Advice: I left my girlfriend for someone else. What if I made a mistake?
Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a reader whose avoidant communication style is making a breakup more complicated.
Question: I’m in my 20s and recently ended a six-year relationship. The reasons were issues related to differing sexual needs and her controlling family (dictating where she lived, how she travelled, whether she could visit me when I studied abroad). Despite this, I wanted to marry her. She was my family, my home.
But while still in the relationship, I fell in love with a close female friend. When I ended things with my ex, I didn’t tell her the full truth. I said the breakup was mainly about our relationship problems, although I hadn’t brought these issues up during our relationship. I also made her an implicit promise when we broke up that this love wasn’t over but just interrupted. She cut contact, then I moved to a different city to live with my new girlfriend. That happened a few weeks ago.
My current girlfriend is extraordinary. She sees my avoidant communication patterns and says she wants to help break them. But I haven’t been fully honest with her, either. I still have deep feelings for my ex. I feel like I’ve lost a family member, and I hear she may be coming to the same city soon. My now-girlfriend doesn’t know about the promise to my ex, doesn’t know my ex is coming here, and doesn’t know that when I imagine my ex arriving, my first thought is to look for her. I’m not sure if I’ve made a mistake.
I know I have an avoidant pattern. How do I have an honest conversation with my current girlfriend without simply transferring my burden onto her? Is what I feel for my ex grief, or something unresolved that deserves to be addressed?
From the Therapist: You’re asking several important questions, so let’s look at each: first, what made it hard for you to be honest with your ex-girlfriend? Second, how can you better understand your feelings about her? Third, how can you be honest with your current girlfriend?
All of these are interrelated, and your 20s are a good time to examine relationship patterns you observed or adopted while growing up. I don’t know your history, but if your family members shied away from difficult conversations, or you found that when you tried to talk about something uncomfortable, you were criticised, shut down or silenced, you might have learned that speaking up could lead to shame, conflict or disconnection. In short: danger.
Avoidance is an attempt to keep oneself safe. And while avoiding the truth can seem compassionate on the surface (“I didn’t want to hurt her”), it’s usually in the service of protecting yourself more than protecting the other person. In this case, it sounds like you were struggling with ambivalence – my girlfriend might not be right for me; but she also feels like home –and worried that if you brought up the issues that concerned you (a sexual mismatch, family control), you might indeed realise you weren’t compatible. So instead of facing that potential loss, you waited for something external – in the form of another woman – to provide a distraction from anticipatory pain.
Yet, just as one lie often leads to more lies to support the original one, avoidance often leads to a cascade of avoidant behaviours. By not telling your girlfriend what issues you were struggling with during your six years together, the breakup likely felt abrupt to her – leaving her angry and confused. Then, to avoid the discomfort her feelings brought up in you, you avoided even more, not only by hiding that you’d begun a new relationship, but also by making an “implicit promise” that this wasn’t a breakup, merely a hiatus.
But here’s the thing: instead of preventing pain, avoidance postpones it. Avoidance may have been a strategy – consciously or not – to sidestep certain feelings (for you: guilt and anxiety; for both of you: grief). But it wasn’t very successful. As you’re seeing, you still have to contend with those feelings. You’re sorting through what it’s like to hold so much history with someone and suddenly say goodbye. You’re carrying the fact that you handled things in a way that hurt someone you love. Part of you misses your ex and wonders if talking about issues earlier might have changed the outcome. And you’re hiding the truth of what you’re going through with the woman you live with now.
All of this makes me wonder if you’re avoiding the biggest thing of all: a suspicion somewhere inside you that you aren’t ready to jump into a new relationship while grieving the end of one that ended just weeks ago and lasted most of your adult life.
So how might you stop this avoidance cascade? You commit to honesty – with yourself and those you care about. You tell your girlfriend that she is extraordinary and you appreciate her efforts to help you become less avoidant, but that only you can do that for yourself and it might take some time. You explain that you have so many feelings – about your ex, about her, about yourself – and you need to gain more clarity so you don’t confuse and upset everyone around you. You say that you don’t completely trust yourself to be upfront and open and direct, because you don’t have a strong understanding of where these avoidant behaviours come from, so you might continue to avoid difficult topics in this current relationship, which could lead to some pain.
Then you say that while you work on all of this (perhaps with the help of a therapist), you don’t know where this leaves you and your ex and the woman you’re telling this to. But the one thing you do know is that you need to say these difficult things aloud, right now – even if they’re hard to hear – because if you don’t, you might spend the rest of your life hurting yourself and the people you love. If you don’t start saying them now, you might never experience the intimacy you hope for.
I know this will take courage, but I believe from your letter that you’re ready to try. And when you do, you’ll see that this isn’t “transferring your burden” onto your girlfriend. It’s relieving her of it, freeing you both up to make choices with eyes wide open, rather than leaving fear and avoidance in charge.
- Lori Gottlieb is an American psychotherapist, writer, columnist and speaker.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Lori Gottlieb
Illustration by: Marta Monteiro
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