"first world" type problem but counselling isn't doing much and I'm not coping.

[higgyhog]

It is quite true that my problem called for "the worlds smallest violin" as someone posted when I talked about it just before Christmas. Somehow it has completely knocked me sideways and even after 7 weeks of counselling (session 8 tomorrow) I'm feeling pretty terrible.

Long story cut very short, I know I don't deserve any sympathy for this bit. My lover and best friend of 8 years had been seeing another woman for 3 years, nearly 10 years younger than me, very beautiful.
He lied and lied about where he was and what he was doing. He bought her lovely presents and took her away for weekends, and always bought me a crappy book for Christmas and said he could not go away with me. We were supposed to meet for a goodbye lunch and she came along with him, slagged me off and made me feel terrible, they told me they were in love and she said he would be dumping his wife for her and they would live happily ever after.

I could have coped with the end of the relationship, but I seem to have been traumatised by the way it happened and having to meet her when I'd already said I would not. He lied to her about me too.

Logical me would be happy to be rid of him. Even emotional me sees that the man I thought I knew was never there. I should feel better now but I don't. I'm not functioning at work, spend my days crying at my desk. A huge bit of me wants him back or just to see him or something, but I know that is utterly stupid, and that as he is 72 in April there is really no point, he can't offer me anything.

Instead of feeling better I'm simply thinking all my life is crap, though I have many nice things going on, learning a new skill, 3 nice holidays to look forward to, maybe a bit of a bleak social life but there are things I can do about that.

The last 12 months was pretty grim, I lost an old friend to cancer, my mother died, we were burgled ( lots of sentimental stuff taken) and now I just don't seem to be able to shake this off. In theory I have made progress, my real brain acknowledges everything that people have told me but it still hurts. I feel totally worthless. He seems to have trashed m memories of some happy times by doing exactly the same things with her. He was going to see me in march and told me about a particular fantasy. She gloated and told me that they did that "all the time" . I'm a strong person usually , and mature in years, but I'm starting to think I need more than the counselling, but I'm not sure what to do. we both knew our relationship was very unusual, and went through some bad patches but I always thought he would be my friend, but he never was in the first place.

Today I'm sitting at my desk again (the only one who works til 5 in my office) crying. Sorely tempted to pick up the phone and call his wife, but I know he would retaliate, and feeling that this hellish misery will never end. Thats it.

A total arse turned out to be a total arse. Headline news.

More importantly you need to work out why you accepted the crumbs of a relationship, what's actually going on for you, and what you are actually processing. That'll take longer than 7 sessions.

Bubblegumgal - it's not necessarily like that, many counselling/psychotherapy training courses are MSc's and very in-depth and some psychology doctorates are very research based and only cover CBT (ie the university of bath one).

It's an absolute minefield finding therapy sometimes because it can be so confusing for people!

I will be back later today, thank you for all the responses so far. The counsellor picked up on my desire for safety and in essence I have come to the conclusion that after being ousted to an extent in my parents affections when my brother was born I have always looked for a second relationship to feel safe. The fact that he is 10 years older than me and has other disadvantages (but isn't bad looking and is reasonable company) simply made him more attractive to me because I felt he would always be there for me. I have decided to make today's counselling the last for a while as picking the scab every week makes it hurt more.

higgy could you talk to the counsellor about that today - the wanting to stop because it feels worse?

Eight sessions in it might well do because you won’t yet feel safe enough there for it to be an experience of being looked after rather than “picking the scab”. It’s good you’ve worked out some possible reasons for what happened, but it’s often not the ‘knowing why’ that helps you change, it’s the opportunity to have a different experience with the therapist. But that takes a hell of a lot longer than eight weeks!

Not that therapy is compulsory. Time will help you feel better about this one, but if you find yourself veering towards another similar relationship (or if that’s already a pattern) then in depth therapy could help you change that.

You’re hurting because you, the OW, has been dumped because he’s got another OW. Get a grip and get some morals.

You've been through a lot, you could have complex ptsd (from a build up of a sequence of stressful events) trauma release therapies like EMDR or Havening could help

Honestly. You will need years of therapy. A year at least. Don’t think of it as picking at the scab. You’ve only just started and he is the red herring in all of this

I will have a talk to the counsellor about it this afternoon. The difficulty is understanding why I feel this way. if he had just finished it with me on some pretext before i found out the full picture then i would not have been that troubled, especially as i'm sure the odd birthday and Christmas messages etc. would have been exchanged and I would not have felt hurt and slighted. The thought of him shouting and jabbing his finger at me and her cool insults, with the two of them preening and mirroring each other and talking about love cut me to the bone. But yes, it might not be that which is troubling me so much, it might be all the other things too. I've been battling with the health authority concerning a complaint about my mother's care before she died and all the other stuff too.

