I’ve been talking about anger – how you can be afraid to be angry in relationships because although anger is a normal emotion, many believe that being angry is bad, struggle to express it, or are used to believing that someone else’s feelings take precedence. I’ve also talked about trying to understand what makes you angry and why, such as shame, rejection, feeling undervalued and taken advantage of.
I know through personal experience and witnessing and helping other people in pain, is that one way or another, if you truly want to have room to feel positive emotions and release a lot of your ‘burden’, you’ve got to deal with anger.
It’s not enough to say ‘Fine, I won’t be angry’ because behaviour is mindset – saying you’re not angry and actually not being angry are two different things. Instead, you’re ignoring how you feel, rather than ’embracing’ the anger and saying ‘Right, I’m angry – what am I angry about and what am I going to do about it?’
I learned the very painful way that it takes a lot more energy to:
1) Pretend you’re not angry
2) Ignore your anger
3) Attack and punish yourself with it
I remember saying when I was younger that when I was p*ssed off about something, I’d ‘park it’ for a few months so that when I took it back out of the emotional closet, I wouldn’t feel so bad about it.
This was true… However, and it’s a big however, I had learned how to do this from such a young age that I was in fact numb. The hurts were still there – they were just buried underneath other ones and I’d blocked them out.
One way or another this anger stuff manifests itself and it can really impact on your health if you bury it as it’s like it’s eating away at you.
You have a right to feel – that’s good, bad, or indifferent feelings. You have a far better idea of when you feel good from good things if you’re able to know when you feel bad from not so good things or even the bad things – you feel your emotions more clearly.
If we are taught, either by ourselves or by others not to feel ‘negative’ emotions such as anger, we struggle to have an emotional range and find it difficult to articulate how we feel. You’re likely to veer between ambivalence or losing your rag and getting medieval, and you might not even know why at the time.
You’ll have disproportionate responses.
You can’t avoid conflict. You do have to say no to people, and unfortunately, you’re going to be annoyed or downright angry sometimes. Fact.
Avoiding conflict re-routes it back to you – the diversion puts all of the pain on you.
When you experience something that makes you angry, a cycle of things will happen.
Your negative experiences bring out your worst fears, particularly the ones that tap into your fundamental beliefs about yourself and you become angry, indignant at what you’ve experienced, directing the anger in various directions, and more often than not, when you can’t pass beyond the anger, turning it on yourself, which can cause depression, but will at the very least, certainly have a huge impact on your self-esteem.
When you don’t love, care, trust, and respect yourself, you will put yourself in compromising situations and compromise yourself. Some will be embarrassing and others will make you cringe with humiliation.
When you pull your head out of the sand of craziness and realise what you’ve been doing, who you’ve been doing it with, how you’ve been doing it, why, and what you may or may not have done to contribute to it, the deep sense of shock will make you feel incredibly angry.
You’ll then be terrified of what to do next and afraid to trust and believe in yourself or anyone else, and that will make you angry too – you’ll feel robbed! This is especially the case if it appears they’ve gone on their merry way. You’ll feel either undervalued, taken advantage of, shame, rejection, or even all of these, as I discussed in the posts on understanding your anger.
You’ll then derive your new self-worth based on what you perceive to be your lowered value as a result of what has happened and how negative you feel.
Persistent anger that’s internalised will alter your perspective and distort your perception of yourself.
This gets back to the heart of unconditional love – we’re very quick to ‘love’ others without conditions (think boundaries) and yet we can’t truly love someone or have positive relationships when we don’t have unconditional love of ourselves. This means that regardless of what’s taking place, you know yourself and act with love towards you instead of using every occurrence that takes place around you to affect how you fundamentally feel about you.
This isn’t about saying you can’t have down times – hell, we all experience those, but there is a difference between being in a bad mood/p*ssed off because something has happened and hating yourself because something has not gone as you expected or you’ve experienced disappointment. The latter actions internalise everything that is taking place around you.
