LIMERENCE: Online Relationships That HOOK You With Hope

when you find out the person you're falling in love with isn't into you it means it's not going to work out and it's a terrible feeling especially if you were abused or neglected when you were a kid and there's this huge temptation when you're in that unbearable kind of pain to escape ending that relationship by instead abandoning yourself your values what you want out of life your self-respect if you have childhood ptsd when you think someone's about to leave you you've probably become way too good at becoming whatever kind of person you think might not get left meaning you turn yourself into whatever it takes so they'll stay in your life maybe you pretend you're happy to be just friends even when your heart is breaking maybe you volunteer to be friends with benefits even though for you the only benefit is not having to face for a little while longer that it's not going to turn into true love or maybe when you discover that someone's just been using you to make their own life exciting that the way not to lose them you think as empty and cruddy as the relationship is is to start being just like them to use other people and see if that will make you happy too now i have a letter today from someone i'll call abby and she writes i'm twice divorced i've struggled with codependency and relationships my entire life i'm single in my mid-30s and at this point in my life i feel better about a lot of my issues however i recently hit a big setback and life through a curveball that made me question myself two months ago i traveled to europe for for training for a new job i had an amazing time for the first time in my adult life i was actually enjoying being on my own i was happy going to the trainings for work going out to dinners with colleagues seeing the sights going back to my hotel alone i didn't pine for someone to be there with me which is what the old me would have done for sure i used to think that if you don't have someone with you experiences aren't as valuable sometimes i wonder if i still feel this way but while i was there i was solo and i felt great unfortunately it didn't last long after returning to the states i kept in contact with some of my international colleagues through social media one in particular i'll call him marco was very charming and i met him during some of the training sessions for work he and i friended each other on social media and he pretty quickly moved our online conversations from friendly to flirtatious it surprised me because he was a hundred percent professional and even a bit shy when i was there in person he didn't do or say anything that even made me consider for a second that he was interested in me until we started texting after i was already back home i thought maybe he really liked me but he was just shy it was kind of sweet we texted back and forth for a while and at first it felt very exciting it was like we were teenagers eventually it went from flirtatious to outright x-rated at one point i freaked out and told him i needed to step back i told him i have a problem with getting too attached too quickly he told me he liked me but it was impossible for him to do anything serious since we were so far away obviously what he said was correct but i still started feeling an attachment to him i didn't text him for two days just getting my pencil here because sometimes i circle things that i want to come back to because i'm going to go through this letter again after i read it through to talk about some of the stuff that you described after the two days went by i made a decision to try it again just enjoy it for what it was and not have any expectations i want to say i missed them but i think i just missed the attention i was getting from him still i felt some sort of attachment and even jealousy i didn't like the thought of him seeing other women or texting other women he never said he was doing these things but i presumed he was since he said what he and i were doing was just for fun so what did i do i started dating and texting other men i figured he can't hurt me by doing something if i'm doing it too kind of like beating them to the punch as i'm writing this out i realize just how childish and unhealthy that is i was trying very hard to be casual about marco and about the other guy i went out with i'll call him local guy i've heard you talk about how people with cptsd often have a really hard time with casual dating and sex i know i do at one point i was chatting with marco and local guy and still swiping on guys through a dating app this was out of character for me and pretty overwhelming but i felt like i should do this in order to avoid getting too attached to marco i was always a serial monogamist going from one committed relationship to the next i thought maybe casual dating would be good for me anyway at one point marco said he wanted to meet he talked about coming to the united states to see me he was going to be traveling to south america for work and he said maybe we could find a way to meet we talked about plans and dates and costs etc i even offered to meet him somewhere halfway but he would never actually commit to anything there were excuses like it's too hard to find flights in my city it's not actually it's too expensive he said i don't know what my schedule will be and so on fast forward to the day before his trip he says he wouldn't be able to come and see me after all or even meet halfway it became crystal clear to me at that point that he was not invested in making an effort to meet up i was hurt and embarrassed for myself because i got my hopes up after that i pulled back from our communications things were becoming all about sexting with him it wasn't sweet like it was at the beginning i felt like a piece of pornography he was using when he was bored he