[Anonymous]

I don’t know what my problem is but i am in pain, please help me…

Me and my girlfriend met online. After a week of chatting we are an item. After a month of dating she moved to SF from LA to live with me and transfer her school here, try to start a new life with me. For her it’s a big deal that she sacrifice for me because all her life has been in LA and her friends was the center of her life. (she wasn’t that close to her family.)

After she move up I started to understand her past and that’s when the pain starts to grow. She suffers from depression when she was young. She then drive herself out of her family and focus on friends around the time of highschool. She dated women and men and the last guy he dated was the unforgettable one. (at least for me)

According to her, he was her first love. After 3 months of dating she got pregnant. (That was when she was 19, what happen to high school sex education?? I can never understand) After a month she got abortion. She was staying with him during the time so he can take care of her. Then after some time she suicide while still staying with him with sleeping pills but got rescued and sent to hospital. The doctor then put her to mental institute before releasing her. She stayed for couple days and come out. She said she suicide because their relationship did not improve, she thought they would be more connected or something. Anyway, the guy still cheats and she cheated one time try to get back to him. (which he still not aware of it) They didn’t break up but fight a lot. Somehow the relationship lasted 2 years. Whether she told me the details of the relationship because she needed me to know or i asked about it, I have images in my mind that i can’t remove.
(too much information really)

She say she already forgot most of it after being with me for a year and half and she finally understood real love from me. But the whole thing just disgust me. Her history with her ex…I tried to forget, tried to get past it but everytime I saw a depression medicine commercial, an abortion joke, or just anything related to men-women sex i would start thinking about her past and cannot pull myself out. I just sink in this thoughts of depression and i couldn’t do anything about it so does she. There is time I wanna just go, be alone, get isolated…I used to be a very happy and positive person. but i can’t leave her…I felt weak, I am suppose to get her through this, she is the one that got real pain. I wanna be there for her, I am suppose to heal her not digging her past. But now everytime I starts to think about it she is the one try to comfort me and apologize. I love her, she loves me, we wanna make it work. I wanna know why can’t I forget it, why
can’t I let it go, how can i have peace with it? We can’t have a future if this keeps going on.

I tried many self-help remedies. Read articles, read relationship books, exercise, talk to friends. nothing! nothing helps. Is time the only medicine? Or as time goes on both of us gonna get more cuts? I don’t want her to suffer from me and I don’t want to suffer from her past too. Please help…

[April Masini, your AskApril]

The way you can heal is to understand your limits — and hers. You cannot cure her and she cannot cure you. Only you can heal yourself and (listen hard here:) only she can cure herself. If you try to cure her, you will fail. If she tries to cure you, she will fail. This is the bottom line.

Her depression and suicide attempt, acting impulsively (moving to be with you after one month was impulsive and a mistake) and not taking responsibility for herself, are not things you can help her with, so you need to stop trying. In fact, the best thing you can do for her is to back off and give her the space to help herself — or not help herself — but ultimately, to live her own life. When her own life is on track, then and only then, can she be in a relationship with another man whether it’s you or someone else.

The same is true for you. If you are down and out, you are the one who has to decide what makes you feel bad, how you’re going to deal with those situations that put you in a blue mood, and what kind of progress you’re going to make in your own life. Then, and only then, can you be in a healthy relationship with someone else.

If her past troubles you so much that you don’t want to be with her, then do both of yourselves a favor and back out. To stay in a relationship that is so mired with problems there’s little to no chance of success isn’t doing anyone a favor. When you think you can heal her by staying or heal yourself by staying, you’re wrong.

Everybody brings a past to a relationship — whether it’s a family of origin past or a divorce past or children from another relationship past — but the trick to great relationships is to find someone with a compatible past. It doesn’t have to be identical, but it has to be compatible.

I hope this helps you. You seem mired in your own depression and you need to get out of that to live your life well — with or without your girlfriend.

[Member]

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