Why is it important to to have a healthy sense of self when dealing with anger? Aside from letting you gain perspective and a healthier perception of yourself, you’ll be far more inclined to deal with the things that make you angry with action.
You can spend a hell of a lot of time worrying, overthinking, analysing, working out scenarios in coulda/woulda/shoulda mode, or trying to ‘recoup’ some of your loss caused by the pain by trying to go back to the person and stem the feeling of rejection and/or get validation. However the amount of energy you will use on these things will only demoralise you, trap you inertia, and give you even more reasons to be angry and any actions you do undertake are likely to be counterproductive because you’re likely to feed into your negative pattern.
With relationships and your sense of self, everything is intertwined. As I’ve told many before, start adapting one relationship habit and it has a positive knock on effect on everything else.
I cannot emphasise how important and fundamentally necessary it is to have boundaries. If you have boundaries that you don’t just think or talk about but live by, you remove a lot of the opportunities for pain, but it also means that should someone do you wrong, you’ll be far better equipped to deal with the anger you feel from it because you’ll know who you are, you’ll be living by your values, and you’ll validate your reasons for being angry.
You’ll take action because boundaries require you to take action and be in control of your experiences.
Boundaries don’t just teach people how to treat you and what to expect from you, but they allow you to love yourself because you will act with love, care, trust, and respect towards you. And I should stress – boundaries aren’t just for ‘everyone else’ – they’re also for you. It is important to impose limits on what you’re prepared to accept in your life.
Tempting as it is to complicate things, getting angry, being angry, and dealing with the anger doesn’t have to be complicated. Really.
Again I know this from personal experience. One day I went to a kinesiologist because I was fighting for myself after being told that I’d have to go on steroids or keel over from pulmonary heart failure at 40. I thought I was going there to talk about food sensitivities but as with a lot of holistic stuff, they look at everything.
She started counting back through my emotional years and asking me about specific times (year and month) in my life and my back went up. I wanted to run from the room and I didn’t even know why. The more she asked, the more defensive I felt. I won’t go on (for now) but I ended up crying like a baby that day and I partly knew what I was crying about and a larger part of me had no clue. All I know is I went in there as one very angry bundle – it was just buried deep inside.
I thought I would have to spend a lot of time working out the who, what, where, when’s, and why’s of my anger, but whilst I worked through a lot of stuff, forgiving myself and letting go of other stuff because I’d accepted it for what it was freed me up to feel genuine positive emotions.
I had to inject a lot of boundaries in my life. It’s as simple as this: If you don’t want to spend a lot of time feeling angry, indignant, and screwed over, don’t screw yourself over by having little or no boundaries. It doesn’t work. You already know this.
I learned how to say no and discovered the sky wouldn’t fall down – Anybody who can’t handle you saying no, especially sto stuff that detracts from you, isn’t worth the time of day. No is not a dirty word. You will simmer with burning resentment if you say yes to everything with the expectation that people will treat you better.
I looked at the old stuff I’d buried with new, clearer eyes. I had more compassionate (to myself) eyes. I acknowledged where I’d made mistakes and used the accountability to empower my decisions about the boundaries I was putting into my life. But I also got real about the events and the people because I was able to be a bit more objective.
Deal with your fears. Whatever you’re afraid of, what you do already know is that doing the same things will continue to make you realise your fears. Get them in proportion, don’t let them rule you and drive your relationships because it’s a big wrecking ball. As a reader once said to me, ‘Fear is just a feeling’. She’s right and we often exaggerate them to stay in our comfort zone. Read my posts on that nagging voice of negativity, positive woman = positive relationships, challenging the misconceptions about love, relationships and yourself.
I asked myself what I would do if I was to continue to stay angry. I couldn’t think of an answer. It occurred to me I’d probably think about being angry and wonder if the other person would see the light and yada, yada, yada, and I realised that I wouldn’t be doing anything other than stewing in my own anger.
