Dear Soul-searcher:

(all quotes that follow are your words.  I edited the punctuation in the quotes for the sake of clarity).

In your July 2015 thread you shared that you were 26, and “desperate to settle down and have a family”. You were in an eight months relationship at a time (currently ongoing, over five years) with a military man from the UK, a “lovely person.. makes me laugh.. loving and caring and very mature and most of all very, very loyal”.

For the first six months of this relationship, it was long distance, the two of you traveling to see each other, “it’s been quite a rocky relationship from the start”, he was “quite controlling, jealous and insecure.. so possessive.. but we loved each  other so deeply, there was no way we could have let go of one another”.

About a month before, June 2015, he traveled and stayed with you: “1st week was bliss, pure bliss. 2nd week came, we wouldn’t go a day without fighting”. You wrote that you were “very sensitive and you could say something so harmless but if you say to me abruptly etc. it hurts me”, and he was “snappy, moody and loves to be in control”.

The plan at that point, July 2015, was that you will move to his country in August 2015. “He says how much he loves me and that he wants to marry me etc.”

At the time of your February- March 2017 thread, you were in your home country, after returning from the UK. You left your home country earlier, having “sacrificed and left everything I had here to move to the UK with him..  leaving my job that I was comfortable in, my home, my friends and my family”. While living with him in the UK, when he was not deployed, at times “he was out clubbing with his friends”, and lying to you about it. You fell into depression, felt unappreciated and unsupported and “wanted to go back home”. You checked his phone and saw “a picture message of a half naked woman and plans with his friends on which clubs to go to etc.” You told him you were leaving, he “begged and pleaded and promised me that things would change and how blind he was”, and you stayed. After that, “it was never stable, it was 3 days great, 3 days bad, and so it went on and on like this”.

You told him: “I want a family, I want to get married, and I want a stable life. If you can’t give me this, then please let’s just go our separate ways”. He “promised he would get help and change his ways”. Three days later, it was “the same old crap”, so you booked a ticket and went back to your home country. You were seeing a psychologist, and your boyfriend in the UK told you that he was seeing a psychologist there, and that he “has made him see a lot of the problem is him”. Later, you found out that “he messed around a few days before” you left the UK to your home country.

Later he flew over to your home country for one night only, spoke to your mother, “to prove to her how sorry he was and how stupid he has been”, the two of you talked for hours, “he broke down crying and said he wants to change and that it’s not his all words anymore, that he is getting help and he has realized what he has done to us”. You then decided to go back to the UK, following your psychologist’s advice and guidance.

In your January- February 2018 thread, more than 3 years into this relationship, you shared: “I have been suffering from severe depression for the past 3 years, to the point of suicide”. You shared that “the root of my depression is my relationship and the situation in which I find myself now”, and that you “tried countless psychologists, councilors and psychiatrists and it didn’t help.. I was on Xanax and sleeping tablets to get through the day and to be able to sleep at night, as I was suffering from constant nightmares, night sweats, depression and severe anxiety. My depression still comes in phases”.

In another thread, same month and year, you shared that after you moved to the UK, he lied to you many times, “and because of all these lies, I am sure that he has also cheated on me”, that you found a very good job there, got a promotion within a few months, bought yourself a brand new car, “but still things were rocky.. no friends, no social life, all I had was him”, that you were “diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety”. After a couple of weeks in your home country, you found out “that he was sleeping with 2 women”. You somewhat believed that he cheated on you because you left him/ because he lost you, so you went back to  him, and continued to be depressed with him, in the UK.

You wrote: “I have things I want to achieve, I am nearly 30. I want to open up my own business, get married, and have a child. Every time I mention the future.. he says I am being pushy, or I am putting pressure on him”.

You shared about the relationship: “when things are good between us, things can’t be any more beautiful.. We are kind to one another, we are romantic, we listen to one another… he is the one to break that ‘normality’ and become abrupt when work becomes more stressful or.. when he wants to be on his own and I’m inconveniently there. It just comes to an abrupt halt, into which I get angry and frustrated and then the fights begin”.

In your March 2018 thread you shared: “I have been diagnosed with .. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. I already suffer from depression, so having PMDD just makes it 10 times worse.. I always feel very down right after ovulation and I get symptoms such as cravings, abdominal bloating, mood swings, depression and fatigue”.

