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Relationship OCD?

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Viewing 15 posts - 31 through 45 (of 67 total)
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  • #115381
    Anonymous
    Guest

    You are welcome, Midnight. Anytime.
    anita

    #115398
    Nina Sakura
    Participant

    Dear midnight,

    Were these worries always there when you started dating him or they happened more after the bad times started?

    I have often observed that anxiety is more a learned response to a past incident – our mind and body are on high alert though we logically know that this response isn’t the appropriate one to the situation.

    I see this anxiety in myself a lot too – especially in relationships – Its like my mind has some interpretation of me as the “victim”, the snubbed and God knows what. The irony is in the long distance situation, one day he behaves a bit distant (doesn’t reply to my texts, seems too busy etc), the Pandora’s box gets opened.

    What i am afraid of is feeling like i am not needed, that i am a burden of some sort and to avoid feeling this, i have often been distant about my feelings to people – i hate appearing needy in any way but i cant stand being away from my partner either.

    In essence, “I want to be needed but i dont want to need.”

    See how these are contradictions which are inter-related too?

    A good way to understand your inner contradictions is regular journaling – recording those raw thoughts, voices in the head and then objectively seeing what they commonly look like after a while and then to sort of work backwards and understand what are the specific moments that trigger this – sort of reaching the core belief behind it.

    And then to question the core belief – sometimes its done by going into one’s childhood and sometimes its by a process of direct rationalization through various techniques. The childhood way didn’t work me, so rationalization it is for me – Having a critical mind has its blessings and curse.

    I wont say that the insecure me is gone – she will always be here – that critical voice is there still, its just that I choose not to give her that kind of power anymore.

    An analogy, albeit a strange one: It reminds me a bit of Josh Nash in a beautiful mind with those people he keeps seeing -Charles got created when he craved a friend, Marcy got created as an offshoot of Charles. The military man got created when he felt snubbed by the military for his ingenious contributions. they talk to him but over time, he knows they aren’t real and after a point, he learns to ignore them and gives them less power. There is more to his mind than these shadows, there is more to his life than what these doubts tell him.

    My apologies for going off on a different tangent on this post – i hope that my experiences may have provided you with an idea or two.

    Regards,
    Nina

    #115401
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Nina,

    Thank you for your response, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, they did make me think about a few points.

    I do hate to feel like I’m a burden or like people need to make a special effort for me, and anything in that family.

    There is a contradiction within me as you described, because on the one hand I really need to have my own space and to be left alone a lot, on the other hand I strangely always chose partners who were very emotionally and technically available to me, meaning they had time to spend with me and wanted to be with me a lot, and this was possible because they worked from home or other life circumstances allowed for that. I never dated a busy career man who gets home late. So I am trying to figure out what this means – do I then take on the role of the busy, somehow distant one, who gets to feel needed without feeling needy, but whose needy side is perfectly satisfied by this constant, reassuring presence? At the same time I don’t really enjoy feeling needed or depended upon, it’s quite a turn off for me. And I do need space, probably more than most people.

    Sorry this is coming out a bit confused and I am not answering completely to what you wrote, I guess I just took from what you said something that started this chain of thought and tried to explore it.

    And I do understand what you meant by your analogy at the end, although I’m not familiar with your reference.

    Thank you for your insights.

    #115402
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    I continued to think about what you said regarding my experiences with my brother possibly being somehow related to my current issues.

    I was wondering if maybe you could elaborate a bit more on how you think this kind of connection would be created – how and why would it create this kind of pattern?
    The people I always dated were always very different from my brother and I never felt unsafe with them – meaning they never yelled or hit or did anything like that, so I don’t think I am somehow re-creating my relationship with him and reliving the same emotions. I’m not saying you suggested that I was, just trying to explore different ideas.

    I know you don’t have the answers as no one can really know, I was just wondering if you maybe had some guesses or insights which could help me make some more sense of that idea.

    Thank you.