Ask yourself: If I’m going to stay angry, what am I going to do?
I accepted things. A lot of the problems with relationships and even with ourselves is about fighting acceptance. It’s bloody exhausting rejecting the reality of things. I stopped fighting the reality as I needed to fight for myself. For example, people show you who they are. I realised I can fritter away the rest of my days being annoyed and wanting certain people to change but I was trying to control the uncontrollable. It stands to reason that if I’d been comfortable behaving as I had, other people had their own comfort zones. Accepting these people made me realise it’s not about me – This meant some of them had to go and others, by accepting them, I managed my expectations.
You will continue to get angry with people who disappoint you if you keep expecting them to do differently to what they have consistently done.
Whilst it’s nice to see the good in people and be a ‘believer’, it’s even better to see people as they are and not cloak yourself in illusions. Any expectations you have should be based on their consistent behaviour – this means you may have no expectations of them, but at least you won’t be giving them a fertile ground to sow their bad behaviour in.
When you see people as they are, you won’t keep being indignant, surprised, and outraged by what they do and say because you’ll see it coming.
Most of all, forgive yourself. That means letting go instead of obsessing and getting stuck. If you start being a doer, you’ll start to see that you’re doing good by yourself, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to let go of whatever has happened and forgive yourself.
Break the cycle of your anger – deal with your fears, learn to confront situations that make you angry so that you don’t feel powerless and berate yourself and lower your self-esteem. Holding onto and getting stuck in anger is stopping you from embracing your more positive self and we all have one in there that we need to nurture so we can welcome the good in our life.
Your thoughts?
Add to favorites
“know who you are, you’ll be living by your values, and you’ll validate your reasons for being angry” Nat you totally hit the nail on the head on that one. I don’t need to hear I am sorry from him to validate my anger. I have every right to be pissed. Any human on planet would. You cheated and you lied – you broke promises you made to me and you are an AC! I have a right to be angry and I don’t need him to justify my reasons for being angry. But I don’t have to stay that way. He is who he is and will always be that same person until he changes that. I can move on and deal with my anger in healthy ways – sure does make you sweat more on a treadmill which only helps me work it out rather than stuff it down. Buns of steel here I come!
I have a lot of guts… to own my emotions had to be taught… I was reading through your posts and I recently admitted my anger in a particular situation, I tend to subconsciously feel “bad” about being “angry”… although on an intellectual level know it’s appropriate. Yet, I’m trying to let go of a lot and transform per say because I have made many positive strides, I can see the forest from the trees (most of the time) through myself prompting me to dig deeper in turn finding your site as well as spiritual pursuits. I suppose I’m waiting for that AH moment, that release… for true freedom.
That last articles on anger are so very true. Although in my case it was more of a total frustration rather than anger. I used to be very good at calling my ex-EUM on his words when he was underdelivering or backtracking. Unfortunately, he used to do that quite often as he probably thought that professing or planning big things make them half done and then he can (and will) always pull out anyway. Especially without mentioning it, so probably I would not notice…
However, when I called him on it, the fact that he was “caught” and had to explain himself made him feel very uncomfortable. That wouldn`t be surprising if instead of him learning that he could not be promissing big things if he knew he didn`t want them or at least letting me know something changed (e.g. he went all quiet before long planned big holidays that HE WANTED, phone switched off just for the hole New Year holiday when he actually promised to come just the day before) he actually started blaming me for being moody, not relaxed and made me feel like I was almost policing him…
So in the end I was really afraid to show my annoyance with him changing mind on what HE promised/planned during blowing hot and not bothering to tell me about the change while I was relying on it till the very last moment. I started avoiding conflicts (although before I didn`t have this problem) because I knew that I would be blamed for every conflict and “spoiling” the “atmosphere” when he finally bothered to show up.
