When things went south for me and S., we tried to get help. We asked my (now our) GP and it turned out his office mate did couples therapy so we went to see him a few times, maybe four times in total. Her biggest beef as told to him was that I did not know when to leave her alone, that she was prone to being overwhelmed by her own internal emotional tsunamis, and that I needed to learn to just get out of the way and let it pass. My biggest beef with her was that I was hurt by her capricious behaviour, I saw it as disrespectful and could not understand why she thought it was acceptable to treat me the way she did.
When we first started dating, when I was still walking on air, she really did behave like someone who genuinely cared about me. But the shine quickly wore off, and we entered a co-dependency spiral. I fell into the worst kind of validation trap, increasingly desperately seeking (and being denied) external validation from what ought to have obviously been such an unlikely, dysfunctional source. What I did not realise then was that my dependency on external validation is inherently destructive, and no amount of approval from S. would ever have been enough for me anyway. I have to learn to self-validate.
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