Hope it goes well this afternoon higgy

Google schema therapy. Someone on here suggested it to me and I have learnt a lot. From what I understand, if we are abandoned as children we go through life recreating this abandonment with lovers. We set ourselves up to repeat the same old sorry process time after time, actively choosing men who are unavailable just like our fathers and mothers.

I hope you get the help you need. x

Op why are you still in contact with him at all? He is the most awful person judging from the last threads. ( Is this the same woman he wanted you to have a threesome with? ) she seems as nasty as him. Stay away from him. Seriously.

I'm not still in contact with him, though I do keep reading his emails and finding him in photos on Facebook, which of course does me no good at all. I talked with my counsellor today and decided that as I have strategies in place for all my other problems and need to start work on them we will take a break. I will return later if i need to. The feeling is that J doesn't love his wife, the ow or me, but clearly loves himself a lot. I understand that and also that o matter how hard I try I will never be able to know everything that was going on, he suggested that I think of J as being similar to an alcoholic, impossible to fathom because of what he is. He also wondered whether I'm transferring some of my feelings from my other problems to this. So I will see how flying solo goes, I think I have more insight, and thank you for the hand holding and constructive comments.

Do you think you could delete the emails? What purpose are they serving for you now?

I’d get rid of Facebook too but if you think you can’t, have you got a plan for what you will do instead of looking for photos of him when the urge strikes?

He might as well be unfathomable because understanding him won’t get you anywhere, it’s yourself you need to focus on now

I've made that email account more difficult to access, and won't look at it again apart from new emails, that I view on my phone. Counsellor said to put it all on a memory stick and hide it somewhere difficult to get to , then delete, but I'll try the easier option first. There is no more on facebook, he isn't on it and it is only photographs from his children and friends pages that show him - smiling broadly with his arm around his wife (!). Today is a new day I'm telling myself, and i really want to move one step further away from him. I agreed with counsellor to book some more appointments when I've tackled, or started to tackle, the other issues surrounding my brother and other family members, and some sort of constructive life outside work that doesn't involve nefarious activities.

Have you read about narcissistic abuse. And npd I don’t want to armchair diagnose, but it might be worth looking at.
Because it’s a very different type of recovery from any normal relationship

Yes, TATM, I've read a lot about it in recent weeks, there is one of the H.G. Tudor articles "One more chance" here that really shocked me with its reality, exactly what was going on for years with promises of all the things I wanted that were never delivered. There were times when he twisted situations against me to make me feel I was in the wrong time and time again. Although in this last case he said he could not deny responsibility there was excuse after excuse, including trying to make me feel small and ridiculous because I had cared about him. He tried to make out I was lying about not having loved him ( maybe I did for very small periods of time, but he always wanted to convey that he loved me). There is masses and masses of triangulation with new OW. Strangely he sent me the script of something he had written, I could not understand that as normally ( and understandably ) he was quite private about work projects. There are two characters in the draft called J (male) and A (female) J is flagged as being a role for a very well known actor of a certain age. The whole of the romance seems to have certain tie ins to him and OW2 and spookily there is a line in the script " I know you better than anyone on the planet, and you know me better than anyone" which appears with exactly the same wording in one of her emails to me ( except that the "you" is "he" ), so presumably he sent the script to both of us (?) at the same time?
I have found loads of lies in his old emails including lots of references to weekends with the rambling club, which were irrelevant to me as we did not meet at weekends but indicate when he was away with her.
Today I feel very calm, I don't want to spend more time dredging through this and it upset me to think I had to pay substantial amounts for the counselling because of how he had behaved to me.
I went to my new evening class later yesterday evening, I'm making real progress learning something new and that helps. I've made a sort of affirmation out of the "alcoholic " comparison which is keeping my mind off it today too. In view of counsellors advice also putting some practical steps in place to improve my other difficult areas.

An update for everyone who helped me. I'm feeling a bit better this week, don't think about him as much but she is harder to get out of mind (smugness upset me).I made the email hard to get at and don't look at my copious notes about the relationship so much. I'm slowly realising I didn't know him that well at all, so really not that much to miss. I accidentally went to a saved photo today when I was looking for something else, it made me feel afraid and sick. I think I'll get there in the end.

It really good to hear you are starting to devote less of your precious energy and emotions on this ancient waste of air.