Knowing something intellectually and knowing something emotionally are different: I have a Looooonnnnnggggg disconnect before my emotional self catches up to where my logical mind has got to.
Can you do something nice just for you today, treat yourself, take some time off work, walk in a park or a forest, visit a gallery, go do something that you weren't able to do with him (or somehow just didn't get round to)?
When he said to me "We hurt each other and I want you to be happy, you're an amazing woman and can achieve so much" - all I got from that was that he had moved on and I had been so easy to move on from..
If he has moved on quickly - that would not say anything about you, and your worth, that would be about him. His thoughts and actions and beliefs reflect his reality, not the essence of who you are.
I should see it for the manipulation that it is. Or maybe it's not manipulation, maybe it's the truth? .
I'm sure you are amazing and are capable of many wonderful things. However, whether or not when he says it he is saying what he really thinks about you, or whether that is manipulation on his part does not affect the reality of who you are.
I used to see myself only through the filter of other people's expressed experience of me: I relied entirely on other people's assessment of me to tell me whether I was good/bad/selfish/kind etc. Is still don't really know why, but have been working over the last 6 years to define myself without recourse to external judgements.
I used to think I was fundamentally wrong somehow, not broken, as that implies I was fine at some point, damage was done to me and I broke and I didn't think that: I thought I wasn't put together "right". Using others to define you is a very miserable place to be, and dangerous when I consider some of the sources I used to define me.
I'm so confused and I feel so stupid for posting incessantly on this forum but it's the only place I'm finding sanity.
not stupid:
never stupid.
reaching out is a good thing, post and vent away:
SR helped me begin to believe that I didn't need "saving" or "fixing": I was pretty much fine, with a few rough edges that I could choose to polish up if I wanted to.