When Everyone Says, “You Need To Let Him Go,” You Know It’s True …
By: A. Nonymous
Tags: Infidelity, Heartbreak, Affairs, Personal Development, Mental Health

When Everyone Says, “You Need To Let Him Go,” You Know It’s True …

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

It’s the five-year anniversary of an emotional affair I had with a married adult child of an alcoholic. The ending broke my heart so badly it really has taken every living second of the past five years to recover from it.

Not because of him. Because of me.

Like my mother, this sweet guy was badly damaged by unhealthy parents. Like my mother, this sweet guy could have had better outcomes in his life if he’d just dig in and do the hard work to heal.

He tried hard to do some work, all right.

He just elected to do it at home with his wife — which, nine times out of ten, is the correct thing to do. Don’t get me wrong on that.

He also did it by struggling, ever and ever harder, to please the people around him. (Yet again.)

I heard from him again three years ago. He filled me in on his life, which had gone about the way I expected: She insisted on marriage counseling, but then, he said, she acted like she really didn’t want to be there. She “sort of slept through it,” he said. “It was really difficult to make any progress,” he said. “She tried, but she can only change so much,” he said.

Oh, and … “Things are pretty much right back the way they were,” he said. This is what broke my heart.

I would have treated this guy so much better. I realized I had been wayyy too controlling in our relationship and I had worked hard on accepting that and fixing that … and he wasn’t even there!

How many times did I hear, “This guy is unhealthy. He isn’t the right partner for you. You need to let him go.”

I even heard it from our horoscopes.

I read and I read and I read. You know, a ton of new stuff has been written about codependency since Melody Beattie’s golden flagship book back in the eighties.

I knew in my head that if I had let this guy back in my life when he asked to see me again, he would have dithered and dithered, and waffled back into the marriage one more time. (Thank you, astrology!)

I knew in my head that if we got together, I had fantastic chances of him “Yes, dear”-ing me for ten years or so and then, just as he had in his first marriage, exploding in resentment once he realized that a.) he was depressed, because b.) his needs weren’t being met, and c.) he had overgiven once again and was unhappy about it.

I don’t care how codependent you grew up, relationships don’t work unless you learn to identify your feelings and talk the hell up.

I knew all this in my head.

But still the fantasy hung on: One day, one day, he’d wise up and leave this woman and we would be blissfully happy.

And I knew better!!

After five years of nothing but study about What Was Wrong, I know better! I know I do!!

Because growth in that relationship doesn’t come from me.

It comes from him, in his own good time. And right now, it’s kind of looking like either the wife made an unlikely breakthrough … or “his own good time,” is never.

Why Can’t We Let Go?

So what’s happening is, I don’t get to live that dream. That big, larger-than-life dream where I get the man and the big writing career I used to dream of and everything …

… and then that hard, hard wakeup.

I’m having my wakeup now. Only, for the past five years, I just couldn’t wake up.

Why Can’t We Wake Up?

I joined the Patreon group of a wonderful psychology vlogger called Nu Mindframe. She says that if you had a childhood where your needs weren’t met — and this is important —

You look for them to be met doubly in adulthood.

Because your belief in a good world was destroyed too early, before you as a baby or very young child could handle the idea that the world isn’t a happy, wonderful place.

And we’re still stuck there emotionally … needing, needing, needing, needing whatever it is that we need, because we never grew forward from that place in our lives where we as abused or neglected young children had to have kindness and unconditional love, and we couldn’t handle what was happening instead.

I guess that would describe me.

Look how huge my dreams have been: Impossible relationship, prominent career as a writer. This kind of thing shows up in all our horoscopes, too … the husband and the wife are doing the same thing, only in slightly different ways.

And we women both use him to do this, because that is what codependents do. They ask to be used.

They’re soooo sure they’re no good and they’re soooo sure no one will ever love them that they mold themselves into whatever anyone wants, in exchange for love.

Which isn’t really love, because it isn’t really for them. It’s for the person they are pretending to be.

They demand everyone else think for them, and then they’re depressed and upset because everyone else is thinking for them!

But this kind of thing is what we’re all really doing, when we attach and attach to a dream of how it could be with someone or something, and we can’t let go, and every time Reality intrudes with the fact: This isn’t going to happen to you, babe, we’re shattered all over again.

