Women who Love too Much Community Group
WHEN BEING IN LOVE, MEANS BEING IN PAIN... This group is to help women through the journey of realizing they can love themselves. To help realize that they are capable of having a happy, healthy, whole relationship and break the cycle of abuse and heartache from loving emotionally unavailable men.
This topic evolved for me from the "letting go" thread.
I'm find myself replacing the fantasy of true love with a pull to demonize my ex. I obsess about all the things that were clearly wrong from the beginning, all the things i "should have seen" and relentlessly turn over all the questions I have, all those moments when I felt instinctively he was lying but chose to go with trust and faith. I'm tempted to try to "find the truth" behind those moments as if knowing whether or not he was lying / cheating would in some way save me from the pain I'm now in. As if i could absolve myself from responsibility by discovering (more) of his failures.
My thoughts on this are obsessive and relentless. I wake up most mornings from dreams about him and if i don't immediately get out of bed and *do* something i end up reducing myself to tears. But I'm realising that this is just the dark side of fantasy. The same imagination that created true love's prince is now creating a tale of victimhood at the hand of an bad guy. And neither of them are real.
I made plenty of choices I'm not proud of in my relationship. I completely vacated my sense of self from the moment he told me he thought i was "the one" (reality check: we'd been together for 4 months, i am 13 years older than him and at the time we were LITERALLY 9000 miles apart) in a desperate to desire to *be* the one. i put my every ambition, goal and value on the back burner to finally have someone choose *me*, love *me*, the way i'd always dreamed of. and when he left, i didn't even blame him. i didn't like the person i'd become. i want to put down all of it. the obsession, the fantasy, the grief, the pain. but every morning i wake up tormented, wanting to crawl out of my own skin.
there was a bit back about "what you're doing this weekend that asked" what's your biggest lie right now. when i read it i thought - i'm not lying about anything! it's taken this long to face and admit it. My ex relied on me for everything - his banking, getting him jobs etc. when we broke up i asked him to change his passwords but he said he wasn't going to. my lie is that i SAY i want to get better but i have yet to quit my addiction. i've checked his accounts twice in the past week, telling myself that because i "discovered" truth there in the past, i have the right to know. telling myself that i don't want to be in touch, i just want to know what's going on. telling myself i want to move forward, but giving in to temptation again and again. So who's really hurting me in the end?
I'm find myself replacing the fantasy of true love with a pull to demonize my ex. I obsess about all the things that were clearly wrong from the beginning, all the things i "should have seen" and relentlessly turn over all the questions I have, all those moments when I felt instinctively he was lying but chose to go with trust and faith. I'm tempted to try to "find the truth" behind those moments as if knowing whether or not he was lying / cheating would in some way save me from the pain I'm now in. As if i could absolve myself from responsibility by discovering (more) of his failures.
My thoughts on this are obsessive and relentless. I wake up most mornings from dreams about him and if i don't immediately get out of bed and *do* something i end up reducing myself to tears. But I'm realising that this is just the dark side of fantasy. The same imagination that created true love's prince is now creating a tale of victimhood at the hand of an bad guy. And neither of them are real.
I made plenty of choices I'm not proud of in my relationship. I completely vacated my sense of self from the moment he told me he thought i was "the one" (reality check: we'd been together for 4 months, i am 13 years older than him and at the time we were LITERALLY 9000 miles apart) in a desperate to desire to *be* the one. i put my every ambition, goal and value on the back burner to finally have someone choose *me*, love *me*, the way i'd always dreamed of. and when he left, i didn't even blame him. i didn't like the person i'd become. i want to put down all of it. the obsession, the fantasy, the grief, the pain. but every morning i wake up tormented, wanting to crawl out of my own skin.
there was a bit back about "what you're doing this weekend that asked" what's your biggest lie right now. when i read it i thought - i'm not lying about anything! it's taken this long to face and admit it. My ex relied on me for everything - his banking, getting him jobs etc. when we broke up i asked him to change his passwords but he said he wasn't going to. my lie is that i SAY i want to get better but i have yet to quit my addiction. i've checked his accounts twice in the past week, telling myself that because i "discovered" truth there in the past, i have the right to know. telling myself that i don't want to be in touch, i just want to know what's going on. telling myself i want to move forward, but giving in to temptation again and again. So who's really hurting me in the end?
