You need a new definition of bliss—and fast. While you contemplate what that might look and feel like to you, let’s take a look at the patterns and belief systems that helped to create your current situation. I believe your boyfriend did you a favor by cheating on you with your “best” friend. As painful as the experience may have been, the reward is that you are asking for help and are primed to make some changes.
Your relationship patterns are long-standing, and it’s likely that your role models as a child had low self-esteem. It’s also likely that your parents treated you as a burden, or as narcissistic extensions of themselves. You may have felt that your existence depended on you filling your parents needs and/or meeting some impossible standard that held out the elusive reward of feeling loved. However you got it, the message you carry within is that intimacy and emotional mistreatment are bedfellows.
Reflect on the following questions to understand how compromising yourself, giving too much, and being lied to has become a part of your relationship DNA:
1. How did your parents encourage or discourage you when you were faced with a challenge as a child? Did they compare you to others or push you to do better than others?
2. How did they speak to you about yourself?
3. How did they negotiate decision making with you? How were you treated in times of conflict?
4. Did they praise you honestly and often for who you were? Did they encourage you to always do your best regardless of the outcome?
5. Were they interested in your efforts, your thoughts, your unique way of looking at the world? Were they curious about your inner life?
6. How and when did you feel valued, loved, cared for, nurtured, safe, respected?
7. Did you feel a secure continuity of their love when you left home to establish your independent life?
These are only a handful of questions, but they are enough to get you started in your process of reflection. It is completely possible to learn how to love and value yourself now, or as Kabir, the mystic poet wrote, to begin to “stand firm in that which you are.” All books on the rules of dating and relationships could be boiled down to this: Love and value yourself. Your first loyalty is to yourself, Sally. At your deepest level, you know this as evidenced by your statement, “I have had enough.”
