017, he admitted that he had sex with a second woman and kissed a third, August and Oct 2016.
Here is what he wrote to you in an August 2017 email that you copied and pasted for me to read: “the constant lying and me saying you’re crazy when in reality I’m the psycho here who should be on the meds… you are a f*** angel… I’m an idiot, liar, and bad person and manipulator. I have been working so hard to change my ways”.
In my communication with you I focused on your OCD and I agreed with you that indeed he didn’t really cheat on you because the two of you were broken up each time he was with another woman. Thing is, I didn’t pay attention to his words in this email: “I’m the psycho here.. liar and bad person and manipulator”.
You and him have agreed that he was a bad guy and that he was changing his ways. This is what you wrote about him: “it’s like he’s completely new guy… he really has changed… he’s such a different man… he’s changed completely for me… my boyfriend has changed a complete 180… He is seriously a changed man.. telling me and everyone how I’ve changed him so much”-
– reading this makes the reader think: this young man must have been so very bad, to need a change of 180 degrees, how bad he must have been to need such a drastic, complete change… But what is it that he did to you that was so very, very bad?
I can’t find it.
It is possible that he has been so intimidated by you, so tortured following being interrogated thousands of times, that he lost his mind and doesn’t know what he is saying. Maybe you really did break him, so much so that “he is an open book, gives me all his passwords, let me ask the same questions 19323948 times without complaining”.
Sept 2017 you wrote: “I think I am so controlling and such a strong personality woman while he’s passive and submissive and timid… my ENTIRE family is made up of dominant women and the woman is always the one that ‘wears the pants'”-
– so it is possible, that this man is a victim… of you. It is possible that you indeed broke him and rendered him senseless, passive, submissive and timid, that is, broken.
The other possibility is that he really is a bad person. But not because of the acts that you did mention: kissing one woman and having sex with two others in a total of three occasions during the breaks in your relationship with him. Because these are not indications of badness. And not admitting to these three occasions during relentless interrogations by you is not an indication of badness either. So if he is a bad person, there must be something else, or a whole lot of other things you didn’t mention and maybe you don’t know about.
Either way, you should break up with him for good. If he is a bad man- you should break up with him. If you broke him and – then you should set him free and give him a good amount of money so that he can attend psychotherapy so to heal from your long term abuse of him.
I started my current post to you with the thought that I might come up with something new. These two possibilities I just brought up are this something new. I did mention to you before, in 2017, that you were abusing him. But it is only this morning that it occurs to me that, if he is not the bad man the two of you think that he is, then your abuse of him is worse than I thought. This is making me very sad.
anita
November 12, 2019 at 7:47 pm #322689DanielleParticipantThanks for clearing all that up Anita.
So after reading your message, I can put a couple things into perspective. My boyfriend isn’t a bad person, never was. Has he made bad decisions? Yes. He says the decisions he made regarding the other women, were bad impulsive decisions. Because he wishes he would’ve thought more with his head (as in am I really over my girlfriend? Are we just arguing? Are we really done long term? Before adding other girls into the mix). I some what agree with him, I see where I would regret that too. But the bad decisions I think he made are all the times he lied to me . All the times he looked at me in the face and convinced me I was wrong, creating stories in my head, say I had anxiety for no reason because nothing happened, etc. do I understand why he was scaredy to tell me? Absolutely as well! I’m human, I understand how hard it is to say the truth when they might have such severe consequences (in this case, he was scared I would leave his life).
As as I have grown, I do realize he isn’t a bad person though. I don’t mean for his change to come across as a much needed spiritual moral change. When I mean he changed, I really mean his priorities. That first year his priority wasn’t school, me, his future, his family. It was drinking, and being the cool guy, and being obsessed with his fraternity and image and how many girls he could probably get with. He didn’t care to lie, because he wasn’t extremely invested in the relationship. He thought this was going to be a short term fling. When I say he changed a complete 180, I mean his priorities. He started focusing more on school, and what he wanted to do in life. Making money. Nuturing our relationship. Communicating. Being truthful. Spending more time with our family. Not trying to be the cool guy, but the smart loyal guy. The food boyfriend, son, son in law, friend, etc. & I do think he needed to do those things, to realize what was important in his life. He says it all the time, I have no clue who I was back then. He’s so happy that he has changed for the better. Now he’s the guy that gives idk extra tip to the nice waiter, asks people how their day is going, cries of happiness in movies (lol has feelings), isn’t scared to be emotional. Goes out of his way to decorate our entire house for my birthday, gets me those random flowers. Small things that he never cared about before. I hope this all makes sense.