In your April 2020 thread, more than five years into this relationship, you shared yesterday: “he is the worst at communicating, he doesn’t know how  to and talking to him is even worse than talking to a brick wall… When he  is away from me, I thrive.. When he is back, I don’t.. I am still trying to  figure out why that is and why it happens to me.. I really do not know what it is”. By the end of this post, I will try to answer this question.

*** In your various threads, starting in your Feb-March 2017 thread, you shared the following about your childhood experience: before you were born, your mother was separated from the father of her two older daughters and she dated a married man, getting pregnant by him and having you. The father of your two older sisters visited you and his two daughters through the years, and you thought he was your dad. But when you were six, you were told that your he was not your dad (that he “wasn’t my dad”, “I wasn’t his”, “(it) was quite a blow”). One of your much older step sisters, jealous of you, “never failed to remind me that he is not my father.. I get very, very angry”.

You wrote about the man you thought was your dad: “he would take me to the beach to pick shells, to the parks, to his house to play with his expensive China and take me to meals. He died when you were 23. You wrote about his death: “My world turned upside down and even to this day I cry for him”.

You wrote : “I do suffer from emotional tantrums, and they are so hard to control… I will become hurtful and play the victim.. and say things such as, ‘the only man who ever accepted me or loved me was my dad, but he’s dead, and if I could take his place, I would’. When I am in that state of mind, it is very hard for me to calm down.. Once I’ve calmed down, I feel so embarrassed for the way I acted”.

Your biological father was “in and out” of your life, “would speak to me for a couple of weeks and then disappear for the next 2 years unless I called him to make contact”.

When you were 14, your mother left you when you were 14, “for a man in a different country”. You wrote about your mother: “I don’t remember mum being very much in my childhood, very small snippets”, that she left  you often (“she was going for a couple of months every so often”), and you stayed at your God mother’s house, and when she left for a longer time (when she moved away to live with a man in another country), you moved in with your 11 year older sister, and suffered in your sister’s home from her very abusive ex husband, and your sister’s strict rules and lack of support and help in your school studies. You then quit school at 16, met your first boyfriend and moved in with that boyfriend and his mother for four years.

Overall, as a child and a teenager, you felt “very rejected and abandoned and tossed here and there”, “I felt alone.. like no one wanted me, not my father, mother or sisters… I craved feeling loved and wanted”, “I didn’t receive the love I needed as a child, I wanted approval from my sisters as I had a different dad and felt different and not wanted. I wanted approval from my biological father, from my step father, from my friends who had normal families and fathers whom were at home with their mothers”.

*** And now my input regarding your current relationship (and this is only an initial input, if you want we can communicate about it over time):

It is not a matter of him being “the bad guy” and you being “the good guy”. It is not that he is unwell and you are well. It is not that he is the perpetrator and you are the victim. It is not the he needs help and you are his helper. The two of you have been individually and separately unwell for a long time, before you met each other, and after. The two of you have been victims of people before you met each other. The two of you need help. The two of you have  been hurting each other over the years: he aggravates your mental health, and you aggravate his.

Like you wrote in July 2015, when the relationship was 8 months old, “I am very sensitive, and you could say something so harmless but if you say (it) to me abruptly etc., it hurts me”. And when that happens, and he says something harmless to you, you get angry at him, and the situation escalates into a fight. He is far from being the most patient person in the world, so when you get angry, he gets angry quickly.

Like all of us who suffered greatly in childhood, you carry your childhood emotional experience into your adulthood (as he does). You keep experiencing your childhood within the context of your adult relationship with this man. Much of your suffering in this relationship is not about this man, but about the childhood emotional experience that keeps getting reactivated within the relationship with him: you felt rejected as a child-> you feel rejected by him. You felt very angry as a child-> you feel very angry at this man. You felt very lonely as a child, unsupported and unloved-> you feel the same with this man. You  were desperate for and positive attention as a child-> you are desperate for it now. You felt very unsafe then->you feel unsafe now.  Etc.

You wrote: “I have helped all of my partners go through things mentally, and in turn I am now mentally unstable.. ironic?”- in the context of this relationship, you have not been stable, and you didn’t help him. You hurt him and he hurt you. The two of you have been unstable and the two of you hurt each other. You only imagined that you helped him, but all along you were begging for him to help you.