    #115405
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    Your feelings of distress when associating with others preceded romantic relationships. It happened with friends before it happened with romantic partners: “I sometimes had that reaction with friends too when I was younger, I would feel that the friendship or the person was somehow weighing on me and getting me anxious and I would find some way, or excuse, to distance myself from that friend.”

    Your associations with those friends meant danger to you. How do I know? Because you wrote above, in your quote, that you were anxious (fearful) and you felt the need to distance yourself (flight is one of the three reactions to danger: fight, flight, freeze).

    Why did a friend meant danger to you when that friend (and later romantic partner) was not abusive to you?

    Because you had a prior ongoing experience with a person who did mean danger to you when you were very young, when your brain was forming (during those Formative Years of childhood). And so your brain formed a connection between a person you feel close to and danger.

    You wrote: “I was feeling trapped and scared sometimes around my brother, he was a few years older than me and would terrorize me quite a lot when my parents were away. I did feel trapped in that situation with him when we were alone in the house, I kept waiting for my parents to get back from work so that I would feel safe again…I was scared and angry, feeling that I hated him and feared him and that I didn’t feel protected in that situation”

    You wrote it and this is how I know it was your older brother who scared you; your older brother who was the danger in your childhood. It’s right there in your quote.

    You wrote: “I also remember some fun moments with him, but to be honest I usually ended up crying because he would play with me sometimes when he had nothing better to do, then would get bored of it and would find some way to make me cry or feel stupid and worthless. So what was before a fun, exciting situation for me, playing with my big brother, would turn into a mess of feeling hurt and wretched. He would also hit me quite a lot.”

    You looked up to your older brother. He was the one with you when your parents were out. When you had fun with him that felt wonderful and safe but that safety was shattered when he abused you.

    You wrote: “but I guess all of that seemed and still seems to all of us as a more or less normal situation of siblings..” At the time, he was not an equally powerful sibling to you. You wrote yourself that he was “so much older and stronger so he had all the power”: no equal power sibling situation here. Reality was you were alone with a much older and stronger person who had all the power.

    You wrote: “But even saying all that I find it hard to believe this could be the cause, because a relationship with a brother certainly can’t be as important and determining as a relationship with a parent, can it?”

    My answer: yes, a relationship with a brother can be as important when the sibling is “so much older and stronger so he had all the power”- and you are often enough alone with him, unprotected and unsupervised.

    Midnight, how long have you been seeing your current therapist? What do you think is the reason that such a crucial piece of information was not looked at by now in your therapy?

    anita

    #115406
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    Thank you for taking the time to explain this further, and for being so comprehensive about all of this . I do understand what you are saying.

    I have been seeing my therapist for over two years now. I did tell him about this I believe. I believe he thinks my anxiety has another source which we still didn’t find. He seems to think there is a part of me that “kills things off” when things become close or alive with other people or even with myself. I believe he thinks the reason is more related to my parents, but he usually doesn’t answer direct or general questions so much such as “why is this happening”, because I think he doesn’t want to label me or my experiences or impose one interpretation on me.

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Midnight.
    #115407
    Midnight
    Participant

    I will tell him about this conversation with you when I see him and see if he has any thoughts.

    #115416
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    You wrote: “he usually doesn’t answer direct or general questions so much such as ‘why is this happening’, because I think he doesn’t want to label me or my experiences or impose one interpretation on me.”

    I am not happy to write the following: I think you may very well have an incompetent therapist. Two years is way too long to direct the attention away from this crucial information that here, in less than two days you described clearly.

    How can he not be aware that childhood experiences with an older sibling are often enough very powerful? This is far from being unheard of. He should have come across this common theme in his education, if not in his experience.

    Perhaps his motivation in being indirect and vague is monetary. The fact that he has a professional certificate does not exclude such possible (and not unheard of) motivation.

    anita

    #115422
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    Thank you for sharing these thoughts with me, you are being very direct and I appreciate that.