A week after dating my ex told me that I was the one. I wanted to believe him when he said he loved me. And like you I started helping him with jobs, his money, his children, his parents. I cant say that I lost myself because I was only half of a woman when he meet me. Yesterday I was talking with a close friend that is a WWLTM and she told me that when she was dating her husband he told her that she was the one. She said that she never felt like she was the one for anyone so it was difficult for her not to dive into those words head first. Later in their marriage her husband told her that he used that "line" on every woman he dated and she was the only one stupid enough to believe it. She was not stupid for believing it neither was I or you. We were and in some ways still are just in pain.
I guess I'm not alone in that. Cheating (for many if not most people) seems to evoke a powerful emotional reaction. For me, it would have been a pain that was in a class all by itself. Maybe that ties into my childhood abandonment issues -- my father left us for another woman. Anyway, like I said, though the breakups were excruciating enough, at least I was spared the pain of cheating.
So in a roundabout way, I guess how I would answer your question (why don't you love yourself enough to just want better) by asking you, in turn, whether the cheating evoked that reaction in you too, and if so, whether you've had a chance to process those emotions first, separately. Because I think that's what I would have to do before I could even deal with all the other emotions stemming from the breakup (grieving the loss of the dream, residual anger at failure to meet expectations/live up to promises and so on).
I know that my fear of being cheated on stems from the fact that I define my worth to a partner by what I can do for him as opposed to an intrinsic value in who I am. And I always get involved sexually before I get involved emotionally (a behavior that stems from childhood sexual abuse that I am committed to changing). But the bizarre part is one of the reasons I never bother to *find out* if I've been cheated on is because I know I could forgive it. My history of abuse means I've devalued sex enough that being cheated on wouldn't be the end of the world as long as their was honesty and emotional fidelity. The crisis comes in my self-esteem, worrying that it happened because the other woman is better in some way or that I am deficient. Self worth / self love - always coming back to that....
To get back to your original post, it sounds like you didn't like the person who'd you'd become through the relationship. To me this signals that, as painful as it is, the place you're in now is a far better place. In my own struggles to free myself from a similar 'addiction,' I found it useful, not to "demonize" him per se but rather to make myself see him as he really was, warts and all. Weaning myself off the fantasy was the hardest part. Even now I still lapse occasionally... But when you get to the point where you realize there's only one way to go and that's forward, then things start looking up.
In my relationship I looked for clues that he was cheating all the time and if I had found any I cant say that I would have left either. At the end of my relationship we had decided or rather he decided that we would be friends working on getting back together. As the weeks passed I was miserable and he seemed happier than ever. I wanted to stop talking to him, I wanted to stop hearing from him or about how happy he was. But I could not allow myself to honor the truth of where I was- I didn't want him to think that I was so hurt, and so upset that I could not be friends. I didn't understand that I could drop him cause I wanted to no explanation needed. So, I started praying and asking God to just help me get out of it. What happened was he invited me to lunch and he rode with me. When he got out of the car I checked his phone and saw that he was texting multiple women telling them that he loved them and that they were the best thing he ever had. It was enough for me to say- I cant be friends with you because you are a liar. And some of these texts happened right before we broke up. I needed something tangible to walk away on. I couldn't do it because I wanted to and needed to. But going forth from now on if it does not feel right and it does not serve me- I don't have to explain it I can just leave.
there's a new thread topic in here but it always leads me to self-blame and what ifs... if i'd been able to hold onto myself, would the relationship have flourished instead of being strangled? no... it just would have ended sooner. that's what i have to keep telling myself until i finally believe it.