never made an effort to actually get to know me his texts never asked about me or my day or personal things it was always sexual so i stopped responding to it or i would redirect the conversation now all of a sudden he tells me that he extended his trip and he will be on this side of the world for some extra weeks now he says again that he wants to see me and i'm confused because i don't see what changed from before but honestly i don't want to see him now i don't feel the same connection and i'm insulted that he thinks i'm stupid enough to believe that now all of a sudden he'll be able to find or afford flights when it was such a problem before i think he's only dangling the carrot to get me to engage in the sexual texting sessions again as insulting as it is i'm not devastated by marco's behavior anymore my real problem though anna is i'm afraid that i'm only able to deal with it because i'm dating someone else if i didn't have local guy to distract me from him i feel like i would be a shriveled up mess and taking whatever crumbs of hope marco scatters out to me i don't want to need a guy's attention in order to feel strong i want to rediscover that great feeling i had when i was alone and happy in europe how do i stop needing a backup guy in order to be strong enough to tell guys that aren't good for me to get lost i'm afraid this behavior is making me the user i don't want to be that person i don't want to become the very thing i hate should i end things with local guy we have only been on two dates but i don't want to keep seeing him if he has any real feelings for me i don't want to be a marco apologies to anyone actually named marco can you help i would be so grateful abby okay abby i think you're very insightful about this and you just haven't totally validated your perceptions about it so i can sure see how this happened let's go through your letter i'll take it line by line and give you what insight i can alright twice divorced ouch all right so you've that that's painful i know and you've struggled with codependency and relationships your whole life so codependency sounds to me like you have put up with people behaving in an addictive way or in some sort of way that was unacceptable and not present for you but you made it work for them that's what i'm thinking you mean by codependency so i'm just gonna lay that out there as the foundation of what you're saying about yourself you're single you're in your mid-30s and at this point you feel a lot better about your issues but you hit a big setback and life through a curveball that made you question yourself okay so good that you're questioning yourself that's what curveballs are good for and it sounds like you got through this without serious damage done all right you didn't say being in your mid-30s for somebody who wants to have kids there's this you know other factor you haven't mentioned that so i won't address it but if you do want to have kids and you're looking for that that husband to have the kids with i would just say that everything i'm going to say double speed it it's time to recover for real like real quick okay but you might as well recover as fast as you can all right so two months ago you traveled to europe for training you had this amazing time i relate to that i've had that experience before i didn't pine for someone to be there with me which is what the old me would have done for sure i used to think that if you don't have someone with you experiences aren't as valuable but while i was there i was solo and i felt great i relate so much to this abby i've had that experience and what i just want to point out to you is that one day you can have a relationship where you still get to have that good free feeling of being yourself and enjoying life and not being all strung out on a guy all right it's not like either you're alone and you're happy or you're pursuing a relationship and all your energy is hemorrhaging out of you it doesn't have to be that way it's happening right now we're going to talk about why okay so unfortunately it didn't last long and after returning to the states i kept in contact with some of my international colleagues through social media one in particular marco charming met during some of the training sessions friended each other on social media and he pretty quickly moved our online conversations from friendly to flirtatious okay so he's pretty good at this and he in real life is just like mr you know perfectly gentlemanly not flirting and then online he's flirtatious so i do get the feeling about this guy that this is his habit he was awfully good at it um it surprised me because he was 100 professional and even a bit shy when i was there in person he didn't do or say anything that even made me consider for a second that he was interested in me until we started texting after i was already back home okay i'm sure people have said this to you but there's nothing in your letter that tells me that you ever got to know him well enough and then given his this behavior online versus the guy you met i'm just gonna say i see a distinct possibility that he's married or in a serious relationship and having a secret life all right that's what the behavior looks like and it could explain why he was so weird about scheduling all right so let's get there um i thought maybe he really liked me but he was just shy those are famous last words of people who get really hooked on on somebody who's unavailable i thought he really liked me but he was really just shy now it's true that shy people have a hard time showing they're interested sometimes and there are many cases where eventually you know they came out of their shell and they became available so we cannot write that off entirely but i'm just saying it's famous last words of people who go for unavailable people that i thought maybe