Exactly, as Nat says, there`s no good in keeping frustration or anger inside and putting on a brave and half-happy face. The only thing that I regret today is that I let him to manipulate me so much in the end that I actually started doubting about myself and whether I really wasn`t oversensitive about things and that I actually might have been moody and didn`t have the right to feel angry. It was only thanks to my friends that I started realising that it is NORMAL to feel angry or annoyed if someone disappoints you and is unreliable. In the end, I was more apologetic than annoyed or angry when I was trying to communicate to him that I wasn`t happy about what happened, yet I was still the very bad bad moody b*tch.
The moral of the story for me was – trust yourself and don`t let anyone make you believe that you have NO right whatsoever to be angry, upset, annoyed with them, not even when they are not delivering on what they themselves decided to plan/promise. If they feel uncomfortable about it than they need to do something about themselves, and not trying to “shut you up”.
I’ve been 5 months NC but the anger is still there and I had no way to process it because it was all consuming and all I wanted to do was be angry in the first place anyway. But that anger has taken a toll emotionally, I cry at the drop of hat, can’t sleep most nights and just feel bad in general all day everyday. I hate it and what anger has done to me.
I truly believe that by staying NC and putting up boundaries will help along with forgiving myself and even him. Forgiveness frees. Oh I’m not about to tell him he’s forgiven, I’m forgiving him in my own mind. Its not about him its about me and by forgiving him there will be no need to obsess and as NML says “stay stuck”. Can’t move on if I don’t let go of the past, all of the past.
MaryC:
I, too, believe forgiveness frees. I just recently forgave my ex to allow myself to move on and remain in NC. Now I am working on the hardest part for me, anyway, and that is forgiving myself. You have summed it up well … “can’t move on if I don’t let go of the past, all of the past.”
My first thought was – were you in my head last night? I have been waking up every night and only last night did it register – I am angry!!!
So this morning, rather than doing my usual routine of gratitude, prayer, vision board, EFT… I got up went straight to my laptop and compromised – I put on uplifting, God-centring music while I wrote down why I was angry and of course as per another comment above
‘he broke his promises to me – he promised to provide for me, he promised – blah-blah….
I agree we need to feel it before we can move on – thanks for the validation!
Now where is that punching bag – aaaarrrggghhh that’s right, I don’t have one – nor a swimming pool to do laps to release the stress….
“I intend to have a great day. I intend to be calm and peaceful and even joyous at work today…”
.-= Cathy J´s last blog ..Find True Love: What to do if you have a crush? =-.
So then I guess my comfort zone to a certain extent is not allowing a new girl to come in to my life because she could do what my last girlfriend did to me. To be honest with you, while hanging on to my fear, I never considered the fact that not all women have the same problems as my ex. I never took the time to explore the fear. I just hung on to it and let it well, i can’t find the word for it right now.
I guess I could start exploring by identifying what was it that I trusted, what was it that made me start to feel ok with her when I was with her. She can be a good friend and girlfriend, but when there are factors like not having gotten over her first love, (there’s a clue to what she did to me), and other issues, I dunno, Man.
A guy did this to me, said he was afraid I would do to him what his ex did and he pulled away but he was the one with the issues not the other way around 🙂 … He admitted to me he wasn’t fully healed from her (after date 3 because I sensed something and asked WTF is wrong with you) and I said, ‘ that’s fine, thank you but no thank you I don’t need the drama …’ but what I didn’t like was him expecting me to be his friend after I started to think after 3 dates there was potential for more as that is what he told me he was after as we talked in great length before we met about that. He should NEVER have gone on the date with me in the first place if he wasn’t over her or if he thinks I am going to do to him what she did … That totally p*ssed me off.
