Dear Annie:

Congratulations for finally getting a job!

September 2017, two years ago, you wrote about you and your now ex boyfriend: “We were fine in the beginning but after almost a year we started fighting a lot. He told me sometimes when I’m like this it’s hard to be around me. But that is also when I need him the most for emotional support”-

I too used to be a very angry young woman. But I didn’t understand that when I fight with a person, that person is not going to support me. In other words, when you are angry at a person and fight with him, he is not going to feel empathy for you. Instead, he is likely to feel anger back at you. Maybe scared and then angry.

Like you I also was jealous of others who had friends while I was alone and lonely. My loneliness started very early on at home. I felt very alone and lonely in my own home which didn’t feel like a home, a place of supposed safety and warmth, meaningful conversations and empathy, understanding.

Is this your experience at home with your family: lonely, cold?

anita

Dear Annie:

I learned that when a child experiences a very lonely childhood, the child grows up to be an adult re-experiencing the same lonely childhood. Just as the lonely child sometimes had company and experienced joy in that company, the lonely adult also enjoys company sometimes, getting a break from the usual, ongoing experience of loneliness.

You wrote: “my family doesn’t understand how I feel and I would feel lonely”- it is very difficult for a child to be alone with her feelings. Every unpleasant feeling becomes way more intense when she is alone with that feeling, unseen and misunderstood.

I imagine you were angry then, and probably still, angry at your family for not seeing you and not understanding you. Am I correct?

anita

Dear Annie:

That is what happens most often when we experience a significant lack in childhood: we “don’t feel the anger toward (our) parents anymore” but we feel it toward our boyfriends/ partners in each and every relationship. You were jealous from the beginning of your now ex boyfriend’s friendships, expressed in your previous thread and in the post right above your post to me: “He always chose his best friends over me”.

Problem is that you are likely to feel this kind of jealousy for your next boyfriend and the next (or for this one, if you were to resume the relationship),  until you address the jealousy you felt as a child when one of your parents (or both) seemed to prefer other people over you- other family members, maybe even neighbors or strangers.

The old jealousy in childhood is likely to disrupt your relationships throughout life, if not addressed and resolved. I experienced a similar kind of jealousy myself and have made significant progress on the matter.

Do you want to share about this old childhood jealousy?

(I will soon be away from the computer and back in about 13 hours from now).

anita

Dear Annie:

If you want to explore this further, we can:

1. What bad things did his friends say to him about you and the relationship with you and how did you find out what they said (did he tell you, did you ask him and kept asking him what they said)?

2. You wrote that everyone in your family gave your younger sibling more attention and care- can you tell me more about it: who  is “everyone”, what attention and care did they give her but not you, is it still the case, to this very day?

(I will be back in a couple of hours).

anita

Dear Annie:

I re-read your previous threads regarding this relationship that ended a couple of months ago. The first thread is from September 2017. In that thread you wrote:

“Recently I’ve been feeling jealous and envious of my boyfriend’s social life. It just seems he meets the right kind of people and hit things off well, while for me it’s hard to meet people.. We talked into his old dance building and saw some people who  know him and were happy to see him… In class, we had to do measurement lab and I was hoping to work with him alone, but he ended up  working and talking mostly with another guy in class. I felt lonely because again I had no other friend and it just seems he already made a new friend there. After class, we went to my house and I still felt upset… His coworkers and manager are always nice to him, giving him free food every break time.. I do feel a  little jealous of him. It just seems he has a lot of people there for him while I don’t”-

– you see: you were angry at him for talking to a guy he just met and jealous of him because his co workers and manager were nice to him two years ago. Fast forward to your most recent post, regarding friends he knows for a longer time: “They would constantly say/ask him questions like ‘does she not like us?’ Because I tend to be a quiet person”-

– not because you tend to be a quiet person, but because you tend to be jealous of your boyfriend for having anyone nice and friendly to him, and you get angry when that happens. It is true that you didn’t like his friends.

Two years ago, you wrote: “Sometimes I’m afraid of losing him because how I am… I have a big reaction to something most people find small or insignificant.. We talked about this many times before and thought about how to deal with it but when I get like this, sometimes it’s like we forget we had that conversation… We were fine in the beginning but after almost a year we started fighting a lot. He told me sometimes when I’m like this it’s hard to be around me”.

Like you feared, you did lose him because of your ongoing jealousy and anger. April 2019, your relationship with him was “emotionally distant”, the relationship by that point was “on and off”, you spent a little time together, “once a week”, and “When we do spend time together, we would have sex and then he sleeps… We hardly ever talk to each other anymore”- the relationship was on its way to the ending.

The reason the relationship ended was not his friends were bad people who said bad things about you. The reason it ended is that you experienced valid jealousy and anger when you were a child, month after month, year after year, as “growing up I did feel a lot of jealousy and envy towards my younger sibling because everyone gave her more attention and care and I felt I lacked affection from them… parents, grandparents, and parents’ friends.. would compare me to my younger sister”.

Your parents and the others really did give your sister way more attention and care than they gave you. It wasn’t fair and you felt intense hurt and anger. Fast forward, you kept feeling that same hurt and same anger in the context  of your relationship with your boyfriend. That led to fights and distance and he eventually broke up with you.

It is very uncomfortable for you,  isn’t it, to think of your childhood experience and you prefer, don’t  you, to lay the blame on your ex boyfriend’s friends. But if you don’t address your childhood experience and resolve- over time and work- that hurt and anger, you will continue to re-experience it with any man you get involved with.

(The only exception may be if you lived on an island with a boyfriend, only the two  of you, and if on that island he would never think or talk about any person who was nice to him before ending up on the island).

anita