he really liked me but he was just shy so it was kind of sweet i can see you like trying to put together it's like gee now that we're online he's so into me and he didn't act like it at all in person uh and you were trying to like reconcile in your mind that cognitive dissonance like how could those two people be the same but that's what tells me he has kind of a secret life uh modus operandi here it's a secret life and one thing that online communication lets us do is you can just sort of you can just sort of put out feelers and see who responds so okay just hypothetically i know you're out of that situation now so you're safe for me to just kind of like i'm gonna say out loud what i'm sure you're worried about but you know does he have like five women he does this with think how easy it would be to do this where you have like contact information for people at a conference and you can just email them with just you know hey very nice to meet you we should stay in touch linkedin blah blah blah and then depending on the way the person replies you can just keep testing the water a little bit more and and see who will tolerate slightly flirtatious stuff and it sounds like it like you know it happened pretty fast but it happened through a series of messages where it was ratcheting it up ratcheting up and ratcheting up and the minute a woman doesn't reply is the signal it's like okay not getting you're not gonna it's not gonna happen but if you you know play the odds on a whole bunch of people somebody's gonna bite and you know who it's gonna be it's gonna be somebody who was who had a hard childhood who has a talent for overlooking the fact that they're dealing with an unavailable person who's kind of using them and who can keep finding and attaching and getting into things situations that are exciting for the other person so all right we'll go a little deeper into that but using someone to make your life exciting that's what i think we got here i thought maybe he really liked me but he was just shy it was kind of sweet we texted back and forth for a while and at first it felt very exciting yes it was like we were teenagers okay that's high this is like a drug now it's great eventually it went from flirtatious to outright x-rated at one point i freaked out and told him i needed to step back he told me he liked me but it was impossible for him to do anything serious since we were so far away and i'm just gonna say i have a feeling it was impossible for him to do anything serious even if he lived next door so obviously you say abby what he said was correct but i still started feeling an attachment to him i didn't text him for two days okay there's where your cpta cptsd just hijacked your thinking so you started to feel attachment when somebody was just starting to you know who barely knew you was talking in an x-rated manner to you and then you didn't text him for two days so the confusion enters in right that's what happens with cptsd you're like i have feelings for him i can't reconcile that with this like shitty behavior that he's giving me and uh i know i'll just attach and that's what we do the word crap fit we talk about it in so many videos that's the word i made up for the way we're so good at fitting ourselves to unacceptable situations and people because you're like attaching you're ready for like a love bond you're ready to have a committed relationship with somebody and be in love and that's what's activating in you and you know what that's not your fault that's really natural this guy it i could see like perhaps he he knows people who are just like oh yeah i just want to say stuff online maybe that's possible and legit but i'm i'm quite confident you didn't give him signals that you are one of those people you're saying i get too attached so at this point he flips into somebody who's not just like having fun with you he's manipulating you although he was straightforward and said it can't it can be nothing serious and maybe he spared your feelings by saying it's because of the distance but you started to feel an attachment to him after two days so he should have seen red flags at this point but he's not writing to me so i'm not going to respond to that i'm just like i think it's pretty obvious that you were kind of serious about it you thought this was serious and for anybody to continue with somebody who's showing signs that they think it's serious when they themselves are not serious oh that's hurt that's hurtful that's using them that's taking advantage and i think we're going to talk about that right when we talk about the local guy all right so after the two days went by i made a decision to try again there's your cptsd again it's like somehow i feel dirty i feel gross i feel like this guy's using me i know i'll try again i'm not making fun of you i just like i know this so well it's like your mind can kind of crap fit and just go wait a second i think if i try again this could be different and here is where you abandoned yourself you said i'll just enjoy it for what it is and not have any expectations all right so this is one of my least favorite things about contemporary culture is that there's some kind of premium place i'm not having expectations it becomes something that we become ashamed of having and i just want to tell you abby i'm going to encourage you to get very in touch with your expectations and let them be real to you and let yourself stand up for them if your expectations are that somebody's like behaving in a sexual manner towards you if you expect them to have that indicate that they are seriously interested in you then have that expectation you're going to have to have corresponding boundaries that include all kinds of things like communication and a willingness to walk away but the expectations can be front and center about who you are