spent an hour today talking to a friend on the phone and (not being unkind but) was really surprised she was still finding it hard to get over a relationship that soured almost a year ago. The reason why I found it so surprising was because the guy had long started becoming really unkind to her (not the kind that will just walk out, cut contact and "disappear" - which might actually have been easier) and was often abusive to her on the phone, saying really nasty things to her, saying he probably never actually loved her and the whole thing was a mistake and he was sorry on his part he had mislead her and all that kind of stuff that really tore her apart... nonetheless, she still could not stop herself from trying to keep in touch with him, feeling more despairing as the weeks and then months floated by. Of late, the guy actually started cutting off contact and then left overseas for an assignment without informing her (which she felt was a "betrayal").

what startled me when i spoke to her on the phone was how she had started to feel an increasing sense of betrayal from this relationship even as nothing obvious had changed externally. Between the two of them, things had already soured to a point of what she felt as "non-reconciliation". Yet, the hatred, anger and distrust had grown and grown, even when he was no longer communicating with her, and in that sense, no longer "feeding" and "fueling" the negative feelings. She had also started to bemoan herself as weak and "stupid" and "irrational". It suddenly occured to me as we spoke that (i'm not much of a psychologist myself but..) the negative feelings and thoughts had most probably grown organically within her. It was the result of a powerful, imaginative mind gone haywire, creating and feeding the active mind with negative and despairing thoughts.

It brought to mind Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" - about the power of the human mind and how it can at once either lead a man (in a time of difficulty - such as in his case of a Nazi concentration camp) to emerge either completely mad or staying sane - by focusing on the future, discovering personal meaning in the present context of what he was going through...