After a really horrible breakup several years ago, I think I completely internalized my anger and it came out in these voices that said, “You’ll always be alone” Etc. Etc. And I believed them. Sometimes it came in a different form and I’d think, “It’s just not my time.” Now it’s gotten to the point where I’m completely sick of this thinking. I’m done. I don’t listen to the voices anymore and even actively say, “No, that’s not true.” I was taught from a young age that feelings were bad and I am the person NML described: “If we are taught, either by ourselves or by others not to feel ‘negative’ emotions such as anger, we struggle to have an emotional range and find it difficult to articulate how we feel. You’re likely to veer between ambivalence or losing your rag and getting medieval, and you might not even know why at the time.” That was me! Now, I’m getting better at identifying how I feel so I can see things for what they really are–which means I can put boundaries in place and have reasonable expectations and maybe even not need to feel angry down the road because I know the score. I’m not even sure I understand what I just said but it sounds right. It’s definitely baby steps.
.-= Tara´s last blog ..Mr. Unavailable #33: Letting it Play Out, Part 2 =-.
there’s always a nice cold dish of revenge: do what brings him around, and when he’s in blowing hot mode, dump his ass for GOOD. (after some enjoyable sex of course) but you have to be really over him to do it i think. so, dump him in your mind first and get over it. that in itself is enough to bring him round lol!
Perhaps not the best method for all to follow, but I do have to say amen to that! Lol!
sorry, that last post is NOT good advice for , I think, the majority of women on here.
I’m not terribly emotionally invested in my recent ex-EUM..it was barely a fling, really.
From what I’ve read, I’d say just everytime he pops into your mind, say “WHO CARES!” and move on. Every time. It’ll become habit.
Dearn NML,
Thank you for this great post. I will bookmark this post and revisit it again in the future. Since your last 2 posts about anger, it made me think, I’ve been too nice. I’ve been suppressing over 20 years of anger inside of me and it’s making me depressed. It’s from all the shitty things people have done to me and a lot of them didn’t know that I was angry because I dont’ want to seem or look out of control. Screw them! I don’t care what they think. I’m pissed and I no longer want to hold it in. I want to let it out so I can stop being depressed! I want to sit on my anger for a little while. It feels good.
One day in the future, I will read this great post.
Thank you again Natalie. You’re helping me heal. You’re helping me get back the real Sherry.
First let me say this is a great site and every article/post I have read so far is right on the money. It’s the same advice I give to friends in the same straight forward tone, but fail to follow myself. I’m 45 years old. I was married for 20 years and have been single for 5.
My story could fit into several categories, but I chose this one because the anger element is so prevelant to me. I am angry over a relationship that is destined for nothing but more and more heartache, but I have been able to step away from, and I don’t like the
person I’ve become.
2 1/2 years ago I got involved in a very sexual but entirely uncommitted relationship with a man. We made it very clear that we were not “together” but we were also very good friends. We were each others “go to” person and spent all of our time together. Friends suspected what was going on, but we never cnfirmed it. However, he was always out looking for “the one”, then when he thought he found
someone we’d cut the sex off and after a couple of weeks he’s panic and bail on the g/f and come back to me. Eventually my feelings started to change and I knew I needed to keep it at strictly friends. Not long after that he found out his job was transferring him out of state. Perfect….this would force us to be just friends. We spent the next couple of months together non-stop. He left and we were on very clear terms….or so I thought. He got to TX and the phone calls and texting increased and we eventually became phone sex. I finally confided in him how I felt and told him that we either needed to try a long distance relationship until the time came when I could move or we had to stick to a platonic relationship. He didn’t want to do a long distance thing, but things never became platonic. It just kept going. Then about 9 or 10 months after he moved I picked up on some slight changes in his calling patterns and tone of his voice and knew he had met someone. I confronted him on it and he admitted he had. He insiste we would still be friends but wanted some time and space to pursue this relationship. I was supposd to stand by and watch him fall in love. We were on the same social network and had many mutual friends and the posts just got to be too much. I sent him an angry e-mail and he deleted me. For the next couple of months we had very little communication, but kept tabs on each other through mutual friends. I found out he had moved in with her. Then he called me one day. We talked about trying to re-establish a frienship asked him how his g/f felt about us still being friends and he said he told her we
