How to stop feeling a grudge?

[very-confused-girl]

Hello everybody,

 

recently I have found out something strange about myself. I do generally analyze my emotions quite a lot and what I realized just now, freaks me out a little bit.

 

When I was 18 I had a boyfriend and one day I got very hurt by him. He went to celebrate his friend´s birthday to a gay club, because the friend was gay. Because my ex-boyfriend was very loveable, probably even to guys (gay guys), they were trying to hit on him. He got very frustrated and when he was leaving the club, he felt sick and wanted to prove himself of being a man and as he was walking away a prostutite stopped him. He was like in another world, couldnt think properly. They went to a toilet of some bar and before anything happened, he had escaped crying and realizing that he almost cheated on me! Thats what he told me, I mean I did trust him it was the case and that he did not cheat on me, thats not the issue here. The fact is that it hurt me anyway knowing that he almost cheated and I was not able to vent it out but I kept it inside and started to develop hate against him and in fact I fell out of love very quickly.

 

With my second boyfriend something similar happened - he told me something insensitive and from this day my emotional involvement to him dropped a big time.

 

Now I am finally 23 and have been for 1,5 years in a relationship with a great man, who truly loves me and cares for me. When I had my birthday he even prepared a whole birthday party for me with cake, candles, he gave me beautiful card and sang a song! It was very cute and nobody has ever prepared me such a great birthparty, it was really from the heart. He tells me 5 times a day (really!) that he loves me, and it does not sound like cliche, it is really honest. When I was sick he drove to my place and brought me a pot with hot tea in it . Not very practical, because the tea got spilt all over the car on the way, but cute! He claims I am the only girl he can imagine having kids with. He is already 35 so he has time to think this way

 

He is extremely attentive but recently we started having some fights. He was very stressed because of his work and his ex-girlfriend started invading our relationship in the form of coming to his place while I was there - it happened twice. I took it probably a bit too serious and told him that if she was coming again, I was going to leave him. I wanted him to stop talking to this girl immediately but he is a nice person and does not want to hurt anybodys feeling therefore he has hard time telling her to back off. He always tells her to back of in a nice way but she doesnt seem to get it. Anyway it happened only twice, it is not a big deal the problem is how I deal with it!

 

But my problem is that I started to feel this very bed feeling again. Something like resent, very strange feeling like that I was hurt by my boyfriend therefore he would deserve to be hurt too, very evil thoughts. I cant get them out of my head and about a week ago I woke up and was not even sure whether I still loved him. I reduced contact with him, he started being worried what was going on but I could always made it like nothing was on.

 

The thing is that I can very easily start loosing emotions for somebody straightaway after he hurts me. I am trying to fight this, but seems like I cant influence it. I dont want it, I want to be with him, I want to love him, I probably love him very much but I dont know why I am so strickt and have such a hard time forgiving somebody and gettin over problems. It is almost like once I am hurt, I start to think about it more, reliving the experience in my mind and I am somehow breeding the anger inside of me.

 

Maybe it comes from my childhood I was hurt verbally and emotionally abused by my mom a big time and I developed way how to deal with it - I have blocked myself of her but the downside was, that the "wall" that I created was made of my feelings for her. It always reduced my love to her.

 

Whenever I had a boyfriend, I was expecting very much from him. I expected my relationship to represent my "home" a bit. Like some peace that I didnt have at home. And I was always very much in love with my boyfriends at the beginning of each relationship but when we started having some missunderstandings and arguments (which is something that to some extent is present in every relationship), it was almost like I started freaking out that it doesnt fit into my imagination of perfect relationship anymore and part of me gave the relationship up.

 

I mean this is quite serious I start being worried about my feelings, I dont want to loose him and I dont want to hold grudge against somebody for that long. The thing is that I talked to my boyfriend about being hurt by his ex-gf coming to his flat. He understood and said he was gonna do his best to avoid it for future, he is even moving from his flat to another. Whatever the issue is or was with my boyfriends the things is that once I feel hurt, I start holding a big grudge against my boyfriend.

 

Has anybody experience the same or similar?

 

Any advice appreciated!! Thank you for listening...

