Bucyn

So you were with her not to meet her needs, but to meet yours. You need to to prove to someone who doesn't love you, that you are so loving you are worth being loved.

I don't want to be an armchair psychologist, but I speculate that maybe she is standing in for someone else in your life--say your mother (just an example, could be your dad, grandma, big sister, your kindergarten teacher, the puppy you got when you were 4, whomever)--and you are trying to heal the wound that person left by making someone else do what you couldn't make the original cold fish do.

My ex abusive alcoholic momma's boy husband, did this same thing. His mother was completely inadequate as an adult, she was jaw droppingly dysfunctional, manipulative, needy, clingy, incompetent, and profoundly dishonest and incapable of being alone, making a decision or taking responsibility for herself. She had the emotional ability of a 2 year old, but the intellectual ability of her normal age and the social ability of a middle school girl. And in order to cope with life she was neurotic and crazy as h*ll. Can you imagine being raised by this? She talked about love and stabbed him in the back repeatedly. Any approval or love he ever got from her, she yanked away soon afterwards with more demands and hurt feelings.

So when he grew up, he married the only woman he probably ever found who was crazier than his mother: a woman who was diagnosed alternately with schizophrenia (and had two schizophrenic brothers) and bipolar 2, and who ultimately just ended up in chronic psychosis, one of those people wandering the streets talking to themselves.

He couldn't fix his mother with her undiagnosed, hard to define craziness and moved on to a woman with official mental illness who could be fixed if she took her meds. Which she wouldn't. So she was unfixable too, and after his kids were taken into custody for the sixth time and his newborn dau put into NICU for neglect, and social services told him he was not getting his kids back again because he was just as bad a parent as her, since he kept leaving them in her care, he got divorced. He has said he would have stayed married to her if not for the kids. Married 3 years, and didn't have sex most of the last year...but the marriage made his mommy happy because she had more power than the crazy wife and kept him busy fixing unfixable people, so he didn't have to deal with his own feelings about his messed up parents.

He ruined our marriage within hours of saying vows, refusing to sit with me on our honeymoon or spend time with me much because it would upset his mother. He was 44, still afraid of her, still trying to appease her.

He's now 49, living in his childhood home, alcoholic, unemployed, self righteous, and bankrupt, back to appeasing his mommy. And his 13 year old son with his 4 felony convictions and his own mental illness is waiting in the wings to take over as the next unfixable person he will sacrifice his life to fix when mommy's gone.

Between the alcoholism and the need to fix people he doesn't have the power to fix, he has pretty much squandered his life. It takes a lot of work for him to sit on the Pandora's box that is his emotional life.

Don't let this happen to you. I'm glad you are going to see a therapist. It's not about her, it's about your need to have her or someone like her. You may be using her sickness to try to fix yourself. It won't work.

I had TWO alcoholic husbands. After my last divorce, I spent all my free time in therapy. I did AL Anon (two groups, one at home, one at work), and two therapists (lunchtime with the EAP and after work with our former marital therapist because she knew him), and EDMR. I turned myself inside out, opened that Pandora's box of my own and scrubbed out the crud inside and made good friends with the good fairy Hope. It was like I eviserated myself and scoured out my insides with Comet. And by the end it was fun, I really really liked it. It was so helpful.

Please don't think about her any more, think about yourself. She's just a bad habit, so replace the time and thoughts you have about her with something else that occupies your time and mind. And work with your therapist so you don't pick up another bad habit in her place.

Good luck to you.