never dated – just close friends. About a month later the phone sex started again. She travels a lot for her job and he wasted no time. He even did it in the restroom at work many times. We also re-established our friendship and speak several times a week, sometimes daily about things that are going on. We never talk when she’s at home, but text or IM. In February they became engaged. The other night things finally came to another of many “heads”. He’s out of town for his job and called for some help “going to sleep”. He wasn’t actually participating much and I told him in the past that when he does that it’s equivalent to having sex with someone who is just laying there. Suddenly I realized, there was nobody there. I had no idea how long I had been “talking” to myself, but I was. I looked and he was online – probably looking at porn – so I sent him an IM saying I was going to do some laundry since it was more exciting than what was going on. No response. Then I called him…no answer. What? Left him a message asking what the …that was all about. He called me for a favor and hung up with no explanation. Then I realized…his g/f was calling. This has happened before, but he usually lied and said it was work. But not even an “I gotta go”? The next day he sent me an IM saying his earpiece had died. I knew that was lie. I tried calling and he wouldn’t take my calls. A day or two later I tried to bring it up and he wouldn’t discuss it so I sent him an e-mail letting him know I didn’t appreciate being treated like an idiot and if he valued my feelings at all he would allow me to say what I needed to say. I haven’t received a response and we haven’t spoken. When he signs in online he shuts off his Im right away. I’m surprised he hasn’t deleted me from his IM and social network page again. Every time we have a blow up he threatens to end our friendship. So why am I actually planning our next conversation in my head instead of saying good-bye? I kept the e-mail and every time I start to forget how awful I felt the other night, I reread it. I love him but he is not available to me and never will be. I could never trust him in a committed relationship even if he did give it a chance and he’s obviously incapable of committing. But, I’m still trying to get the courage to end it completely. I’m angry at him and myself all the time and comes out in other parts of my life. I’m not a fun person to be around.
In response to the comment above about saying “who cares?!” – well, when you’re really out of the other side of the woods you are more likely to think “huh?” if something reminds you, because you’re so busy living your own life there isn’t even a “who cares” left. It’s a nice feeling, and you can get there if you work on YOU and not the symptoms of you.
Well I did it…or we did it by mutual agreement. No contact…he left the door open for “sometime” I shut it completely. He deleted me from our social network but I blocked him and his g/f so there would be no temptation to “peek” at his page, which is public. I even deleted mutual friends that were more his friends than mine, whom I don’t really communicate with. I deleted him from my IM contacts, erased his e-mail address and phone numbers from my phone. He responded to my angry e-mail that he didn’t think our friendship was healthy for him, but couldn’t speak for me. I responded that I was in full agreement to end contact and that our relationship was absolutely unhealthy for me. I allowed myself to be under-valued and disrespected all in the name of friendship. So far, doing ok today. Whenever I start to feel a little wishy-washy, I reread my e-mail or the posts on this site.
This site are great. Everyone of the articles sound like they were written about me.
LOVE YOUR FEED BACK ON THIS MAMMA’S…
I have been going 5 months strong of NC with my AC (yay). Doing well, staying strong, in the process of focusing on me, moving into a cute apartment in an area that i absolutely love next month… just basically getting my shit together,..,.
and guess what? yesterday i attended a fairly small trade show. (i am in the entertainment industry) and guess who was sitting up his booth DIRECTLY across from me? Yup TOXIC. there he was, right there, staring at me while my mouth went completely dry and my stomach in knots. he walks over says hello. i say hello, and continue setting up my booth.
I felt his eyes on me all day, he tried speaking to me about 4 or 5 times, i politely blew him off. He was panicking and i could sense it.