[kanga]

Wow. That's a heavy topic. I'm not a grudge holder. I either talk it through or get over it and move it. Holding on to grudges just causes me more drama than necessary.

 

However, it sounds like there's a lot of stuff happening for you. I'd suggest you might want to work through some of these issues with a counselor or other professional, especially since you mention abuse as a child.

[emopunk]

I was wondering if you weregoing to repost this or not...

 

I would say consider what kanga said very carefully. That is something that most likely none of us is qualified to help with. All we can offer are opinions... but those might be more damaging than helpful.

 

Although I will ask this... is it possible that you hold a grudge and are so easily upset because you feel that the relationship is not "perfect?"

[very-confused-girl]

I would also prefer not to a "grudge-holder" but the thing is that I cant influence it. I think that party the problem is that I am always very excited at the beginning of every relationship and once some problems happen I sort of "give the relationship up". Almost like that I am thinking to myself "if problems started, its never gonna be great again, how it was at the beginning".

 

And especially if the problem that occurs in my relationship is caused by my boyfriend doing something bad or inappropriate, that is what can cause this big grudge then.

 

I remember that he told me something insensitive at the beginning of our relationship, something like that in some ways his ex was more charming than me. I probably told him couple of insensitive things too, which maybe upset him at that time, but than he forgot about them. But the thing is that I REMEMBER what he said about year and a half ago, CANT FORGIVE, when I am by myself I am still reliving in my mind the moment when he said it and everytime I think of it I feel the strange feeling of grudge. Even that it is something that happened long time ago, I cant get over it.

 

My problem can have something to do with my idea of having a perfect relationship. The thing is that I am not the "love addict type of person" who has every month new partner because he/she cant be emotionally stable with one partner for a long time. I know that I want to stay with him, I know that arguments and missunderstandings are part of the relationship but maybe I am afraid that ONCE PEOPLE START HAVING ARGUMENTS, they gonna HAVE THEM FOREVER, therefore I crave for having for a perfect relationship without arguments . Its almost like I cant deal with reality of life or something like that.

 

Once we start fighting, suddenly the imagination of possible and potential break-up becomes realistic and I start freaking out and giving the relationship up.

 

And as I said especially if the problem is "caused" somehow by my boyfriend than I hold the grudge against him and thats probably the form of me "giving the relationship up".

 

I know it is very hard for me to explain this to you but to give you an example. With my previous boyfriend - he said something insensitive to me, that was insensitive in my view, maybe lots of girls wouldnt get hurt by it - he was opening a bottle of wine when we were together and he had trouble doing it so I offered a help and his ego felt a bit funny, like he thought I was doubting his ability to open wine and said to me: "Do you think you are the first girls I am opening bottle of wine with?"

 

And this really hurt me and it was something I could never forget and this particular sentence caused that my feelings for him really started reducing and thats exactly what I dont want in my current relationship.

 

I want to get over things easily, but dont know how!

[kanga]

Hmm...yeah, I don't really understand your beef with the comment about opening the wine. I can understand being taken aback at first. But there are just too many other things in life to get hung up over than the intent and meaning and implication of certain things said.

 

It sounds like you take some things too personally, when they are clearly not meant as attacks against you. How to get over that? I think it requires a bit of self-reflection and understanding about what really matters in life.

 

I'll repeat my early advice. No one here is going to be able to just write a few magic words and make you change the way you think and react to others. It sounds like it's something much more complicated than that. There are a lot of books you can try to read (My perfectionistic tendencies have been greatly reduced thanks to "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff."), and there are lots of professional counselors and life coaches that are better equipped to help you figure out how you can get past this.

 

I wish you best.

[Stylin22]

The abusive mom...Been there, done that, got the t-shirt...I don't think you are a grudge-holder, I think you are a hurt person who needs to understand that cause you have a PATTERN of hurt doesn't mean that this guy will hurt you again. Relationship hurts are typical, they are growing pains of sorts. But, if you come from chaos, and you are hurt from those who should love you the most, you see hurt differently. Self-defense mechanism? The expectations. Whether they start out like that or you put them in there now, you are going to continue to do this and they will get higher. Thousands of girls here at this forum are going "5 TIMES A DAY????!!!!!"