    You could be right about the therapy, but then again maybe my issues are more complex than that, I really don’t know. It is hard to tell what is the cause of these issues as it is probably a mixture of things, not just my experiences with my brother. Some of that is related to misconceptions I have about love and relationships, some to my judgmental nature, some to my mother and my father and the kind of people they are… I don’t know if it’s just one thing, although I do agree with you that these experiences might have been more traumatic than I assumed and I thank you for pointing me in that direction.
    I think we could assume that the feeling of fear and lack of safety (although I am not sure it is exactly the same feeling as I have now) might have been “born” during these early years, but then so much other stuff contributed to these issues becoming what they are now, stuff like thoughts and ideas and misconceptions and life experiences, that to resolve these issues it probably wouldn’t be enough to find the cause or the initial source.
    What do you think?

    I really don’t know how competent my therapist is, all I know is that I feel I can trust him and that it does help me to see him, although it might not be going as quickly as I would wish. I will speak to him about this and see what he says.
    I don’t think I would like to change therapists right now, but I am quite likely to move to another city in the next year and a half anyway so if things don’t get better by then I will probably find another therapist after I move.

    Thank you for your presence and support, it really helps.

    #115425
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    You are welcome. You wrote: “my issues are more complex than that… It is hard to tell what is the cause of these issues as it is probably a mixture of things, not just my experiences with my brother….so much other stuff contributed to these issues becoming what they are now”

    There is no way to map out a complete diagram of all the issues, all the experiences you had through the decades and determine what caused what percentage of your current experience.

    My therapist taught me the concept of having a Beginner’s Mind: looking at things as if for the first time. And so, there was this very significant experience with your older brother. (Of course, there is the element of your parents not protecting you from him, not supervising; ignoring the symptoms of distress you must have exhibited).

    Healing is not about a dry intellectual analysis. A complete analysis of a lifetime is impossible, simply impossible. But healing is very possible without complete analysis.

    The reason it is crucial, not optional but necessary for healing, for you to explore the experiences with your brother is for this purpose: once- through time, gradually, with a competent, honest therapist- adequately integrate those experiences into your awareness, the thoughts and feelings that characterize your ROCD, which focus on your husband, will be peeled off from their current object (your husband) and will connect to their rightful object: your brother.

    anita

    #115433
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    I have given a lot of thought to what you have said, I believe you could be right about this even if like we discussed, it might not be the whole story. Still it does seem like it could be an important part of it.

    If we take as a given the idea that a lot of these connections exist in the subconscious mind, then I did have a dream a while back which felt meaningful to me and which featured my brother and my husband in some ways that could support this theory. I would rather not tell it here as it is too personal to share on the internet but it is an interesting starting point.

    I will keep exploring that, thank you so much for your help. I can see that you are very active on the forum and I really admire your courage and energy in helping other people so much, I think it is quite obvious you are a very kind and good person.

    #115481
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    Thank you. I appreciate your kind words. Anytime you want my input, post and I will reply.

    anita

    P.S. you responded very well to my direct, straight forward, clear (not vague) input. If you agree and prefer this method to vagueness, request that from your therapist…?

    #115491
    Midnight
    Participant

    Thank you Anita, that’s a good point.
    I’ll look into that, hopefully I will have some more optimistic updates to share soon.

    #115510
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    I just read your replies to another thread and I am very impressed by the intelligence and wisdom you expressed so clearly. You have my Wow. Looking for ward to the updates you mentioned, and to any post by you otherwise.

    anita

    #115530
    Midnight
    Participant

    Thank you, Anita, this is really kind of you to say.

    It is easier to see clearly through other people’s troubles than it is to see through my own:)

    I do like to help other people if I can, I just don’t always have the time to do that because of work etc. But you have inspired me to take the time today and try to be there for someone else, the way you and other people here were there for me when I stumbled upon this forum looking for some help.

    Thank you for your kind words, I always enjoy reading your posts and find them very inspiring.

Viewing 15 posts - 31 through 45 (of 67 total)

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