In my case, on and on for five years.

Here’s Why We Can’t Quit:

When we’re born, and right up to age twenty-one — twenty one! — our brains are still forming. From birth up to age six or so, a child’s brain waves resemble those of a person under hypnosis! (Yes, really.)

A child is just soaking up every tiny little piece of evidence about what the world is like, what family is like, what people are like, what love is like.

Our tender young brains were getting down the very basics of what it is to be human: Am I good enough? Will people love me and care for me? I can’t take care of myself. If they won’t care for me, what do I have to do?

A baby or very young child is just getting down the essentials: How to calm and soothe oneself when upset. How to reach out for help. How to consider others and self. How to work in partnership with parents and siblings. How to feel and honor their own feelings, but still be socially acceptable to everyone else.

During that time, the developing brain needs calming, soothing, comforting surroundings and an atmosphere of unconditional love and support.

A child is resilient and can live through potty training, being yelled at for biting his sister, and being put to bed when he doesn’t want to go, if it’s done mostly in calming, soothing, comforting surroundings and an atmosphere of unconditional love and support. And when it isn’t, the parents acknowledge they did wrong and make amends with the child.

But we who cannot let go didn’t get to have that.

So our brains are stuck in looking for that calming, soothing, comforting environment, that ideal environment we needed in childhood in order for the emotional brain to develop right.

Only double.

Because we didn’t get it. We didn’t have that wide-eyed time of enchantment and wonder we all love to watch in children, when someone hangs Christmas lights outside and brings the child outside at dusk, and —

“Wowwww!”

When I was that age, my BPD mother was screaming and hitting me all the time.

My mother used to be angry with me because I couldn’t summon up that big, wide-eyed “Wowwww!” anymore. One year she was angry at me because I opened my birthday presents and “She didn’t act excited at all!”

Well, guess what? We’d just had another big blowout, probably because I didn’t want to pick up my room when she wanted me to pick up my room, and it ended up with the flyswatter. Again.

This scene happened over and over and over when I was a kid. I remember thinking, What do you think I should be so happy about? You just screamed and belted me because I didn’t want to pick up my room.

By the time I was eight, I literally wished I’d never been born. I used to sit in class with yet another bully hitting me on the back of my head with a pencil and wish devoutly that I could just dematerialize and fade into the walls and disappear.

I remember waking up early one morning and standing at the front door, wishing like anything I could just open it and walk off down the street and never come back. The doorknob wasn’t even quite at eye level, so I couldn’t have been more than four.

The fact that I knew at that age I would never get far, and that I would just get caught and spanked isn’t the point. The fact that by kindergarten age, I would start falling in love with the teacher, the bus driver, any adult I saw frequently who was nice to me, isn’t the point. Although it is the very, very sad truth.

The point is that, when we can’t let go, it’s because our brains are stuck there.

Not only that, but as adults, we build up what would satisfy the need for that perfect, comforting world ever and ever higher.

Little kids don’t know anything about sex. They still think the opposite sex is “yucky.” They may play house, but they know they’re too little to own one.

They watch TV, but they don’t understand yet that it’s someone’s job to write the script, and that person probably has a lucrative career that would finally make Mom and Dad happy with them: “My daughter lives in L.A.! She’s a TV writer!”

Wow, once we’re old enough, how big those dreams can get. And the problem is, we’ve convinced ourselves that we need them.

I see now that I have got to quit doing this.

I have to quit doing this with writing, and I have to quit doing this with this married guy.

If I don’t, I’m going to fail at a major life task and end up a very, very, sad, sad, old lady.

As a student astrologer, I can see that this is spelled out very clearly in the transits at the end of my life, his life, and his wife’s life. We all had horrible childhoods.

I just figured out that this is the major task all our charts keep talking about.

When you realize that psychology and astrology are telling you the same thing, that’s when all kinds of little shivers start icing down your spine.

All three of us in this triangle have this in our emotional makeup to recover from. My married man attaches to women like this and makes sure everyone learns their lessons by disappointing them and himself.



(Mark? This one grew up already. You don’t have to do that anymore!)