 

Rleationships have their ups and downs. I had to understand that ALL of them do. There is no perfect model of how it's done. There are just things that you can do to make it better...Stop looking for what could be and appreciate what is now...

 

Rejection is a theme here and you are so looking not to be rejected again, so you are rejecting them. I did this too, I should have with my mom. This is how we learn to survive. You should see a counselor and take care of this if you really think this a good relationship for you. Actually, not even that, if you want to be truely happy. If there's an IM type think on this site, throw me on it, I wouldn't mind being of help if I can....good luck and remember, the absolute toughest thing in life is taking on ourselves. Ourself is all we have ever known....

[emopunk]

Stylin hit it, I think. You're trying to save yourself the hurt of rejection... but it's causing you hurt just the same. There are demons to face if you're to break this cycle. Unless you do break it, you'll never be trully happy because you'll always be looking for ways to protect yourself. No training/conditioning/traits are ever so well embedded in your mind that they cannot be changed. You just have to identify the cause of the problem, not just continually find the symptoms.

 

Every pattern has a key to breaking it. You just have to figure out what the key is for you, because every pattern has a different key. You are aware of a number of the symptoms and a few causes and influences. Soul-searching is the only way to get past all this. A counselor may be able to help, but you still need to decide what you want and remember that.

 

Question.. was your mother overlycritical of you and prone to toss past mistakes back at you? I apologize if I'm overstepping bounds there.

[MJTig]

The urge to protect yourself from further hurt can be good and bad. It can be good to stop further problems, but can also stop you from working things out and growing past it- therefore only piling on past hurts and blocking you in. Sounds like your trigger is sensitive (understandable with how you grew up), and you imagine grevious hurt in the future after one off word.

 

My advice? Talk to him about what you said to us, that you are working on trust and handling emotions, and you need his help. He can help by being patient, reassuring you, explaining himself and most of all - backing up words with action. You'll start to trust in what he says.

 

Not to fall back on the LS mantra, but have you had counseling to work through this and deal with what are pretty much affects from your mom? There are all kinds of ways to teach yourself how to deal with separating rational and irrational thinking so you know how to proceed.

[very-confused-girl]

Thank you so much everyboy. My mom was overly critical of me but not in the sense of being a parent with extremely high expectations of her kid. That wasnt the case. My mother was a very talented woman but she grew up in a very basic conditions and her talent didnt get a chance to spread and develop, she came from a small village.

 

And suddenly probably because I belong to a different generation than her and I grew up in a city, where everybody is ambitious, I suddenly had a chance to achieve certain things. I think that she got a bit envious of me that when she was a kid, she hadnt had this chance I have now and started to insult me.

 

Everytime I came home and told her "hi mom I got A from mathematic test" she was always like "and what? anybody could do it, it does not mean anything, you will never achieve anything anyway".

 

I forgot to mention that she was always malicious when she was drunk, when she was sober, she was extremely proud of me. Almost like if she was leading two lives. One on alcohol and one on soberity.

 

Besides insulting my achievements in life she was also very often telling me she regreted I was her daughter, she wanted me to die, telling me to get the f**k out of her flat and after five minutes she came and was kissing me and saying sorry. I was always very confused.

 

Therefore I dont believe when people are telling me that I am beautiful and they love me because my mother completely created in me a thought that I am not loveable and I dont believe in conffessions of love because I know that when people say they love me, in five minutes it can be different, because thats how my mother behaved - she had very extreme mood swings.

 

I think you hit the point, really. I am trying to protect myself from being hurt and rejected, that in the end I am the one who is rejecting the whole relationship based on just one insensitive sentence. It is not fair on my partners because if all people were like me, the whole population would extinct I cant just leave somebody after him being a bit awkward and telling me something that was not even meant to hurt me, but something always breaks in me and I can proceed the relationship further, I got "stucked" and my feelings start to disappear

[MJTig]

That totally makes sense why you don't trust words then. Make sure anyone you want to trust knows that backing them up with loving actions is very important.

 

*hug*