Therapeutic Thursday: CBT that Betrayal

I think people sometimes think that I hold on to things for too long. I don’t mean in that, I have a house filled with trinkets I can’t let go of kind of way (I do), but in that, you did something bad to me and I won’t forget it kind of way.

I sometimes think they might be right, but yet I still don’t let some things go.

Part of me knows this is unhealthy, and for the sake of posterity, I’ll be clear: I shouldn’t still be upset that one my close friends is dating my ex and now they’re moving to Colorado together. (Thank goodness I’m moving to London, because if I weren’t, I’d be moving to the same place in Colorado!). I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do.

[There is a school of therapy called Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy which directly addresses these kinds of thoughts, these “should” or “shouldn’t” thoughts. The basic premise of the therapy is that whenever you engage with a thought of this structure, you simply ask yourself, “who says you should/shouldn’t?”. It seems like a simple tool, but in actuality, it’s incredibly powerful because it puts your own thoughts, which seem so monumental, into a little perspective. I’m not going to do the “who says?”, but it’s food for thought.]

I wonder if attempting to therapize this in a case-by-case basis would be the most effective thing. After all, I carry a pretty firm grudge. I still am annoyed with lots of people from high school about some things they did that hurt me. I certainly have college drama that haunts me. Of course graduate school was too recent for me not to have baggage there. Which is all to say: this is a pattern. This is a way I interact with the world. I am okay with you until you hurt me, and then I have a really hard time letting it go.

So, what’s that all about? I mean, I’m mostly tired of being hurt by people, repeatedly, because they either someone hurts me once, and doesn’t try to repair it, or they hurt me repeatedly and don’t seem to care. And really, it’s not that they “don’t seem to care,” it’s that they don’t care. I can’t ever think of a time when I hurt someone I cared about, and either didn’t try to fix it, or kept doing it knowing it was hurting them. I’m not one of those people. If I care about you, I do my damnest not to hurt you. If I do hurt you, I do my damnest not to do it again, and I make damn sure not to do it again.

So part of me knows deep down that when someone repeatedly does things they know hurt you, they don’t care. And if they don’t care, they’ll likely do things to hurt you again, and then why should you let them back into your life? Why should you forget what they’ve done, and pretend like they never hurt you, when they don’t apologize for having hurt you in the first place?

Is it just that other people don’t have the same rules? Their feelings don’t get hurt over the same things, so they don’t get upset about the same things I do, and they don’t realize they are hurting me. Even when I say it. The part of me that tries to be like everyone else says I should care about my friend enough to be happy for her. She found someone she is happy with.

And then the other part of me counters that it was my exboyfriend. And it wasn’t an amicable split, and it wasn’t something I wanted, and it took almost nine months of breaking up to get to the point where I was finally so frustrated with him that I didn’t care. But even then, I still went back for more, because we slept together several months later when I visited in the summer. So I wasn’t over him, and obviously part of me still isn’t. It’s not that I want to be with him, that’s never been it. It’s on principle that you just don’t fucking do that, you know? Maybe I have too firm of morals, but at least I have them.

I’ve always reconciled this dilemma, this specific problem of my former-friend and my former-lover now being on the fast track to wedded bliss, by ignoring it. By cutting it out of my life. By going about my business and living my life and 99% of the time doig just fine. But it still hurts when it comes up in circles with my college friends. Maybe that is unhealthy, but I have a feeling it’s also incredibly normal. It’s normal to feel hurt over a betrayal, and it’s normal to struggle to let it go until so much time has passed that you simply can’t be hurt anymore. It’s just that I have a blog where I choose to commit these feelings to pixel, so it seems like it is abberant. I have a feeling it’s not at all. Sometimes the most powerful thing I say in a session is that “it’s okay to feel the way you feel.” We all need to hear that from time to time.