Relationship Purgatory: I Can't Stay Here Forever (Please Help)

Hey everyone! I hope this post finds you well. I haven't posted on here in at least a couple of years, but I really need some help. I would really appreciate any advice you can give me on ways to proceed with getting help for some of the issues below.

Since there are so many complex issues, traumas, and events that I've struggled with throughout my life, I'm going to include the following in bullet-form. These are:

- My dad tried to molest me when I was 4, after my parents were divorced (they divorced before I was born). I told my mom. I begged her not to tell anyone but she immediately got extremely angry and took him to court.

- I testified in court when I was 5-years-old. His whole family, and my dad himself, said my mom made this up to get custody taken from him. I did not want to tell because I did not want to ruin my dad's life.

- I had to comfort my mom about this. Our relationship was already codependent and I was her caretaker. For this reason, I do not think I ever processed or grieved or properly got angry over my dad trying to do this to me.

- My mom got my dad's custody rights taken away when I was 5. I forgave my dad soon after the event (in fact, I'm not sure that I was ever angry with him). I started speaking with him again when I was 11.

- Again, he told me my mom made that up. At first, I told him I remembered it and it WAS true, but eventually I stopped saying anything. Now when he brings up how my mom ruined his life, I say "I'm sorry", but that is it.

- I was my mom's mother. Her mother died when she was around 11 and I don't think she had grown up psychologically by the time she had me. As odd as it sounds, I made a pact that I wouldn't let my mom die and that I would make up for the pain and lack of love she'd experienced in life.

- Mine and my mom's relationship became very unstable at some point in my childhood. I think some of her extreme behaviors started after the event with my dad. These behaviors consisted of: threatening to kill us both or just me, hitting me, falling on the floor and pretending to be dead, and other types of physical, emotional, and verbal abuse.

- The two memories of this type that stick out the most are:
1) telling me she was going to drive us into a cement wall and kill us (as she accelerated faster and faster, slammed on the breaks, and caused me to hit my head on the dash of the car). I think this was when I was 4 or 5.
2) Tickling that turned from normal to violent, for no reason at all. Her tickles turned to pinches and then slapping. I couldn't understand what I had done.

- I have major guilt issues with my mom. I also worry that she will die most days. This used to be an everyday thing with me.

- I always told/believed my mom saved my life. I vowed to her I would take care of her and we would never be apart. She moved and left me alone in my hometown right after I finished high school.

- I was a good kid who often struggled to have friends. I made lots of guy friends, but had trouble finding girls to be friends with. As it turned out, none of the guys that pretended to be my friend during this time period and after, were actually my "friend." This has been a reoccurring problem and theme throughout my life.

- I let people walk all over me my entire life. This includes my parents, friends, romantic partners, bosses, absolutely everyone.

- I have problems saying no. I have had dozens of sexual relationships with men because of this.

- Following the incident with my dad, my childhood (and adult life) was filled with further sexual trauma and abuse. I was convinced (and still am) that the world was filled with pedophiles or people who don't love you or people that will abuse you. Every romantic relationship that I've had, and many of my relationships with friends, family, coworkers, etc. have supported this belief.

- My first long-term relationship started when a guy I had slept with in college stalked me, invited me on a trip to a town about an hour from my school, got physically violent, and drove 2.5 hours to his hometown. I ended up dating this guy for 6 years.

- He was also physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive. He also stopped having sex with me about 2 years into our relationship, told me he was going to cheat on me, and did end up doing so. Due to my pre-existing problems with attachment and trust, I had an extremely hard time navigating my way out of this relationship. I think he ultimately broke up with me after cheating on me again. It hurt more than anything at the time.

- I seem to have blocked the majority of this relationship out. I remember bits and pieces of it. Like my mom, he threatened to kill me often. He verbally abused me in any way he could, including telling me I deserved to be molested. He made me feel the same familiar worthlessness as the majority of my life experiences.

- I made it out of this relationship and started seeing a guy I'm going to refer to as M. I thought M was extremely different from my former long-term partner, and really anyone I had ever been friends with. He wasn't superficial or judgmental and seemed to be a very kind person. During the course of our relationship, I lost and found my mind.

- M suddenly stopped having sex with me. Because this had just happened in my former relationship (and due to all of my issues with sex), the first night he refused, I sobbed. He didn't say anything, except that I was keeping him from going to sleep. I promised I would let him go to sleep the next time, if something like that ever happened again. Unfortunately, it happened that night too (he didn't initiate sex and turned down my advances), and so on, for months. Eventually, I learned to cry silently.

- As we continued to not be intimate, I transformed back into the unstable person I had been before I dated M. We started fighting a lot, although I was not sure how these fights started or continued for so long. I felt like M's lack of interest showed that he didn't love me.

- At first, I tried harder to resolve whatever was causing our lack of intimacy. I stopped asking about it altogether. I went to sleep earlier and didn't keep him awake at night. I believe we had sex eventually during this time, but it was only a couple of times, at most. When this didn't fix our issues, I started the process that would consume me over the next 3 years.

- I worked on getting more attractive. I worked on being more "chill" and fun and nice and easier to deal with. I tried not to pick fights as much. Occasionally we would be intimate, but this was extremely rare. His "sleep" excuse became many different excuses: his stomach hurt, it was too hot, it was too late, I had made him angry that day, etc. He never initiated any physical contact with me - of any kind.

