It is coming up to two years since my boyfriend of four and a half years broke up with me. I had been having doubts about the relationship, but when he called it off I was overwhelmed by the rejection and spent the rest of the year heartbroken, forgetting the relationship wasn’t perfect. I moved to a new city shortly afterwards and have spent the past couple of years working on myself, my hobbies and personal relationships, and am in a happy space.

I am going to a wedding in four months’ time, and he and his new girlfriend will be there. Over the past few months I’ve had a recurring dream that on meeting her, I am disgustingly crude and rude to her. I say the most appallingly bitchy things to my friends (who are also friends of my ex) in order to make me feel better, but it only makes me look undignified. I hate the person I become in this dream, but the feelings of hatred I have towards this woman boil up inside me and even as I type this email, I feel a burning blackness in my heart. It is completely irrational.

I want to handle myself with class. I want to get over it, but these dreams stir up my feelings. I’m at a loss now, as time is not proving to be the healer it should be.

In your longer letter you also told me all about the great things you are doing: working full-time, studying for a master’s part-time, making new friends, being healthy. You say you are in a good place, and happy. All of which is excellent.

But there was a line in your letter which gave me a clue to your malaise and it was that your friends are mutual friends with your ex. So I wonder if you’ve been able, in real life, to really let rip and vent about the relationship, in the way people do when they split up.

Dreams can be horrible but they are not premonitions, nor do they mean you are a bad person. It’s what you do that matters, not what you think. We all need a place to let out our darkest side and, for most people, that stays in their head – as it should.

I consulted psychotherapist Chris Mills, who specialises in relationships. “You’re worried and confused because different parts of you seem at odds and are moving at different speeds. They seem in opposition but, actually, they are working together. The problem is that you’re much more comfortable with the rational, measured, forward-looking part of yourself than the primitive, vengeful, ferocious part.”

I wondered if you have had problems expressing anger: how did people react when you got angry as a child? Were you helped to work through these feelings, or did you learn to bottle them up? I think you need to look at this. It’s OK to be angry: sometimes appropriate anger is a great facilitator.

“As you say yourself,” Mills pointed out, “‘I became angry but it helped me to… move on’. It’s the rational part of you that was able to see the relationship was less than perfect. It’s the rational part of you that is allowing you to plan and strategise and give you the busy, fulfilling life you have now. But being angrily reactive is another part of who you are. We take enormous risks in the attachments we make and when we lose them – even if we choose to break up with someone ourselves – we can feel deep disturbance and panic.”

Don’t be afraid of the part of you that is having these negative feelings. It’s easy to blot them out and try to bury them. I used to, but then one day I decided to turn round and face them to find out what they were telling me and how I really felt. It’s a bit uncomfortable for a while, but it diffuses things. I asked Mills why you might be having this dream. He said that if we try to quash feelings repeatedly, our subconscious has a way of bringing them back to our attention.

So this wedding invitation has brought to the fore feelings you have buried. That’s good. Face them, absorb them as part of who you are. You don’t have to go to the wedding, of course, but I hope you do. Mills and I both agreed this seemed like a massive bottleneck of emotions and although Mills said you “might feel a bit down after the wedding”, he also feels that something will have cleared.

• Send your problem to annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.

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