Is Our Relationship Doomed?

What an excellent question. Before you focus what to do or not do, I want to help you become clearer on what I believe is your girlfriend's motivation for staying in touch with the ex. I recommend sharing all this with her.

If you've been reading my columns for a while, or have read my book, Till Death Do Us Part (Unless I Kill You First) you probably have heard me talk about the repetition compulsion. This compulsion is an unconscious mechanism that drives us to repeat childhood abuse or trauma in the hopes of healing it.
One symptom of this compulsion is the uncontrollable need to keep returning to a bad partner or the inability to end a bad relationship. The reason we resist giving up the relationship, no matter how destructive or dead-end it may seem is because the unconscious believes that giving up the partner means giving up any hope of healing our childhood wound. This is why we stay in the ring and keep on struggling and swinging. To give up the relationship or contact with the partner would feel like giving up the hope of healing our own wounds. Read my book as well as my articles on unfinished business and repetition compulsion for a deeper understanding.

Your girlfriend has all but said this is what is happening for her. She says she cannot let him go. Now you know why.

As for you, you have good reason to worry that someone is going to get hurt. Your own unconscious mind is warning you that her need to work through her wound is drawing her back to him. You sense there is a risk that she might resume her relationship and drop you. This is a very real possibility.

I would tell her all this. Then I would explain to her that she is never going to heal her wound by returning to him. This is because her ex is as damaged as was the parent who abused her in childhood. This means that the ex is as incapable of giving her any more or any better than her parent could.

Rather than returning to the empty well of her ex, your girlfriend needs to work on healing the wound inside herself. The process consists of identifying the wound she suffered; figuring out what she needed as a child and didn't receive (her Happy Ending) and then giving this healing to herself (literally by re-parenting herself). She can also enlist you to help her in this healing by allowing you to give her the kind of treatment she needed way back when. I go into full detail about how to do this healing in my book. Obviously, I don't have enough space to go into further detail in this column.

Let me know how you both make out.