Have you tried opening up to your bf? Maybe he wants to be there for you... Have you opened up to him about any of what you're struggling with or is it too weird to talk to a new relationship about an old one?
Oh yes. We talk about absolutely everything. It's part of the "contract" of our relationship: No lies, no games, no ********, nothing is off limits to talk about, ever. It's just hard for him to understand that I can have anything but hate for a person who treated me like AXH treated me. In his eyes, it's like... if I can feel grief and compassion for a person who threatened to kill me, I don't value myself as highly as I should.
And maybe he has a point. But I think it's one of those Mars/Venus things. I don't like generalizations, but it's definitely a situation where another woman can listen and say "I understand that you have grief and sadness and pain over this whole thing" while he just wants to FIX IT for me. He doesn't try to talk me out of grieving -- but he reminds me of the hell I lived in.
I think we were able to understand each other somehow when I said that I truly believe that just because a relationship doesn't last forever doesn't mean it didn't have value, at one point in time. I think it may be a mix of him wanting to fix the unfixable and me wanting a level of identification from him that he can't give me.
Either way -- it's OK. We're talking our way through this, and he's giving me the space I need to process the hard sad feelings. And I feel like I'm clearing an old fallen-down homestead out of the way so that I can start building a new life. And that's huge for me. That I'm accepting that this is painful, I don't like pain, I want to run from it, but if I'm going to be able to build my new life, I need to clear out the rubble, even the stuff that's hard and heavy to carry and heave-ho onto a funeral pyre for my old life.