and what you want and what you're looking for you'd be so surprised when you wear your expectations on your sleeve i want a real romance you know i want somebody who loves me you'd be surprised if you own it and it's out there how much that can show up for you but when you disown it like this and say oh i just won't have expectations that's how i'll resolve this problem well then what you get is somebody who does not fulfill your expectations so you say i want to say i missed him but i think i just missed the attention i was getting from him i don't know having a crush on somebody or beginning to fall in love that part's normal that part's normal it's just that your cptsd was able to keep kind of staying in that mode with somebody who just kept sending you these awful signals that it's not going to work out all right he said i didn't like the thought of him seeing other women oh yeah and you became even jealous you felt attachment jealousy and you didn't like the thought of him seeing other women or texting other women so here your cpts cptsd has now like created this fantasy version where you guys are together in some way and this would be you know a betrayal of you i have a feeling though that you might have been the other woman or one of several all right so just backing that up that jealousy feeling in you one of the things about when somebody is pressuring or manipulating you to to be in one of these kind of fake relationships is that you will either accept pressure for them or pressure yourself without them having to say a word to believe that your jealousy is somehow a problem but your jealousy is part of your natural expectation of a monogamous relationship that's where it comes from it just comes from that's what you want you want to be with somebody who doesn't see other people you get to want that and in fact you get to have that but you but but the path to having that means not having stuff like this so we'll get there he never said he was doing those things seeing other women but i presumed he was since he said what he and i were doing was just for fun yeah fun for who not for you okay painful it's not funny it's fun it's fun you know just enjoy it for what it is right but actually it's just like the r the proof is in how do you actually feel you're miserable you're feeling torn up you're having trouble staying stable around it and so i can't say enough that as much as you spent your childhood learning to deny what your intuition and your feelings were telling you just look at how you feel how do you feel in in this relationship terrible all right terrible embarrassed you know all these adjectives come out missing oh it's just so sad so what did i do says abby i started dating and texting other men so when you say dating and texting um something tells me it was of that sort of like you know not actual sincere variety where it's just to get some sexting going and you said i figured he can't hurt me by doing something if i'm doing it too well that's just silly all right and you got that too you said you thought you'd beat him to the punch so just like punch yourself that doesn't keep you from being punched as i'm writing this out i realize just how childish and unhealthy that is so good abby good so you see your wisdom is right there it's right there you're kind of like trying not to see it right now but yes you see you do see it you cannot avoid getting hurt by somebody by hurting yourself and other people that's not how it works there is there's a part of you that has a pretty clear idea of what you want in a relationship and it hurts what hurts is not standing up for it not allowing yourself to own that that's what you want settling for less trying to contort yourself and get rid of all your values and your needs just to keep keep somebody from leaving that hurts and you'd be surprised sometimes you know every relationship that ends if it's given that we now know it was destined to end even a very special relationship a lot of the pain is about what we had hoped it would be what we thought it was what we hoped it would become and we lose that and we grieve that and we come back to what is and what is is the relationship is what it is and this one is already you know nothing we already know so you can face that you can actually handle what is the extra grief that comes from losing what you hoped it would be see this is where the cptsd and limerence which is the infatuation obsession with something impossible that so many of us have done that kicks in when we feel like we can't accept we cannot accept the loss of the dream but it feels really good i'm just telling you to come back to reality when you've been in a dream it it's sad to lose the dream but it passes much more quickly than you think and the feeling that's left which i think we all fear it's going to be like sitting there completely empty inside and miserable the feeling that's going to be left will be like ah truth ah back with my feet on the ground okay okay let me let me get on with my life here let me take care of myself there's the truth and reality have a very good sweet natural feeling to them that your body likes your brain likes it your cptsd will suddenly like calm down because you're in reality cptsd thrives when you're deceiving yourself so this is so good what you did okay so then you said i was trying very hard to be casual about marco and about the other guy i went out with yeah there it is that fake ideal i should be casual casual meaning yeah no expectations sex for everybody whatever and you said i've heard you talk about how people with cptsd often have a real a really hard time with casual dating and sex so i want to make a huge distinction casual dating means i don't know you know you go have lunch with somebody and it's not like you're pursuing a relationship or doing a