Should She Have Quit?

I am not going to answer the letter writer’s question. Should she have quit her relationship or should she have stuck it out? In truth, a year ago she left a man she thought she was going to marry, so it’s a bit late for regrets. The more important point, from my perspective, is the hints she gives about her ex-boyfriend’s therapy.

As often happens, we do not know what kind of therapy the man was undertaking. We do know that the skill differential among therapists is vast. If you imagine that professional qualifications mean something in the field you are going to be disabused. 

And yet, we do have some hints. The man is undergoing once-a-week therapy. His girlfriend believed that it was not doing him any good. In fact, it seems to have rendered him insufferable.

The reason, she suggests, lies in the fact that the therapy helped unearth an infantile trauma, and this unearthing seems to have given the man permission to mistreat his girlfriend. It could be that the therapist is practicing something like recovered memory treatment. We do not know. It could be that the therapist believes that all root causes lie in childhood trauma. We do not know.

We do know that sometimes it is better, as the old saying goes, to let sleeping dogs lie.

Here is the letter, via Carolyn Hax:

Someone I thought I was going to marry turned out to have major trauma from childhood. When it started to come up, he took it out on me. I didn’t understand what was happening so I went from being joyful to being close to tears nearly every day.

He was in weekly therapy, but I didn't see any evidence of it.

We had been such great friends that I was thoroughly convinced that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. When I finally realized what was happening, and he had for the nth time refused to see things from my point of view, I ended things. Which was also the first point he apologized for some cruel things he said.

Now, over a year later, I still am burdened with whether I did the right thing.

As I said, I do not know whether she did the right thing, but I suspect that she did. The man got himself caught up in some kind of therapy, to the point where his psychic exploration was being used as an excuse for his appalling behavior.

Sad to say, but sometimes you need to cut your losses.