Dating : When Your Love is Unhealthy

I’ve realized from my recent resurgence of PTSD symptoms that when I write about traumatic experiences I’ve had, it takes a lot out of me. It brings up a lot of buried feelings. I have to dive deep into those old mental spaces to tell the stories. I write them anyway.

Because I have no intention to stop writing now, I decided it would be best that I go back to therapy, so I’ve done that. I had my first virtual-visit on Tuesday, and we’ve scheduled a standing appointment for every week moving forward until my brain decides to chill out.

My therapist asked me what my short-term goal is, and what my long term goal is. I thought about it for a second. I already know what my long term goals are. I need to learn to better regulate my emotions. I need someone who understands my condition to keep me accountable for working on myself and practicing my skills. And I need to learn to see the gray areas.

As far as short-term goals; I had to think about that one. I realized that totally unrelated to all this trauma I’ve been digging up from my past, I have a massive problem that I’ve been trying to cover up with my new writing hobby. For the most part, writing so much has helped me immensely, but it’s a serious issue that the problem still exists. My new hobby didn’t cure me of my affliction. It didn’t make the problem go away.

The problem is that I still love my ex, when I haven’t seen him in 7 months, and I purged him completely a month ago. I was already very rarely communicating with him, but I went ahead and cut the cord last month. I first blocked him on all my social media accounts, but then I went and deleted them altogether. You can Google me, but all the links are broken, because those are just cached results. I’ve closed the accounts.

I think my Facebook is just about at the 30-day mark where it will be deleted forever.

I still love my ex. He’s never been diagnosed with any mental illness or personality disorder, but his behavior has been harmful to me. He seemed cold and callous, after a period of really intense affection. In retrospect, I realize that he may not have been able to truly empathize with me or anyone else.

I recall one time when I burst into tears because I’d had enough of him getting angry at the smallest things, this time because I was ten minutes late arriving to his house. He stared at me for a long time, looking confused. It was the first time I’d shown any real distress, instead of just irritation. I think it was because by then I had started to have much stronger feelings for him. Once I showed real vulnerability myself, the mind games really started to escalate. He was cruel.

I also don’t know that he could’ve helped that, though. He did things that suggested a real need to be loved, admired, and respected. He was always trying to do something for me; to help me in some way. It was one of the things we struggled with because I didn’t immediately understand how important it was for him to feel useful, and I had no tangible needs which I needed him to meet.

He drank, which is how I started drinking for that time period, and when he’d get really drunk, sometimes his vulnerability would peak through.

“No one should love me,” he once told me. I asked him why, and he said it would be in their best interest not to.

“No one ever sticks around. Do you see anyone here?” He has a network of people that he can do things for, who can do things for him. Everything is very transactional for him. So, I suppose he was lamenting on the fact that he had very few to no “true” friends.

There was someone there, though. It was me. That didn’t seem to matter. No matter what I did, he wouldn’t believe that I could love him if I didn’t need him.

He hurt me, and he played with my head, but after everything I’ve been through, it’s nothing I can’t handle. Once I wrapped my mind around what he had been doing and I accepted that “Hey, this man will never be capable of loving me,” I realized that I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t imagine all the times I thought I caught him taking photos of me. I didn’t imagine him pouring more wine into my glass once I got tipsy when I‘d turn away or go to the bathroom. I didn’t imagine hearing him ask me if I liked it when he mind-fucked me, under his breath. I didn’t imagine him saying little weird stuff here and there that was beyond creepy, like referring to the beginning of his relationship with his ex as “when I first got her.”

He said he “got” her like she was a thing that he owned. Later I brought it up and he told me that I imagined it. Okay, whatever.

I imagined our whole relationship. Got it.

I let a lot of really disturbing things go because I wasn’t myself at the time, having been at a very vulnerable place in my life. I was also on a medication that made me out of my mind.

Those were just the minor things that helped to enable my own toxic behavior, though. The real insanity was that I was okay with seeing what he was doing and ignoring it. I was being toxic. I was being an enabler. I was in the wrong, too.

I was the bad guy, just as much as he was.

I was the ugly, disordered thing with whom there was something seriously wrong.

He was able to do all of those harmful things to me because I let him. In letting him, I was, in turn, harming him, too. By knowingly allowing the abusive behaviors, I was maintaining an atmosphere of toxicity in which we were both engulfed.

My therapist asked me to consider if codependency might be the issue.