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Lately, around the 4 week mark of NC, I have been thinking about the concept of a personal truth.

What I mean by that concept is a philosophical point of view that two or more people are entitled to their own version of any given event or phenomenon of emotional nature.

Now I have always been slavishly of the mind that there is this objective truth about most everything. "Ask a thousand people on the street/experts/statistics, Yes or No" kind of deal. And this point of view does have a lot of merit in some areas of life. But I think when it comes to emotional side of things, it is not as black and white as that.

Lately I've been thinking about why I'm so deeply conflicted about the breakup, besides the trauma bond of course. I came to the conclusion that I have been conflicted by my personal truth being so different to my ex's truth. My truth was and still is that I wanted to work out our problems during and after the break my gf wanted. My girlfriend's truth is that we were and would not be happy together. The fact that she turned out to been seeing my friend during the break kind of made my system go "uh huh, I guess we were in a bad place for her to do that". And that her truth trumped mine because I am indeed happier without her!

But this is where you can conflate intention or the present, and the outcome or the future. This is what I did. I felt I lost by victory points in the game of the relationship because she called the shot by ending the r/s. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. "This r/s is bad, let's end it." "Oh yeah, I guess it was bad, seeing you ended it."

The objective truth here was that I was willing to work through things, and she was not. This doesn't take into account incredibly important points like the trauma bond, her untreated disorder or the emotional infidelity that was going on in the background. And it does not need to! The truths in this case speak about intentions, not the outcome. You cannot foresee the outcomes for certain, and you can't and should not be a Texas Sharpshooter, drawing targets around your shots. You could of course extrapolate that one person thought the fight was worth it and the other one did not share the sentiment. But the gist is that your intention is not necessarily fouled by the outcome. You did your best but the game was called early. Even if you, after the game, realized the game wasn't going as well as you perhaps thought it was going.

Does this resonate with people? I suspect that people with a higher level of self-esteem have a more solid grasp of the idea of the personal truth but I wanted to share my musings in case someone is going through something similar.

this may seem counterintuitive, but i found that when it came to detaching, i was ultimately detached when i was able to see three different perspectives, and in a balanced way.

1. my own perspective, of course. my personal truth of the relationship, where i was coming from, how i operated. i found that this changed a lot over time, especially as i was able to see other perspectives. at the time, i saw myself as something of a martyr and a victim. eventually, i saw myself a bit differently, and didnt like everything i saw. ultimately, i began to see myself as a person who had a more limited emotional maturity, who was doing the best he could, but had a lot to learn.

2. my exs perspective. this changed many times too, as i learned about BPD. frankly, i had a great deal i needed to "unlearn", from junk psychology on the internet. over time, i realized that my ex and i were operating from very different places, different motivations, something i couldnt see at the time. understanding where my ex was coming from, what she was experiencing, how she may have felt - i dont necessarily have to agree with it - helped me a great deal ultimately. it helped me to see outside my own motivations and beliefs about myself, and to see how other people might perceive me and experience me. this is the skill of empathy, something i realized i didnt have as much as i might have thought i had.

3. the "from 30000 feet perspective". what an outside observer would see if they looked at our relationship. its a perspective that is far less emotionally charged. from 30000 feet up, my ex and i looked like two dysfunctional people, who bonded and acted dysfunctionally, who loved each other a lot and gave the relationship their all, but couldnt make it work. this one took me the longest to see.

the more i was able to synthesize the three perspectives, the more detached i became. its as close to objective truth as i can get.

Yeah, that seems like a solid foundation. I have to admit I'm not quite there yet. I feel bad admitting that from the satellite view, it was doomed and that even my own personal truth was clouded by dysfunctional emotions in both camps. I feel like I'm letting my ex win by admitting "defeat".

Then again I'm still not over the r/s ending. I have been ruminating on substitute feelings: I've supposedly worried that my ex friend and she will have a succesful r/s and they will succeed where I didn't. But ultimately, it's me deflecting the pain from having the r/s cut out from me. For some reason my brain does indeed want to dodge the feeling and start obsessing about their compatibility instead of just admitting I'm in agony over the r/s ending.

it took me about a year to be pretty much free of the pain. it took a few years after that, and, embarrassingly, a couple more questionable relationships, to start to see things as i do now.

this is relatively fresh for you. think about it this way: its kind of like reading your high school diary. its easy now to look back and see how absurd i sounded, but i would never have been able to do that without growth and new experiences to apply retrospectively.


i went through a very similar process  :hug:. its a major blow when an ex jumps into a new relationship, and especially given the infidelity. i dont think its unnatural to make that comparison, or certainly not to want it to work out. it will help enormously to be mindful about it all, like youre doing. when i would lean on my friends to soothe my fears, i couldnt see what i was doing, and what i was avoiding. i just wanted endless reassurance to salve my wound.

its funny, if you think about it, you or i probably dont feel this way about other past relationships. we may not spend a great deal of time thinking about it, but we know there is someone(s) else out there who is a better fit for us, and a better fit for them, and its not a particularly painful thought or feeling. at the time, even the idea that there was someone else out there that was a better fit for me than my ex, would send me into a catastrophic tailspin, because i was still attached, and i was still badly wounded.