Dear Danielle:

I understand your desire to be free of distress, to enjoy the present. How to make it happen, is the question. One way to stop the reoccurring obsession with your boyfriend lying to you and/ or hooking up with another woman is to end the relationship so that you don’t have a boyfriend to obsess about. Keeping the relationship, what can you do?

1. Gain insight as to the motivation behind the obsession, which could be those interrogations by your mother regarding your step father, how she didn’t believe you and you started doubting yourself. That very doubt can be the motivation, doubt in your own knowing of what happened extending to doubt in knowing what happened with your boyfriend in the past.

2. Learn skills to practice when you experience obsessive thoughts and disengage from them. As you feel the distress associated with those thoughts you focus on how the distress feels in your body. As you do, you stop thinking. The thoughts are like vehicles that carry that distress around and around in your brain, making the distress ongoing. When you stop the thoughts, you force the fear outside the vehicles that carry it and it stops getting around. It dissipates, evaporates. An emotion by itself is time-limited. If not attached to a thought it doesn’t last and last.

anita