[laverne]

I meet my boyfriend when I was at the most happiest in my life. we statrted dateing, but he made me insurcure now. He talked about his ex non stop from day one. then when I fell pregnant he was mean and hurtful towards me then when our little girl was born i started to resent him as I put up with everything for so long. I pushed it to the back of my mind but i no longer could i started to say horrid things hit him and was spiteful. I tried to changed but it was so easy to do those things to him then i started to try and control my frustrations and anger i thought everything was going to be better but they weren't as all of a sudden he just left, he sent me a text now his back has been for a few weeks but he seems to have changed like everything is all about him during this time i fell pregnant again but i knew he would treat me the same so i had a termination i hate myself and i just want to die. what do i do?

[marina]

I think you need to put some space between yourself and him. You need to start being really good to yourself. Look after yourself and your daughter. Everyone deserves to be loved and treated with respect - including you. It may be helpful to get some counselling for the termination. It is like a bereavement and you may need help to deal with the emotions.

[crystal]

Please decide to live, Laverne - because you've got a little girl who needs you.

You might not feel like living right now but your life is important and has meaning to people around you. Maybe your boyfriend doesn't care but I'm sure your daughter does and probably friends and relatives as well.

Do contact the Samaritans http://www.samaritans.org/ for some emotional support.

[Dee2]

Laverne,

Please contact the Samaritans and see your GP about your feelings.
You can even email the Samaritans. I have found that using the email service is very helpful, as sometimes it can be hard to articulate your feelings over a telephone - in fact I struggle to tell my family my feelings but sometimes things are better off in the open, and as they say "a problem shared is a problem halved". It wasn't easy telling my husband my feelings (and I've kept stuff back) but at least he is aware of what is up with me at the moment.

If you feel you are unable to open up to your GP, try writing your thoughts down on a letter and give this to your GP. That way you won't forget (or intentionally forget) to tell the doctor all your troubles. This helped me greatly as I couldn't bring myself to tell the GP I wanted to/had harmed myself - I felt like a small child.
So the doctor read the letter and straight away he was very sympathetic, and although I've had a few shaky moments where I thought I was going to fall of the edge, after a few weeks of SSRI treatment I find my mood has improved greatly and I see things as they are - not through dark lenses, (or through rose tinted glasses) but I don't jump off the deep end when something goes slightly wrong, and I don't think the world and his dog is against me anymore. It is great to have rational feelings back - I thought I was going mad.

[Benjamin Fry]

I think that there are two issues here. One is how you function in relationships and the other is the termination.

Iíll start with the termination because I suspect that this is where the most urgent feelings of pain come from. I think that terminations are greatly underestimated in our society for the psychological pain that they cause both women and men. I still think that the most unresolved emotional issue of my life is a teenage abortion. Iíve only just begun to discuss it again with my ex-girlfriend and she is also going through a time of reconciliation to what happened. It is a huge responsibility to bear to end the potential for a life and I suspect that you have not had the love and support that you needed to help you through making such a decision. The feelings that this throws up would benefit from some professional help. I am sure that if you contact the clinic where you had the termination that they will be able to put you in touch with someone who can help you. Please reach out for help. It is a common issue and there are people who understand what you are going through.

It seems like your relationship has been a difficult one. You notice that you have gone from someone who was happy and confident to a bit of a doormat. This is not unusual. The security of a relationships often allows both parties to begin to process a lot of feelings from the past. This in turn makes the emotional temperature of the relationship sometimes too hot to handle. Thatís why lovers fight. On top of this a baby is like a psychological catalyst, initiating a return of many of our own feelings from infancy and childhood. These may be overwhelming both you and your partner, which may explain his yo-yo behaviour.

In your relationship you could benefit from finding some ways to interact where you can share your emotional pain without blaming each other. Ultimately though your partner has to be prepared to make a commitment to taking responsibility for finding out where his difficult feelings come from. He has to stop blaming them on you. You also have to start to deal with your own issues and not just wait for him to change to make you a happy person.

This is all very hard to do when bringing up a small child and coping with a termination. However, you will find that any decent counsellor should be able to help you with both. You donít have to get through it all on your own. Itís ok to ask for help.

[Benjamin Fry]

You may be right that it will be hard to get over the termination. But the truth is that it takes two adults to make a family and you have noticed that ìhe said he would be thereî for you but ìdidnít turn upî. This seems like a metaphor for the relationship. He is just as responsible as you are for the termination. A pregnant woman needs and deserved support from the man who slept with her. You were not given this support and would also have been in the grip of some very strong hormones.

It seems that during this relationship you have had difficulty with anger. You say that you have hit him which suggests that when you get angry you get out of control. But I also sense that you repress anger, such as over his lack of support with the second pregnancy, and instead get very depressed inside, resulting in the suicidal ideation (depression is usually the result of repressing strong anger). This would leave you with little experience of using anger safely and being able to communicate it to relieve yourself of the feelings. A counsellor can help you to learn this skill. Meanwhile perhpas there was a history of angry behaviour in your family that you would like to talk more about here.

If you make your world dependent on him then you leave yourself very powerless. If you wonít go to counselling without him, then you are letting him dictate how you get helped. You may never get over him if he leaves. You may never forget the termination. But you have a life ahead of you and a child to mother. You can recover to be once again the person you were before this relationship. It will be hard, but rewarding.

Iíve personally been similarly overwhelmed by exactly these same issues and also felt the lack of will to live. But with the help of some counselling and support from my friends, I recovered and actually now have a far better life because of the whole experience. And it didnít even take that long. I know it seems impossible from where you sit right now, but it can be done, one day at a time.

Go to counselling alone at first. Once you feel more stable then you can try again with the relationship.