Shell-Of-Myself -> At What Point Does One Become A Lost Cause?

January 31, 2018 9:14 PM

It's been eight years since my only (semi-)real relationship ended (it was less than a year) and the intensity of the pain is as acute as it ever was. I'm running out of options thick and fast but the Plutonic-type obsession has a vice-like grip on my soul. I don't have suicidality in me, unfortunately, but I just long for death. Does anyone have any 11th hour measures?

I read this not long after my breakup and I read every single piece of advice: . I enacted what I could, and had to admit defeat with some other things (social media stalking of his publicly visible profiles) because my will power is too weak. But despite the measures, I am getting more and more shell-of-my-former-self by the day. In fact I think I'm at the point where the shell is eroding to dust.

This is what I have done:

- Travelled around the world a zillion times.
- Had a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
- Years of psychodynamic therapy (which didn't help nearly as much as everyone claimed!)
- Enacted what society calls 'revenge' (telling everyone what he did to me, which was infidelity and domestic violence. There was also non-consensual sex but I've only just realised how wrong that was thanks to #metoo).
- Started on the graduate programme I used to dream of (but have taken a sabbatical after only a year because the pain is too great).
- Worked lots of jobs, including seven days a week at one point to keep myself busy. Kept life as normal and stable as possible.
- Spent years not working and just trying to sleep it off.
- Tried to find lessons in it until I was blue in the face.
- Did a thousand and one evening courses
- Lived in a monastery for half a year with constant meditation
- Went on several vipassana retreats
- Dabbled in crystal healing/reiki/every kind of woo under the sun.
- Spent many many nights crying down the phone to the Samaritans.
- Exercise, though I don't have a whole lot of energy because the grief just exhausts me.

I was abandoned when I was a baby so that's the real issue according to the text books, but knowing that makes no difference, and I don't 'feel' that's the issue. The transference is too complete. I crave him with every fibre of my being and even though I know he doesn't care a hoot about me, or anyone else for that matter, I would still prostrate myself at his feet if he wanted me to. At this point he could cheat on me and hit me and I'd shut up and take it far, far more than I did eight years ago. Why? Because eight years without him has been worse than any agony he could inflict. None of the doctors or hospitals think I am mentally or emotionally abnormal but even if that's true, it's been truly maddening. I didn't end it, he did, but by the end I was screaming 'I can't do this anymore' and calling breaks left right and centre, and he had to do it. Would it have been less painful if I had ended it? Well no, because there was no way I could have. No way on Earth. I could foresee these past eight years lying out in front of me.

If you met me on the street you would think I was a self-contained, tough, capable, well-educated human being, but maybe that's part of the problem too. Maybe I wish I had been different when I was younger, had been to less academic schools, and had married and had a family life in my early twenties (a decade ago) instead of going into a fairly rarified world of the academy or these awful society feminist types who were of course going to brutalise me. I see it all so clearly now. I became hard through that life, not soft, and I wish women were taught a more traditional way of being for our sakes above all. I just don't want to play games any more. I want to lock myself away in some verdant part of the world with the man I love and live surrounded by animals. Society is too fickle, too changeable, too prone to whims, and I don't want anything to do with it. Or maybe I do. Maybe I want this Eden in which to convalesce, before returning to the city reborn. I was, if I can vaguely remember, an extrovert.

I am also preoccupied with the others, some my old community, some his new one, all white lefty elite academia types, who closed ranks. I can't tell you how much I hate left-wing hypocrisy. I am not white, but I will vote for the National Front, for Brexit, for Trump, for Marine Le Pen, for any populist under the sun, because I am so so so disgusted by how hypocritical the left all turned out to be. If anyone was supportive, they were almost all traditional, conservative, family people of all colours who understand basic marital values and don't try to apply weird-ass communist principles to human relationships. I am sick to death of hearing about minorities (even if I myself am a 3-in-1) because he and his friends keep banging on about them, which actually feels quite exploitative. I basically have no idea what my beliefs and politics really are anymore because everything in my personality structure is now formed as a reaction to that one horrific experience which I relive day in, day out. I’m not calm about these things. They enrage me. If a feminist was to hand me a flyer today, I’d be apoplectic with rage, and she would have no idea that it was only minimally to do with her. I am so sicked by everyone's #metoo posts or their virtue signalling at women's protests or whatever other toxic nonsense because they all collectively let me down. Yes I was angry when I said my piece and exposed my ex and took a bite out of his friends, but irrespective of what they thought of me or how I conducted myself, I expected them to cut him out. But they all trip over one another for their connections don't they? And they are all alike in values and social ambition. And the result is that it makes lots of parts of the world no-go areas because too many things remind me of them. Young people remind me of them. Millennials remind me of them. Protestors remind me of them. Writers remind me of them. Journalists remind me of them. Extroverts remind me of them. It was just this very upwardly mobile set but unfortunately most young people in Western Europe are now upwardly mobile millennials. Wherever the others are hiding I can't find them, and don't have much energy left now to try.