big courtship or anything you're just getting to know them maybe slowly okay that's what casual dating is casual sex is something different that means sex without any kind of strings attached no relationship attached no talk of exclusivity um maybe you don't know each other at all maybe it happened just after swiping that afternoon and you know that is casual sex so casual dating is actually perfectly good because what i'm always trying to say is if what you want is a solid committed relationship what dating is for is to get to know people to see if they might be the one and if you think they might be the one to then get closer to them so intimacy would be way down the line on that trajectory there dating is just getting to know somebody and seeing if you think that they match what you really want and if you haven't taken my dating course yet abby i hope you will the whole course starts with i get people to like write it down what would be your ideal person what would be your ideal life with that person like it begins with not just getting in touch with that but allowing yourself to want that i i have yet to meet a person with cptsd who hasn't really dumbed down the thing that they really want in their life because of you know you just get so used to not getting what you want you don't are you worried it'll be foolish to want more than you get we don't always get what we want but we do a lot better when we can be clear what we want and not just keep settling for whatever happens to come along okay so casual dating is fine to get to know somebody casual sex is a different thing and you've already demonstrated like even when the sex happens online and it's not even like a real life thing your attachment mechanism moves forward okay so what is cptsd well for most of us it's an attachment wound we don't attach quite right it goes too fast it can't happen we lunge in we grab on we push away you know our our attachment mechanism is is like a dog you get from the pound right you know it's very needy it bites you and it's very anxious and that's the attachment wound so when we're healing cptsd we're healing that attachment wound along with it and then when it does come time to meet somebody and begin to attach the ideal way to attach i mean we're never going to be perfect but a better way to attach would be just kind of like in a gradual ramp up rather than a i like somebody they like me bam you know i'm planning the wedding you don't want to do that that's that leads to pain that's where that feeling of embarrassment comes from it's just kind of like oh gosh i was out of touch with reality so you just a slow ramp is what dating looks like when you're doing it kind of with your whole awareness and not trauma you know governing it and going oh my gosh you better like grab on and make this work or you're going to be alone again and being alone is so terrible so that's your that's your ptsd talking so sometimes you have to use a structured model that's what my dating course is if anybody wants to take it it's i'll put a link to it down in the description but you date on a structured plan so that you have guardrails so that even when your mind is like oh i don't even care anymore i just want to rush into this thing you've just made yourself a couple of guard rails about like but i'm not going to because i i have a plan about how often i'm going to see somebody you know for the first several months and where i've decided that intimacy can happen and when i feel that it's too early right when that's decided in advance it's a lot easier to stick with it rather than just oh i don't know whenever it happens so if you can get to know somebody for a while before any kind of intimacy happens before engaging that attachment part of you you're going to find out a lot about them like you know maybe they're a jerk or maybe you're incompatible or maybe they're married you know like okay abby says at one point i was chatting with marco and local guy and still swiping on guys through a dating app and this was out of character for me and pretty overwhelming red flag when you go out of character for yourself and not in a good way that's a red flag that someone is not the one just saying okay when you see yourself go out of character in a bad way they are not the one when you see yourself stepping up um becoming a better version of yourself for them it's a sign it's not a guarantee but it's a sign that this could be there could be something here okay look for it's always like that look at where what which situations make you feel nauseous about yourself which situations make you feel like wow i'm doing better pay attention to that feeling and how other people kind of what that gut feeling is going on the thing about cptsd is our gut feelings are not always reliable because they tell us stuff like rush in he loves you so that feels like it's coming from your gut too but seriously pay attention to that negative feedback that you're getting from yourself but you felt like you should keep dating like this swiping dating multiple guys to avoid getting too attached to marco okay so i just wanted to show you a tell you an alternative to just like casually you know or i don't know dating i don't think you're talking about dating you're talking about like hooking up casual hookups as a way to not get attached to somebody you're really into here's another approach boundaries boundaries go slow then you won't get attached and then you also won't get all hurt and strung out and get your that bright luminous part of you shut down the part that makes you attractive to somebody who is interested in a relationship to you a relationship with you when they encount you know healthy people when they're encountering people who just seem kind of run down and freaked out about all the people they're kind of dating it's