Going to therapy is hard enough on its own. Actually doing the homework your therapist assigns you is a completely different battle. When you finally find a coping mechanism that actively heals your childhood trauma, your partner should be your absolute biggest cheerleader. Unfortunately for one guy on Reddit, his girlfriend decided to take his mental health journey as a massive personal attack.
The Original Poster is a thirty year old man who grew up in a household where absolutely nothing was ever celebrated. If he got a perfect grade on a test, his parents barely reacted. Birthdays were treated like a standard, unexciting Tuesday. Because of this deeply unsupportive upbringing, he grew into an adult who totally sucks at recognizing anything good in his own life.
To combat this ingrained negativity, his therapist gave him a brilliant piece of homework. The OP was instructed to start writing down small wins in a cheap little notebook before bed. He jotted down tiny, daily victories like forcing himself to go to the gym when he wanted to rot in bed or successfully keeping his cool during a highly stressful work meeting. It was a simple, innocent exercise that actually started fixing his brain.
Enter his twenty eight year old girlfriend. When she first noticed him scribbling away at night, she asked about the notebook and thought the concept was incredibly sweet. But over the course of a single month, her opinion morphed into complete and utter paranoia. She somehow convinced herself that this private mental health tool was actually a secret weapon designed to constantly judge her.
Whenever the OP wrote in his notebook after they hung out, his girlfriend would aggressively ask if he was grading their time together. She started making deeply passive aggressive jokes about not wanting to end up in the notebook for doing something wrong. She took a tool meant to heal his childhood trauma and made it entirely about her own insecurities.
The OP desperately tried to deescalate the bizarre situation. He patiently explained that the notebook was literally not about her at all. It is a personal log of his own brain chemistry and daily habits. He even reassured her that on the rare occasions she did make an appearance in the notebook, it was exclusively for positive things like surprising him with a coffee and making his day.
But logic does not work on someone suffering from terminal main character syndrome. The girlfriend doubled down on her ridiculous stance. She claimed that the positive entries still made her feel judged. In her twisted logic, if they hung out and the OP did not write a glowing review about her afterward, it meant she failed to do something notebook worthy. She completely manufactured a competition against a piece of stationary.
Exhausted by the constant interrogations, the OP offered a perfectly reasonable compromise. He told her he would just keep the notebook in his backpack and only write in it while sitting in his car or at his desk at work. He offered to completely remove the trigger from her physical presence so she would not have to look at it anymore.
You would think that would solve the problem, but toxic people always move the goalposts. The girlfriend rejected the compromise and accused him of sneaking around and keeping secrets. She essentially trapped him in a scenario where he was damned if he wrote in front of her and damned if he wrote in private.
Then she dropped the ultimate manipulative ultimatum. She demanded he throw the notebook away entirely. She looked a man in the eyes and told him that continuing to use a therapy tool prescribed by a medical professional meant he was choosing a notebook over her emotional comfort. That is not just a red flag, that is an entire crimson parade.
The internet is collectively begging this man to run for the hills. He is absolutely not the ahole here. You cannot light yourself on fire to keep your insecure partner warm. If your significant other actively tries to sabotage your mental health progress because they are not the center of attention, you do not throw away the notebook. You throw away the whole relationship. What would you write in your wins notebook if your partner pulled a stunt like this? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!