I found the whole thing so traumatic, and so metastatic in its spread, that I have isolated myself gradually over the years as I found I was too raw for anyone else's company, and too much on another planet nursing my pain to be able to communicate, with any kind of accuracy, with anyone left down there on Earth. It's been like trying to listen and shout through a fog. I've also tried being around men who are interested in me but I don't want to be around them, and past any initial flicker that may come alive in me, as I get to know them, they remind me all the more of how much I miss him. It makes meeting men a profoundly lonely experience.

It's a strange thing: I am obsessed with him, I miss his thoughts, and in many respects he was wonderful company, but I don't love him. I love the sweetness I thought he had when we were falling in love, but when I think of his actual personality I feel irritated and disgusted and I recoil at his hardness and cruelty. It's such a mind-f*** when someone presents with such a gentle manner and begs and pleads and seems so deeply in love to all observers, but is actually only thinking of his own interests. It's an extremely subtle kind of narcissism, and only experience can teach the difference. But even though the difference is now clear as day in people I meet, it's still really damped my ability to trust *anyone*. But that said, I didn’t trust him, even then. I was not so mad in body or mind to love someone who simply cannot love. It wasn't love.

But this doesn’t preclude hope. I also have a streak of mad optimism, and belief that he can learn to love, as soon as life knocks him hard enough and he hits rock bottom. And so there are my chains, and I fantasise about being able to engineer his downfall somehow, so that I can save his soul. Mad, mad, totally mad, I know. Completely bloody codependent. And so there is the mad logic by which I want a man I could not love, more than I want the air I breathe.

Maybe I want to be locked in a room with him for a month so we can talk about it all to death, and then be done. But there is no communication between us and for various reasons it's impossible. We also talked about it to death then. What would there be to say now? Maybe it would help if he could say to me what I know he thinks: “I never loved you, you b****, and I never will. I think you are pathetic.” But he’s always so painfully polite and when I last saw him in person, he was still in love with me (by which I mean the oxytocin etc was still active) and that’s the memory I have. But maybe I would see his abuse as further challenge. I could just see my ego spinning that to: ‘Oh you don’t love me do you? We’ll see about that.” I remember reading a thread on some bodybuilder forum of these men who were being harassed by their ex-girlfriends. After pages and pages and pages of posts, one man said: ‘You know the best way of getting rid of her, is just to be really really sweet to her.’ I remember when we first fell in love – after years of my being obsessed with him – I was surprised at how bored I was by him and by it. Maybe bored is the wrong word. I think it was more: ‘Oh. Is this what a relationship is? Is that all?’

In that other metafilter thread, one of the comments said one of the factors in never getting over a breakup is that: "They were starving for the other person to give them something they need to give to themselves."

But this is very abstract. How can I practically give myself the things I have been starving for? A mother to hold me, someone to cradle me, someone to soothe me and breast feed me. It's a bit late isn't it? And a bit nuts that I wanted it from a self-centered 20-something man.

I know there aren't many avenues left here for people to offer anything meaningful, and it does indeed feel a bit like a check-mate for me too, but if you do have something I would be grateful.

The only two remaining things I can think of are:
1) Pray with much more regularity.
2) I'm starting another job in another country soon and where my family are abnormal and odd and would never let me get one at home, I was thinking of fostering a dog when I am there and maybe adopting it permanently if I could find a way to bring it home. That's the only other thing I'm craving with any kind of urgency - just a lovely dog or two for me to love and take care of, who are all mine.

posted by edinburghgirl to Human Relations