I keep meeting people in my life like him

[Anonymous]

Hi

I keep meeting people in my personal and work life like him. I have to co parent with him. My job involves coming into contact with people like him and recently realised my manager is similar. I am moving jobs and hope this won’t happen so much. I met someone after my ex and eventually realised he had the same abusive traits. I look back in my life and see others also. I don’t feel I’m getting any better at dealing with these types of people and I’m terrified of meeting them now and am very closed off to meeting new people (when initially I left the relationship with my ex still open to others and wanting to see the best in people). Maybe it’s just a bad time for me as I’m struggling with coparenting issues but I’m wondering how I am going to ever get better at dealing with these types of people (as I don’t seem to be able to avoid them), is there something about me that makes me a target? I am having some counselling now but I just wondered if anyone has felt like this and got better?

[iliketea]

Me too! I think as you become more aware of the abuse and how it has happened, you do come to realise it in others. Which is a good thing. Im learning the next step is to not be attracted or around these types of people and thats to do with my own self worth and learning about boundaries. I asked the same questions as you, and trauma counselling really helped in answering a lot of them. In some ways I thought a cliché, but it does seem to all stem back to childhood experiences and what we learnt then in terms of dealing with stressful situations, situations we felt stressful as children, so not necessarily anything extreme, could be one parent pushing you academically, or another being emotional distant, or something external. Then as children we found ways of dealing with that, so did we become people pleasers, avoiders, (insert your own thing) whatever it was, it was to protect ourselves. Then, and this is a really basic telling of the story, as we go through life we carry on with those protective mechanisms, and often they aren’t healthy and they can lead us to abusive relationships – with people who don’t care much about boundaries, and often we’re not really aware of boundaries either so are not putting them in place – so when we come across n********t types it becomes the perfect platform for both parties to enact their inner child to deal with their inner wounds.

Listen to Caroline Strawsons bitesize podcasts from the start, she explains it in a very easy to understand way. xx

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