- When this didn't work, I lost it. Despite our ups and downs with intimacy and fighting, this was the one person who I believed would not abuse me. He was different from anyone else I had ever met. I really thought I had found true love with him; a stable partner/friend/family that I had never had. I knew that if I lost him, I would die. He was the only person, besides my mom, who ever gave me hope.

- I was in grad school at the time, and he was not working (due to issues of his own). I decided I was going to go to medical school, something I had promised my mom I would do as a child. I told him I was going to apply and I would be able to take care of him, even if he never worked. He encouraged me to do that if I wanted. At this point, I already thought he didn't love me (and never could), but thought he would be more willing to stay with me if I paid for everything.

- Along the way, I changed. I stopped expecting him to treat me like his girlfriend/partner. He was a gamer at the time, and since I felt he didn't want to talk with me, we spent most of our time together in our bedroom with me writing my thesis or studying for the MCAT, and him gaming, watching television, and/or smoking pot. I thought he was proud of me. I thought he would eventually start treating me better.

- When things didn't improve, I got worse. I had lost any of the "friends" I had during either this relationship or the one before it, and I couldn't bear continuously asking my mom for the same advice or putting her through having to hear about my intimacy issues. I started reading articles online about problems we had experienced in our relationship. I spent many hours a day pouring over these articles, when I was supposed to be working.

- I couldn't find articles that supported the reasons he gave me for our lack of a sex life or lack of a normal relationship. I read everything from articles about hormone imbalances to communication problems to porn/video game addiction. When I came across a tip or possible reason for these problems, I would ask if this could be the issue. He would either get incredibly angry or sneer and shut me out.

- I continued to pour over any information I could to understand what had happened in our relationship, if M loved me, what was wrong with me, what was wrong with him, and how to fix it. This was met with more anger and resentment. Eventually, he acted like a completely different person. I was convinced it was my fault - that I had transformed him into my abusive ex-boyfriend.

- As I read more and tried more and failed more, my self-esteem became extremely low. This was familiar to me (as it was something I had struggled with my whole life). My self-hate became worse and I thought I would be better off dead. I couldn't deal with the idea that the one person I had found, who I knew was a good and kind person at first, was rejecting me when I couldn't understand why. M said he wanted to stay with me and always gave solutions I could try, but none of them changed anything.

- My life became consumed by this frantic searching. As the days went by, I woke up with less hope and more sorrow. I stopped enjoying life completely. I spent most days telling myself what a "worthless, ugly, crazy piece of **** I was" and how I deserved this and how I let M down and how I should kill myself.

- Work became harder to concentrate on. I cried EVERY morning when I woke up. I cried EVERY day at my work. I literally spent all of my time reading about what could be going on with M and I, trying to speak with him about different things we could work on, and hating myself. Every now and then, M would change his mind and have sex with me one time, but it wouldn't happen again for months and months, and the damage was already done.

- Eventually, he asked me to move out, and told me we could continue to be in a relationship, but on a "break." This was also extremely devastating, as I had never lived on my own before (outside of the college dorms). I also knew this meant the end was coming - that he was going to abandon me and that I was right in believing that he didn't love me and that he probably never had.

- M told me that I needed to do this to fix myself. He said he knew that I would never be able to work through my problems, if I first didn't live alone. He couldn't make me any promises that it would fix our relationship, but he promised me that no matter what, he wouldn't abandon me.

- I was so confused and scared and depressed when I moved into my own apartment. I didn't understand what I had done wrong. I didn't know who I was without M. I didn't believe that he intended to try to work on addressing these issues. I didn't believe he would continue to talk to me or see me.

- He did, though. He saw me and acted as if he wasn't affected at all. It bothered me a great deal. Although M had treated me much better than anyone in my life, he also treated me much worse. I changed a great many things about myself in an attempt to save our relationship, while he couldn't give me one real answer for why he treated me this way or how he actually felt about me.

- We are still broken up now and he still tells me he loves me and he still wants to be in a relationship with me, as long as we don't have "the same problems as before."

- I am still stuck in this apartment. I have lived here for one year at the end of this month. I see M most days. I helped him get a job as a custodian at my university, at night. I think this is helping him feel better about himself.

- I am still tied to him without any semblance of a committed relationship, at this point. I am afraid I won't make it out of this alive. Despite this one-sided post, M was the best person I knew.

- He listened to me, he helped me believe in myself, and he helped me make sense of my experiences in life, who I was, and who I am. Since I moved here, we have both engaged in many conversations about how this happened and how we could have done it differently and how we would do it differently in the future.

- I have no idea how to proceed from here and I am afraid I will end up waiting on him forever and if I did manage to get back together with him, we would have the same problems again and soon after.

- I thought about moving to where my mom lives. I don't know if this is a good idea or not. We have a much more healthy relationship now, but I am 30-years-old and have been putting off my live's goal of moving to the west coast to play music for the past 12 years (because of my relationships, fear, etc).

- I cannot stay in this apartment (relationship purgatory) for the rest of my life. I would rather die sooner, than spend my whole life waiting on someone to show up who will never come or will never love me or will never be able to have a healthy relationship with me.

If you made it through this whole post, thank you. I apologize for the length - it was just easy to keep going once I got started. I would appreciate any and all suggestions on working through these various types of trauma, as well as my relationship with M. Thank you, again!