As you expect to spend a lot of time with him soon, living together, quarantined or so, I would like you to adopt a humble attitude, understand that the two of you need to stop hurting each other, and stop helping each other. You are not superior to him in terms of mental health, and you need his help no less than he needs yours.

anita

Dear Soul-searcher:

If you helped this man be better father to his son, then you did help his son a great deal, and that’s a wonderful thing that you did, for his son.

This is what you wrote about how you felt as a child (same quote as in my previous post to you): “very rejected and abandoned.. alone.. like no one wanted me.. I craved feeling loved and wanted”. But you felt loved and wanted, or almost loved and wanted, when the father of your two older sisters visited you through the years: “he would take me to the beach to pick shells, to the parks, to his house to play with his expensive China and take me to meals”. When you were six, you were told that he wasn’t your (biological) father, and that was “quite a blow”, for you, and your older sister reminding  you of that repeatedly made that blow worse.

Regarding your boyfriend, you wrote: “when things are good between us, things can’t be any more beautiful… We are kind to one another, we are romantic, we listen to one another”.

Putting together the above: every time things are good between you and your boyfriend, it activates the very good feeling you had when your non-bio father visited you and took you to the beach and to his house, etc. This very good feeling is what keeps you in this relationship. You are chasing that good feeling, waiting for it, needing it and this motivation is what’s keeping you in this relationship throughout all the many, many depressing times.

You get the good feeling when things are going well with him, but you also  get angry sooner than later. Not only because of his behavior, but because you’ve been angry as a child. It is the old anger that gets activated: “I get angry and frustrated and then the fights begin.. I do suffer from emotional tantrums, and they are so hard to control… I will become hurtful.. and say things such as, ‘the only man who ever accepted me or loved me was my dad, but he’s dead”-

– you are angry now, and have been angry since a young child, because you weren’t loved as a child (“I didn’t receive the love I needed as a child”), and what you received from your non-bio father, was simply not enough.

In summary: I believe that what is keeping you in this relationship while miserable in it most of the time, is the very good feeling you experience with him from time to time, as rarely as it may be. The reason this good feeling does not last, is because you are still angry for not having been loved as a child.

At this point, I don’t know how much of the trouble in the relationship is because of his behavior, and how much of it is because your pre-existing anger that leads into fights.

anita

Dear Soul-searcher:

“why can’t I just be content with what I have”- because you keep wanting something you don’t have.

What you don’t have is the feeling that you are okay, that you are loved and lovable.

Regarding your new thread, I will respond to it here and hope that other members will respond to you there. I think that working with vulnerable children is a very valuable job: some of these children, maybe all, feel the same as you do: not being loved, unlovable, not okay.. hurt, angry, enthusiasm here and there followed  by the same  old same old discontent.

“but again, I want something that fulfils me and makes me happy! I have chosen so many careers.. How do I find out what I want!”- at the risk of repeating myself (I do repeat myself a lot), I don’t think it is possible for a person who feels unloved and  unlovable and not okay to be fulfilled and happy.

Once you realize deeply enough that your childhood experience of rejection and abandonment and mistreatment was not because you were unlovable, and that you were and are indeed lovable, then you will feel okay.

anita

Dear Soul-searcher:

“What you  have said somewhat scares me, will I really never be ok and happy and just have these happy emotions from time to time? Does this mean I will never be happy in any relationship or job I pursue in life?”-

– if I answer: yes, you will never be ok and happy, you will never be happy in any relationship or job you pursue in life, other than from time to time- it will read like I am predicting the future, and that would be arrogant of me.

But my life experience, my own story, other people’s stories point again and again.. and yet again to the following reality: when our childhood experience is significantly troublesome, we keep re-experiencing the childhood we had, no matter where we are, with whom and in what new circumstances.

It is possible to free oneself from that troublesome childhood emotional experience if we process it and release it. It takes a lot of work over a lot of time. There is no quick way (we tried all the quick ways, haven’t we).

As is,  your childhood experience exists in many neuropathways in our brain, spread out, taking over/ interrupting the here-and-now area of  your brain. What I mean by processing your childhood experience, is to create new connections/ neuropathways in your brain, over time, that will contain your childhood experience to one area (the Past), and in so doing, free your here-and-now area (the Present) from your childhood experience.

This definitely is an emotional journey, a gradual emotional learning journey. But most people who start on this journey quit  it because we don’t want to confront that pain of childhood. We keep re-living it, but we don’t want to look at it, more precisely, we don’t want to be fully aware of how we felt back then.

anita