Julie. A revelation about a relationship breakdown.

Julie was an attractive, vibrant and outgoing young woman. She came to see me because she was distressed and disturbed by a relationship breakdown. She was a gym junkie and very fit and slim. She met a man at the gym who was anything but fit and slim.

He was there trying to lose weight and look after his health. There was an attraction and slowly they formed a relationship.

“He was grossly overweight when I met him." She said. “I coached him.”

She took him on. They decided to work together on his goals with exercise and diet. This was hugely successful. Over one year he lost all his excess weight and became very fit. He became the poster boy for the gym with his story being used to motivate others. They did long walks together, ran marathons and participated in all the challenges that the gym offered. He became what he had sought to become and what she had been working towards for him.

They were together for one year. It was very intense and they were always together. It became serious and they were planning for a life together. At the height of their achievement, he broke up the relationship. He just left without explanation. Nobody could believe it. She was shocked and hurt. It was so sudden and unexplained.

“After everything I did for him. After all the effort, the time, the energy and he just dumps me like that. What a waste of time.”

He started to ease his attendance at the gym. She saw him at a cafe with a friend. He had put on weight and was eating junk food.

“He’s completely going downhill. Back to who he was before I met him. I felt disgusted when I saw him the other day. He is so weak and disgusting. I feel so disappointed. It’s the promise that is gone. Now I’m all alone. How will I find someone else. I’m so pissed off with him.”

It all happened so suddenly. They spent the weekend together as usual and then on Sunday night Julie got a text from him saying he was not sure that he wanted to proceed with the relationship. A few days later she got another text saying that he’d made up his mind and wanted to end the relationship. 

“And all he could say to explain it was ‘I just freaked out’. It seems like he got everything he wanted and it just freaked him out. How do you explain that?”

“I wonder if it’s a form of self-sabotage” I said. “A rebellion against the self that was created and promoted. The underlying knowledge that he is not this thing that he is projecting. An inner conflict between the image and the truth and an attempt to correct it”.

It is also an effort to keep trying to be something which you don’t believe you naturally are. The effort of not allowing yourself to be yourself, even if you don’t like who that self is.

It’s common for insecurities and self-limiting beliefs to surface when we approach something we truly want. It’s a good example of a toxic emotion from the past coming up and overreacting to a current situation. Shame from the past surfacing as worthlessness. One of the ways it surfaces is through the well known phenomenon of The Imposter Syndrome, where we cannot experience our success internally despite all the external signs of success. Somewhere, we don’t feel we deserve it. This can be followed by the self sabotaging behaviour of withdrawing from something to protect us from the pain of failure, which we believe will ultimately happen. We are afraid of failure but we are also afraid of success. We fear becoming powerful because power will change the world as we know it and so represents a threat.

In this case, he might have also felt that it wasn’t his success. It was Julie’s achievement. So he felt like a fraud. It’s almost as if Julie had built what she wanted and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to live up to it in the long term. Being freaked out is being afraid. Possibly that Julie only loved the person he had become not the person he was underneath. What if this person re-surfaced eventually? Would he be rejected? Would Julie be able to love the person underneath if he could not keep up the effort to maintain the person he had become?