Really needing support and understanding on this relationship

Hello there, my name is Heather and I am hoping for some type of support, advice, or people who have had similar experiences. Basically, when I was younger (around age 14) I developed an eating disorder. I believe it was to cope with the stress of my alcoholic parents, but also it has to do with birth trauma because I had an induced birth performed with a drug called Pitocin. I am always feeling overwhelmed and ungrounded. I am extremely sensitive to my environment. I am extremely empathic and I tend to take on the pain of others. I have done a LOT of work with different healers and therapists in search of hoping to understand myself better. I have begun to understand more of who I am, yet I still am struggling so much.

Relationships have been an exciting thing to me. I love leanring about myself through experiencing other people and I love loving people. I also love the comfort of having someone around me because I felt rejected and unloved by my family.

When I was 17 years old, I was raped. After that, nothing was ever the same. I have done much much work with healers on releasing this trauma from my cells and doing soul retrieval and talking about what happened. I feel that I do accept what happened and I know it had many positive aspects, such as leading me on a deep spiritual path and hopefully going out into the world to help others with what I have learned. Yet, I know that this trauma still remains within me and manifests as an adrenaline addiction. When I am home, or when I feel safe, there is no need to produce adrenaline, but the second that I go out into the world, stressful events begin to happen. I then feel overwhelmed and release adrenaline to keep me going and protect me from the pain of living in this society.

I know that I have so much more healing to do in my life. Yet, I also know that I am going to lead a beautiful magnificent life in the future. I have hope that I will get through all of this and be released into the beautiful butterfly that I am. Yet, now I feel as though I am in the cocoon and I will be here for some time.

The point of all of this is a relationship I have been in for the past year and a half. I know that this relationship has a lot of karma and also has to do with the fact that I really wanted company and love through this challenging period of my life.

I will call him Pepe. Pepe is a very strange, yet loveable person. Everyone always falls in love with him. He is very easy to get along with. Yet, he lives his life in a fantasy world because when he was younger he was deeply wounded and traumatized emotionally and he has chosen to suppress these emotions in order to go on with his life. Yet these wounds and traumas come up every single day. Never does a day go by where he is not faced with these traumas. Yet, he still lives in a defense mechanism of living in a fantasy world. Whenever I begin to talk about how I feel, he tunes out and ignores me. This reminds me of my childhood with my alcoholic parents and causes me so much pain. I cant bear it, so I get so angry. I dont know how to deal with anger. It is not an emotion that I have had a great deal of experience with.

When I become angry, it sometimes gets so intense, and Pepe gets so upset with me, and is unable to even talk to me in a supportive way, that I lash out and sometimes hit him. He never hits me back.

I then feel guilty for hitting him and want to never hurt him again.

Yet, also there is deep resentment inside of me for the way that this relationship has been. So much has happened that I dont even know if I can explain it all.

I am a highly sensual and sexual person. He is not. He was raped at age 7. He does not kiss me, cuddle with me, and rarely hugs me. We rarely ever have sex. Probably about 7 times in the past 1.5years. It has not been free flowing and it has not been very good. Yet, we love each other. And I have not been able to leave this relationship. I have tried to have sex with other people, but I only enjoy sex within a relationship because it allows me to let go and feel safe and loved, But he will not experience this type of relationship with me (a sexual relationship.)

I know that this relationship does not sound like it is working out very well. He also is struggling financially and he is 45 years old. He rarely works, he works as an alternative physician. It has been painful for me because I end up spending all of the money in the relationship and I end up broke. Last night our fight was about this very subject.

I am 23 years old and I want to experience life, but I feel as though this relationship is holding me back in many ways. Yet, it has been helping me deeply to heal from my eating disorder. He cooks beautiful food for me everyday and we sit down and have beautiful meals in a safe environment which is something that I have been unable to do for so long, since I lived with my family before the rape.

What do you think? What would be the best thing for me to do?
We are currently living together. If anyone has any ideas, please send a response. Thank you.

Love,
Heather

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