Reflectively, I tend to see a bit of myself in most of my clients. Hostility, involves forcefully wanting to validate invalidated evidence (Kelly, 1955). Shamefully, I hung on to a man who no longer wanted me for seven years. In my state of hostility, I convinced myself that he would one day love me and want to be with me. Hostility manifests in various forms in such relationships, e.g., over apologising even when you are not at fault, gifting too much, over-checking, settling for breadcrumbs, tolerating being gaslit, and rushing over to help when something goes wrong in his/her life. In the latter, although the rescuer self might whisper to you that you are helping just like you would help anyone, the underlying factor motivating you to rush to his/her aid is because you want him/her to see how much you love them, how loyal you are, and how useful you could be in their lives. You hostilely minimise, excuse, justify, or avoid evidence of your efforts not being appreciated. Instead, you become so committed to doing more with the hostile hope that you will be appreciated and seen by them one day. Indeed, sometimes people who display this trait might have a preoccupied attachment style, in which the individual has a negative view of himself/herself and a positive view of other people. Therefore, they need relationships for reassurance and to feel worthy and secure. In some cases, you find that the person struggles with the Charlie archetype, involving self-sacrificing tendencies. Although it might be difficult to accept, most people who enact this role in relationships have issues with feeling unwanted and disposable. Indeed, when you explore their background, you would most often find an experience of abandonment and rejection in which they felt worthless and construed the self as unlovable. Therefore, they hostilely cling to a particular relationship to undo their past experience of abandonment/rejection. Of course, sometimes someone might no longer want you because of something that you did or repeatedly did, resulting in them construing the relationship as unbearable. Alternatively, drawing on personal construct theory, you might find that your partner/spouse reconstrued themselves and the kind of relationship that they seek, resulting in them seeing that you are no longer a person with whom they have commonality. I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes we tend to over-personalise the sense of not being wanted anymore.
