I Don't Belong To You - Sneak Peek!

I Don't Belong to You: What Is Inside Will Come Out

When you are in a relationship with someone and there are things inside you that have not been dealt with, it will show up. Not only will it show up, it will kick and scream until you acknowledge it. You have to name the things that you haven't dealt with to be able to expel them! #MESSAGE.

I couldn't put my finger on the "problem" though. Everything seemed right. I wasn't living with my parents anymore. I had a cute boyfriend, a contented way of living, work wasn't "outrageous," and I was acting, which was always enough for me. Joey and I were more than public—we didn't have to hide our relationship anymore—yet I still wasn't "happy."

I thought all of that should have made me happy, but still I wasn't. It didn't help that I couldn't speak to Joey. It didn't make sense to me that I was unhappy in our relationship and he wasn't. I didn't understand how he could act like, in the very least, MY unhappiness didn't affect him. It seemed so fake, almost like he was doing it on purpose, pretending there was nothing wrong when there obviously was.

This was my first experience with emotional unavailability outside of my family. Emotional unavailability was my family dynamic, I thought it was attached to THEM. To experience it outside their home was so disappointing. I didn't know what to call it then, but Joey was emotionally unattached. He couldn't properly address his feelings and definitely not his feelings for me. He would even tell me that he loved me but that he didn't have the ability to be affectionate and/or show in general his disposition. #POKERFACE. I couldn't break through his emotional walls and that made the relationship hard, especially when it came to dealing with our problems.

The fact that he was "self-employed" but lacked self- discipline was wearing on me. He wasn't consistent in his work. The real problem was he lacked certainty in himself (how funny the people in your life mirror your issues). One day when we were living at his mom's I came across three or four college applications, which he had started but didn't finish, and I soon realized he never finished anything. Our relationship became a push and pull of him and me depending on each other to make the other happy. It was depleting us both without us even realizing the cause.

When things went wrong, I would try to fix him or help him—and he became dependent on me for a lot of things. He and I thought that that was love, the fact that I encouraged his co-dependency by setting no boundaries and doing everything for him. My tendency was to let that happen, but in truth I hated that burden because it was all too familiar.

I started to realize that I was staying in a relationship that was dragging me down. I was holding on to something that wasn't good anymore because I was afraid of letting go and being alone, really alone.

As my resentment grew, my darkness started showing up: old bad habits/defense mechanisms.#HURTPEOPLEHURTPEOPLE. Sometimes I went off on him just to get a rise out of him. I couldn't express MY pain and the fact that he couldn't see I was hurting caused me, I think, to subconsciously show him through making him feel that same hurt. And just like that, our relationship became physically and emotionally abusive, and mostly on my part. Sometimes we think only guys can be abusive, and it's not true. Things can get out of hand for anyone when you have feelings you ain't dealt with. There was one time in the middle of the night when we got into a crazy fight. I should say morning because it was like three a.m. and I wanted him to leave! He wouldn't, and he wouldn't let me leave. I was texting my best friend, Jamie, the whole time and like in a movie she hopped out of her bed without question and came to pick me up. He left when he realized I'd called her to come, but when she dropped me off the next morning he somehow was right on the couch.

He never hit me, but we fought for the first two years of living together. I started to feel so ashamed, as if I was turning into the monster that I promised myself I would never become. This wasn't me!! Who was this?? How did I end up on this end of it, how? I thought to myself.

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Thanks for reading, and come back next Friday for another all-new excerpt! Visit my site (kekepalmer.com) to preorder I DON'T BELONG TO YOU and to find out where I'll be appearing next!