I would like to say (long story short) i spent 9 hours at a trade show watching him, his awkwardness, hearing him sell himself to his clients. AND FOR THE FIRST TIME… i didn’t want to wrap my arms and legs around him begging him to love me… i wasn’t craving him like i used to. He watched me all day, and made pathetic attempts for conversation, blowing as hot as ever… i didn’t give,…
NML – i was so proud of myself….he waited for me as I tore down my booth, i’m sure he wanted to walk back to our cars together and “catch up”. I grabbed my purse turned to him, did a casual wave and walked out, I held on to my power and it felt so good. I saw him in a real light, my thoughts stayed grounded… i saw him for what he really is – for the first time.
It was the biggest coincidence that we had our booths in front of each other at a trade show that he has never attended in the past…. (who knows maybe he set it up – who cares). But i didn’t cave… something was happening inside of me… that logical side was taking over, and i liked it. That “pull” is slowly fading.
I know i’m moving forward and FU** it feels good!!!!!
Hey Pushing thru
I hear ya, kind of at the same point you are. Avoiding the ex as much as possible, still hurting, but I know that things will be ok. I deal with the same thing, running into my ex AC at the gym and occasionally on the street, I just say hello and walk quickly away not letting any conversation happen otherwise the ex would try to engage me to flirt or whatever else he needs in order to stroke his ego.
I sometimes feel like I should have known what a user he is, but I am realizing now that it wasn’t a weakness on my part that I trusted him. He is the loser and he isn’t good enough for ME.
It is so much just a “take it day by day” situation. You just have to gather all your strength and insist that no one gets the chance to treat you badly. Learn to love yourself first and don’t allow anyone to be your priority while just being an option to them.
Cheers
Good luck everyone!
Smile! These AC’s are NOT worth it! Find someone worthy of your love, not game players!
@ Jane –
Thank you for your response, i think you’re right – we are at the same point, because i feel myself slowly becoming stronger however things still hurt me. I noticed him flirting with a cute girl at the tradeshow that day (purposely, i’m sure to get a reaction from me), ,,,, it bothered me. I had to look away, take a few deep breaths.
But then i remember all these posts, and quickly snap out of it. They’ll never change – he’ll never grow up.
I have to admit, i was a little extra flirtatious with my clients as well – when i found myself doing it. I stopped.
The best revenge is to move on!
Still, I don’t regret going through it – we have learned so much, and come a looong way!
Good luck to you during your time of NC! Stay strong!
I am on day 15 of NC (although he’s managed to call from an unblocked number just to “wish me Happy Mother’s Day”, uh uh) and THE AMOUNT OF ANGER AND INDIGNATION I FEEL IS EATING ME. I recognize myself in all of Natalie’s posts: self blame, self recrimination, sick to my stomach for being so damn insecure, vulnerable and settling for crumbs from a married ac. I saw him for nine months and while I “had it/him” I felt so alive, so beautiful, sexy, wonderful. Yes there were nagging voices that got kicked to the curb…and the voices of concerned friends that got worried once it progressed into more than just a fling…but I wouldn’t hear any of it…I was way too into the high of this intense collaboration with a guy that made me the center of his universe, chasing me, pursuing me, thinking of me constantly, sending me poems, reading me Pablo Nerudo. He WAS MARRIED – what was I thinking? Honestly, I was thinking at the time “minor detail”…HOW STUPID CAN A PERSON BE? I can’t sleep, I cry all day, I am not present for my job, my kids. I am trying to embrace the tips on building back lost self esteem but it is so fu…ing hard. I want SO BADLY to send him an email and tell him that I SEE IT ALL SO CLEARLY NOW: i was used, tricked, deceived AND THAT HE HAS NO SOUL. I feel like he is getting a pass for his AWFUL behavior towards me and I am so struggling with NC right now just to tell him what I really think of him.
These posts are so helpful…I read them every day and they are helping me get stronger but when am I going to get OVER THIS PIECE OF CRAP MAN who I really don’t want but WANT TO WANT ME!!!!! Arggg….the insanity!