not attractive i'm just saying on a practical level what is attractive is someone who knows herself someone who has a self-possession i want to say the word self-possessed not possessed by anybody else's agenda not abandoning herself but just kind of knows who she is and allows another person to get to know her but isn't is neither like chasing or manipulating or changing herself to make that happen okay you are good enough to allow people to get to know you all right trust me you are good enough you don't have to do all this other stuff i was always a serial monogamist and i was going from one committed relationship to the next so yes some of that is necessary at the early part but you're in your early 30s i feel like you have a longing for the real love thing now so i would say change your goal from serial monogamist to monogamous with the one person who you really want to be with and you don't have to get into a bunch of committed relationships before that you can just date like coffee dinner like don't get too involved until you meet the person who you really think and you and a person with cptsd like with what you have or what i have you can't make that call like in two dates like give yourself a much longer time than you think i won't put a time in front of you i went a very long time all right just dating my now husband and it worked really well for us we knew each other really really well and it took three years and then we were engaged and then another two years later we were married and then some of you know the story then i kept thinking okay i'm done now everything's all resolved but of course as a person with cptsd i still had all kinds of things to work out and luckily i was with a good guy who loved me and we had you know a strong relationship where my trauma stuff could come up and the marriage would hold and he would still love me and stay with me so i i'm what i'm understanding from you is you would like something along those lines so i'm just saying just serial monogamist is what your past was now you know now you can just be selective be selective and be selective through dating like real dating real dating not getting all into a relationship or necessarily intimate with anybody okay because if you attach it's all over you right you get all attached and then next thing you know no matter how they treat you your cptsd is going to try to make the relationship last just saying okay if you're like me if you're if you have what i used to have all right anyway at one point marco said he wanted to meet he talked about coming to the u.s to see me he was going to be traveling to south america for work and he said maybe we could find a way to meet and we talked about plans and dates and costs and you even offered to meet him halfway but he would never actually commit to anything there were excuses like it's too hard to find flights to your city which it wasn't so right there when he made up some that's just baloney you know you live in some major city i take it and of course he can get flights it's not too hard so basically there was i'm i'm just gonna say i i think there's two things that it would be one is he has a partner or wife and possibly she was going to be on the trip and it became impossible or somebody who knows his wife was going to be on the trip and it would become impossible for him to sneak away and see you right that's what would justify it or he just has this kind of thing going a sort of kink where it's totally exciting for him to have an affair online but he really is not interested in anything in person that that the the feelings he have don't exist on the real plane and cannot and he already knows that about himself so i would say one or the other and either way he's like poisoned the man is poison all right so good that he didn't come see you all right this is he's he's like a walking heartbreak for you there he is okay i see him coming go back marco stay away abby's trying to have a real life here okay so then you said fast forward to the day before his trip and he said he wouldn't be able to come and see you after all or even meet halfway and you say it became crystal clear that at that point he wasn't invested in making an effort to meet up no and you were hurt and you were embarrassed because you got your hopes up yeah okay fair enough after that you pulled back from communications things were becoming all about sexting with him it wasn't sweet like it was in the beginning you felt like a piece of pornography he was using when he was bored and you know i thought about what you said there and i tend to think that's that is what he was doing and it's so understandable that you didn't understand that at first like why would you right he was trying to create carrots like just enough to keep you involved and doing sexy texts with him and that's how he did it right he had to keep convincing you that there was hope that in real life this could work out so that you would so that you wouldn't pull away when you pulled away you know he started started up again all of a sudden he extends his trip and says he'll be on that side of the world you doubt it you think maybe he's not even maybe that's not even true and i think you're right i don't know whether it's true so you say you're confused because you don't see what changed from before that's right he's hiding from you what changed if he was seriously interested in you you would have a reason you could understand but honestly you don't want to see him now yay abby yay everybody down in the comments give abby some love and some encouragement yeah don't see him now i don't feel the same connection and i'm insulted that he thinks i'm stupid enough to believe that now all of a sudden he'll be able to find or afford flights when it's such a problem before and you said i think he's only dangling