I do understand from an outside perspective how what he did seems like no big deal, or not technically wrong. And it isn’t. I see that. But since it happened to be first hand, it feels a lot worse. I remember the texts, the way he would look at me, the nights I was crying, how he would laugh saying I was insane if I thought anything happened with that girl. The nights he would be blacked out drunk. The night I found out he texted an ex, or his friend saying a girl was hot. I remember these things. Are they important in the long run? probably not lol. Do I think he would do that ever again? No. Do I understand he was an immature 19 year old? Of course. Do I understand this was when we had been dating less than a year? Yes. Do I know I wasn’t the best girlfriend either? Absolutely. Do I know he’s changed? Yes. Do I know he would make a great husband and father? Absolutely. Do I know all people make mistakes? Yes. Do I think he’s sorry? Yes.
So after knowing all this…. why am I still caught up on it. Is it even this that’s causing my obsession? Is this a distraction? What is it. Why can’t I be happy and accept that we’ve grown so much and for the better. Why am I living in the past. Do I even want to break up? Am I just obsessed with the thought of breaking up because my OCD is latching on it? Is it true that you obsess most about things you care about?
Also, I do understand the posts I wrote over a year ago, and I can admit I have changed and grown a lot. I am no longer in college, have an extremely successful career, my boyfriend and I are on our own now, paying our own bills, living a very different life than in college. We’re at a different point in my life, and like I said in my post… I am so freaking happy when I’m not obsessing about the past and stuck in my own head. If I’m living in the actual moment, focusing on the present and the future, I feel absolute bliss. I’m happy.
November 13, 2019 at 10:42 am #322857AnonymousGuestDear Danielle:
In your recent post, you wrote about your boyfriend: “He’s so happy he has changed for the better. Now he’s the guy that gives idk extra tip to the nice waiter, asks people how their day is going, cries of happiness in movies (lol has feelings), isn’t scared to be emotional. Goes out of his way to decorate our entire house for my birthday, gets me those random flower. Small things that he never cared about before. I hope this all makes sense”-
– no, it this all doesn’t make sense: you present things as if your mistreatment of this young man for so long, breaking up with him multiple times in the first year or so, then 4-5 years of accusing him of cheating on you, interrogating him multiple times about what he did with whom while on breaks from you, asking him “the same questions 19323948 times”, and him answering you “without complaining”, being “passive and submissive and timid”, giving you all his passwords so that you can track his activities, all this somehow produced an amazing change in this 19 year old immature boy of the past and turned him into a mental and emotional super hero of a man and boyfriend.
This does not make sense to me because it is not possible that abuse begets mental and emotional health. It is like claiming that beating a person with a whip creates a healthy, glowing skin.
In other words, what you present to me as reality, is fiction. I don’t like reading fiction here or anywhere. I like true-life stories.
anita
November 13, 2019 at 12:27 pm #322865DanielleParticipantSo in our opinion, I’m abusive to my
boyfriend because I questioned him a lot because he wasn’t truthful with me for 2 years. He broke up with me 4 times, not I. I broke up with him the times he would confess to things that I had been asking for years because I always had a gut feeling. I would get angry and break up, yes completely immature and stupid and honestly I see that it pushes him to want to tell me less because I always would break up with him.
But i I don’t understand how him causing trust issues and breaking my trust.. which leads to me questioning his honesty, makes me toxic and abusive. As for the passwords and all that situation… I haven’t had my boyfriends password to anything in over a year. I don’t log on to his stuff, I don’t track his location, because I realized that’s toxic and controlling. Yes after I felt like I couldn’t trust him, I did resort to that non sense, like a lot of young girls do, but I don’t do that.
You are extremely intelligent, and I respect your opinion. You just have a very different opinion than almost everyone I’ve spoken to, and I’m interesting in understanding it more. Maybe I do agree with you, I don’t know.
Usually all people say is hes great, were great, he made stupid young adulthood mistakes, he’s changed for the best, enjoy that. They also tell me things I could change, be more understanding, forgiving, less confrontational, etc.
We actually went to therapy a couple of times, he paid for it, because he wanted us to go, he wanted to learn how to communicate and listen better, I wanted to learn how to live in the present and forgive. Accept him. Let go of the resentment. Not once did she say I was abusive or he was some scared young man, and she would meet with him and I individually as well.
