Am I a Rebound Victim?
Reader’s Question
Lately, I have been feeling like a failure in my relationships. I have been married twice. My first marriage ended after 2 years; I have a son from that marriage. My second marriage ended after 15 years, but most of those years were both emotionally and physically abusive. I recently broke up with the man who was my third relationship. The relationship lasted a little over 4 years but was based on lies. This guy asked me to marry him several times while continuing a relationship with another woman. He was also abusive. I finally kicked him out of my house because of his behavior and because I also had reason to suspect he was still seeing the other woman. By that time, however, I was also pregnant with his child. I’ve learned that he fathered a child by this other woman as well. And, whereas I once thought I had a fairly decent relationship with this man’s father, I’ve since learned that he also participated in the lies and deceit. In the end, it appears that the man from my last relationship only wanted me at a time when things weren’t working out with the other woman — and when they got back together, I was left holding the bag.
I’m having a hard time accepting the fact that I’m most likely a rebound victim, but at the same time I feel no regrets about leaving any of my relationships, including the last one. But because my exes have all moved on and married and started families, it makes me question myself. I’m looking for someone else’s thoughts on my situation.
Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply
When all the smoke clears, it might become more evident that you were indeed a rebound victim in your last relationship. But it’s also fairly clear that you have had a tendency to find yourself in relationships that are characterized by abuse and deceit. You seem to exercise pretty good judgment about whether to remain in such relationships. The major question at issue here is whether there are some aspects of your personal history that have placed emotional “blinders” on you with respect to getting involved in the first place with the kind of man who might well abuse or deceive you. There are a number of possibilities here. One possibility is that you are overly familiar with character-flawed individuals and lack some awareness about what characteristics in a man need to be a prerequisite for you to become involved with him. Another possibility is that you have some unmet need or unhealthiness of your own that leads you to actually gravitate toward the wrong type of person. Yet another possibility is that you do not have enough confidence in your own worth as a person or the soundness of your judgment to become involved only with a man most likely to be respectful and faithful. Indeed, there are many possibilities. Because you owe it to yourself not to repeat a negative pattern, and because you now have two innocent children who need responsible guidance from their parents, it would be advisable for you to sort these issues out with a counselor.
You report questioning yourself presently because your exes appear to have settled down with others. That fact in itself does not speak to the issue of whether their characters are of the type that would have made them good life partners for you or fathers to their children. Rather than base your opinions about yourself and your judgment on these external circumstances, trust what you are likely to learn from an honest self-examination and have faith that greater awareness will assist you in making sounder judgments in the future.