the carrot to get me to engage in sexual texting again yay abby's intuition you're seeing it you're seeing it uh i think you're probably right and i'm just proud of you you can see it and he's still trying to throw confusion on you but you did you just stay confused no you wrote in you're participating here you're letting the viewers here benefit from your experience you know so that every i mean really abby you sharing this letter here countless people are going to hear this and they're going to have a better idea how to like see this coming and not get as hurt as you have been and i and you're going to recover from this and you're going to be able to do so much better all right so then you said as insulting as it is i'm not devastated by his behavior anymore but the real problem is i'm afraid that i'm only able to deal with it because i'm dating someone else yeah so it's a well-known thing right that's one way to get over a heartache is to involve yourself with somebody else and you haven't been very specific here but it sounds like it's kind of a yucky sleazy arrangement with local guy you're not interested he's a distraction so you fear you said yeah if i yeah i feel like i would be a shriveled up mess and taking whatever crumbs of hope marco was giving you so yeah you're basically borrowing from somebody else's life so that you don't have to deal with your life and i don't see any way that that comes out good i'll tell you again you can face the pain of the loss of marco and you can also feel proud of yourself for stepping back and walking away and for just being able to perceive like this isn't what you're looking for no harm done no harm done okay you got out of it you got wiser you got clearer about what you wanted and you can keep going with that you know so now there's this one little hang up is that you've brought this guy in as a as a crutch as an emotional crutch because you think you can't deal with facing that delicious fresh air of reality but you can you can but it doesn't feel good does it and it just has a smell like yesterday's uh dirty dishes right you don't want to have that all right so i don't want to need a guy's attention in order to feel strong that's a good goal but i'll also tell you that it's okay and it's human to feel stronger for a while when you're kind of falling for somebody that's why it's so fun okay but then it's also strong to go oh wait this isn't the one and then carry on carry on into your future i want to rediscover that great feeling i had when i was alone and happy in europe how do i stop needing a backup guy in order to be strong enough to tell guys that aren't good for me to get lost you can um and actually local guy i i hope you're not talking about him because i don't i it doesn't sound like he's done anything bad to you because you said i'm afraid this behavior is making me the user and it's like abby yeah it is it is actually so we're going to look at this in a different light of how do you how do you make good on this all right i don't want to be that person i don't want to become the very thing i hate should i end things with local guy yes you say we've only been on two dates but i don't want to keep seeing him if he has any real feelings for me well i can't think of a better reason to stop seeing somebody than that you don't want them to have feelings for you isn't that weird how it came to that but it did i don't want him to have real feelings for me so it's only been two dates and there's a way to do this that's as kind as can be and it doesn't matter what his motives were you can just be as kind as possible to him and you know you met him online and that's totally acceptable to stop seeing somebody after two or three dates or any amount of dates you can you can leave a relationship no matter how long it's been going on but after in those early stages you just say super kindly um if they call you again you can call them proactively but after two dates i just say well if he asks you to go out again or text you you can say you know what local guy you're awesome you're really great i just kind of have gotten clear in myself i feel like this isn't the relationship for me but thank you so much for the time we spent i wish you the best and that's what you do just honor him set him free to go get the kind of relationship where he gets appreciated for being him you get to have some time to recover now rather than trying to fix your wounds by plugging in some other guy you get to just heal you get to heal and work on your cptsd recovery and um and get clearer about what you want so that you can start to change how you operate what are your boundaries what is the reason to go on a date with somebody what is a reason to say no to somebody so yeah i i cover all those steps in my dating course the link is down below if you want to look at it but this is your chance this is a beautiful time in your life to get clear about what you want and we can just thank even marco for helping you get clearer about that okay if any of you watching this think that your childhood trauma may have affected the way that you choose partners and it's affected your relationship life i have a quiz down below the dating quiz and you might want to take that and check the common symptoms that show up in people who have been through trauma you might find out that the symptoms you're experiencing are really normal for people who have been through what you've been through and if you like this topic i've got a video lined up for you about getting abandoned why does it keep happening and that video is right here and i will see you very soon [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 101,419

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Id: vKuqfsvP724

Length: 40min 30sec (2430 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021