Thats why im not sure if it’s my writing, or communication of the events, that makes it seem some other way.
November 13, 2019 at 12:34 pm #322867DanielleParticipantI also wanted to add to his “change”. He doesn’t say he changed because of me, he says he changed once he realized what his actions (lying), breaking up with me, getting drunk, having meaningless hook ups, were making him feel. He said he felt like he was headed down the wrong path. He says he doesn’t think he would’ve graduated if he didn’t finally change. He says he changed because he wanted to be successful, have a happy relationship, remember his nights and not always be blacked out drunk, not getting with random girls. HE caused the change, not me. He randomly changed from one day to the next, around the time he told me about the first girl. He also says seeing what the lying did to me, made him realize that his decisions so impact other people, and he didn’t want to be so impulsive and careless. His dad has an affair on his mom, left her for the mistress, and now they’re happily married. He didn’t want to be that. He didn’t want to listen to his dad who always said to lie to avoid problems. He wanted to be BETTER. He wanted to be better than how he was being. He wanted to be a better partner because HE realized he wasn’t being one.
That is why I am confused as to why my abuse of questioning, caused the change. Because that’s not what I’m trying to imply.
November 13, 2019 at 12:36 pm #322869AnonymousGuestDear Danielle:
“I broke up with him the times he would confess to things that I had been asking for years”- not true, you broke up with him repeatedly in the first few months of dating him. You started dating him May 2015. One of the times you broke up with him, calling him names and kicking him out of your place was Oct 2015, leading to his having sex with another woman for the first time in the context of his relationship with you.
anita
November 13, 2019 at 1:50 pm #322877DanielleParticipantYes, that is true. I broke up with him that one time for the first time because he was always drunk and was extremely focused on his fraternity and wasn’t giving our relationship any of his time. But you stated that I broke up with him 4-5 times all the time, but that was him. He broke up with me 3 times for no reason, just wanting to be single or if we were arguing a lot, but he would say that he just wanted to be single and have fun with his friends. And then would come back a week or two later after realizing it wasn’t “fun”. I wasn’t the one easily disposing him every couple of months to “have fun”.
I absolutely will admit that I shouldn’t have broken up with him that first time, I should’ve communicated better and expressed my concerns. I also will take full responsibility for the times I did break up with him for telling the truth. Absolutely ridiculous of me to do so.
November 13, 2019 at 1:54 pm #322879DanielleParticipantYes, that is true. I broke up with him that one time for the first time because he was always drunk and was extremely focused on his fraternity and wasn’t giving our relationship any of his time. But you stated that I broke up with him 4-5 times all the time, but that was him. He broke up with me 3 times for no reason, just wanting to be single or if we were arguing a lot, but he would say that he just wanted to be single and have fun with his friends. And then would come back a week or two later after realizing it wasn’t “fun”. I wasn’t the one easily disposing him every couple of months to “have fun”.
I absolutely will admit that I shouldn’t have broken up with him that first time, I should’ve communicated better and expressed my concerns. I also will take full responsibility for the times I did break up with him for telling the truth. Absolutely ridiculous of me to do so, because I ended up making him feel like he couldn’t tell me anything because I would leave him. So it’s a lose lose situation, he tells me and I leave, he doesn’t tell me and he lies but he hasn’t me. That’s not a good situation to be in.
November 13, 2019 at 2:01 pm #322881AnonymousGuestDear Danielle:
I will be able to reply to you when I am back to the computer and back to your thread, up to 16 hours from now.
anita
November 13, 2019 at 2:22 pm #322883DanielleParticipantNo worries Anita, thank you very much!
November 13, 2019 at 4:09 pm #322903AnonymousGuestDear Danielle:
This time communicating with you, I am not focusing on your OCD, I think that I gave you all my thoughts about that before. Plus it is very, very tiring to communicate with an OCD sufferer, which brings me to my focus at this point: why is this man with you.
What I mean by that is, why has he volunteered to suffer your OCD for so long, to be interrogated like he has been, why has he accommodated your irrational questioning of him, the demands, the moral superiority position that you took; what is his payoff-
You mentioned money before, something about your uncle mentioning that your side of the family is wealthier, if I remember correctly. Plus you were able to lease an apartment while in college and go on vacations, Mexico is one. Question: is it possible that he is benefiting and/ or is hoping to further benefit from you financially?
anita
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