Dear Danielle:

You don’t trust him. It is an issue of trust. When we are in a relationship with a person we don’t trust we feel not in control, because we don’t know when and how they will betray us. Feeling not in control makes us feel unsafe. So we try to be in control. I am thinking this is what the dominant women in your family have been doing. And I don’t think all of them have OCD.

A few posts ago I wrote to you that I had tunnel vision about your OCD, that I want to look around (have peripheral vision), and see other factors in the bigger picture. Trust is in the bigger picture.

We can look more at either one of the following, or both:

1. Your history of trust: trust/distrust between you and your mother (those interrogations…?), between you and your father/ step father; witnessing their trust/ distrust in each other.

2. Your boyfriend: if you want, make a short list of his behaviors that cause you to distrust him. No commentary in that list, no expressing your thoughts and feelings about the items on the list,  only the specific behaviors, an example: he kissed an ex girlfriend when we were broken up. Another example: I asked him dozens of times for six months if he kissed a girl while we were broken up and he lied, saying he did not.

anita