Stranger,
Since you said you intend to discuss my request with the therapist tomorrow, I want to leave as little room for miscommunication as reasonably possible. So to be clear:
I'm not asking you to surrender access to something that was private from me. I'm asking you to restore access to a record that I already possessed: the conversation history exchanged exclusively between us outside of Signal. I expressed that I would prefer to have the Signal record too, but I believe you deleted it and you haven't confirmed or denied that, so I'm working on the assumption that you have in fact deleted it. But having either or both of those backups means you now possess some records exclusively because I suffered an accidental loss.
You haven't actually denied losing your copy of the primary requested record. Having it would make you the accidental sole custodian of the only remaining evidence.
This asymmetry matters particularly because our relationship ended through a blindside abandonment and because you have repeatedly accused me of abusive conduct while never identifying examples or explaining the accusation. Meanwhile, I have accused you of abusive conduct and cross-referenced examples with psychiatric, psychological, and philosophical research and literature - and I have, in fact,Β been undergoing psychiatric treatment for damage resultant of abuse as characterized by providing psychiatrists.
Anything sensitive shared by you in those communications is matched by anything sensitive shared by me.Β The contents of that record may contain intimate or confidential disclosures made by me. We both contributed to the record, and we both originally possessed access to it. While I expect the record mainly contains communications from the early years of the relationship, those years are significant for reconstructing and understanding a relationship that lasted nearly a decade and ended abruptly andΒ without the mutual processing normally associated with the end of a serious relationship.Β
I've had a lot of time to do a lot of fucking reading and there are two major points backed up by research I can cite for you if you're even reading this that are directly relevant to this particular request:
1. Research on relationship dissolution outlines how romantic relationships become incorporated into people's self-concepts, and how that dissolution can produce substantial changes in self-concept and reduced self-concept clarity. That reduced clarity is a predictor of greater emotional distress.Β
2. Research examining adjustment after relationship dissolution distinguishes deliberate reflection from maladaptive brooding. Deliberate thought about the dissolution is associated with more positive outcomes, whereas intrusive thoughts and brooding are associated with poorer adjustment. This is something that I knew from the beginning,Β and is why I have begged you for every scrap of information you would give me so that I could process it instead of spiraling on intrusive thoughts and worst-case scenarios.Β
And this part is emotional, but I have insisted on this from the beginning, and offered examples and evidence backing up my claim, and you have responded mostly by refusing to hear me and refusing to offer information, in order to protect your own peace. Your actual thousand-acre wood of peace, even as you watched me begging you with the embers of my own peace still clung to the rags of what was left over after you stole what you wanted and burned the rest down and salted the ash on your way out.
Why are those two points relevant? Because my request for this record is not to support pathological rumination. I want to examine a primary historical record with my therapist and my psychiatrist in order to distinguish what was actually communicated and what patterns actually existed in our relationship, especially early on, from what I currently remember, infer, and reconstruct.
Having restored access to this record will allow me to ask and explore questions with powerful implications for my healing journey:
- What did I actually believe at the time?
- What did you actually say at the time?
- When did particular conflicts begin?
- Did certain explanations appear at the time or only afterward?
- Are later and present accusations consistent with earlier events?
- Did either of us apologize, deny, retract, contradict, or acknowledge particular events in original text or in retrospect?
- How did our communication patterns change over time?
- Which parts of my narrative are documented memories and which are retrospective interpretations?
I'm not asking you to send me memories I shared with a woman I once loved so I can torment myself with the pain and frustration and revulsion and humiliation and disappointment and honest goddamn despair of comparing her to the woman she became and all what that woman did to me. Because you're absolutely right. That wouldn't be good for my health, and IΒ am intimately aware of that. I'm asking you to restore access to evidence that can help me in the labor of constructing an accurate account of my own life for legitimate processing and then putting away forever.
I'm concerned with your refusal, posed as though in my best interest, though absolute and not up for discussion. You being in posession of the only existing copy gives you an epistemic advantage, power over me that you did not earn, merely happened into.
Symmetrical access is more conducive to discovering truth than unilateral possession. In light of claims that both of us have made about each other, about the past, about the present, I insist that I have a legitimate interest in recovering a historical record that offers us mutual accountability for what it covers, and has a legitimate therapeutic purpose for my own healing journey.
This process is simple and quick, and does not require you to participate in my healing or in any emotional reconciliation. You should not have the power to transform an accidental loss of my copy of those conversations into permanent exclusive control over the historical record of a relationship that belonged to both participants.Β
I'm not insisting you have an obligation. I'm just telling you that you have the opportunity to do a good, kind, easy thing, and your reasoning that you don't believe it's good for me is a valid feeling to have, but is not a valid deduction to stand by.
-