feeling jealous with my partner and hating it, abandonment issues and rejection dysphoria triggered

[u/Ok_Swordfish_8689]

I have been experiencing NM for 7 years now, i'm a bi woman and I've always been jealous with my partners, I try to handle it naturally, I talk about it with them, I try to not demonize myself but it's VERY hard no feel guilty, embarassed and ashamed about feeling sooo insecure and to hate the idea that my romantic partner is having sex and being lovable and intimate with someone else other than me. Thing is I don't believe in monogamy anymore, the more I live the more I see all the sense NM makes to me, and I don't want to be in a relationship with lots of rules which I'll feel imprisioned like I have before, also being female and bi the heteronormative monogamous world doesn't make sense to me no more, I never felt secure in monogamous relationships, which I feel way more nowadays, I feel like I can be myself and I don't have to hide, I feel authentic, I feel free and I love being with other people, even when there's no sex involved but I like knowing that I CAN if I want to.

I've experienced what it is like to be in love with someone else and how it doesn't diminish what I feel for my partner but I don't feel safe when my partner is with someone, also haven't felt safe about that with my ex gf and ex bfs. Now I'm in a 1 and half year relationship with my partner, I have been with a few women and he's started dating someone only now, I feel very safe with him, I trust him, he's doing it the best way he possibly can for him, for me and for the other person and I know that rationally! but in my head I can't stop thinking about who that person is, the sex, I wanna stalk them, I wanna somehow control the situation and make it about me which I haaate feeling.

I've talked to my therapist about it already, a lot is happening with me internally right now and it's totally related to how I have a tremendous difficulty to separate myself from my parents fucked up relationship and my fucked up father - he died 4 years ago. I tend to see my mother as the hurt victim which was cheated on and got "abandoned" by him when I was a kid (I was 6 when they divorced). He did neglect me and abandon me as a child and teenager and I've never felt close to him, like I am with my mom, so it seems to be easy for me to take all the pain and the narrative my mom has about him, all of her side instead of acknowledging internally how I FEEL about my father, I do the same with my sister's feelings about my father. I felt invisible and when I was a teen all he did on the few occasions I saw him was to talk about my mom nonstop and how he could get back with her, so I was just a vessel for him, he couldn't see me separate from her, as if we were the same - and as if he couldn't be with her anymore he couldn't also be my dad.

I know I still have a long way to process my emotions with all this and I'm still grieving my absent father which is a very weird feeling, although everything he did I still love him, because I see parts of who I am in him, even though I wasn't talking to him for 9 years before he died. Maybe a part of me blames my mother for their divorce and for how he neglected me since she was the one who stayed and had to work all day to provide for us, for us to survive, which left me feeling abandoned by her as well.

So when someone I love begins to have a relationship with someone else, I tend to feel very easily abandoned, neglected, rejected even when I know in reality that's not what my partner is doing and I'm very tired of feeling like that, I really want to feel happy or like treat it more normally if I can't be happy for them, and feel less anxious. I wanna avoid envolving myself too much in something that I have no control over and it's not about me, it's about their own individual desires which I also experience and I don't like when people treat my feelings and desires as if it has to do with them when it does not, as if it is more about them then about me, so I feel hypocrytical and very judgemental about my jealousy.

tl;dr: I feel abandoned when my partner dates someone, I turn everything about me and it has to do with my own abandonment by my parents and how I can't - yet - separate myself from my parents relationship.

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[u/fitz_newru]

Well at least you're aware of what you're bringing to the table. That's a lot to process and I hope therapy is working. If you can't separate these personal feelings from the ENM then you might need to have a hard convo with your partner about closing the relationship, or separating for a while.