Dear lisa:

A summary of what you shared so far: you are a 58 year old woman, no children. You lived alone for most of your life, “very independent… really like to be in control”. But you also “enjoy having an intimate connection with someone… enjoy being in a relationship”, and you “do want a special man in (your) life”.

The problem is that you also feel “trapped… boxed in” relationships, once they get serious, and your anxiety while in relationships that get serious goes up. You would like to have a serious relationship with a man where you will not be stressed, be relaxed instead.

Your parents’ marriage was not healthy, your father verbally and emotionally abused your mother. You remember “feeling sorry for, and angry with (your) mom for staying, and being treated so badly”, and you remember thinking, as a child: “I will never let myself get trapped in a relationship that is so awful”

Your most recent relationship lasted about 15 months. You are currently on a dating website. You feel that you are not good at distinguishing between “must have” characteristics to look for in a man vs  “icing in the cake” characteristics, such as personality quicks.

Now my understanding at this point: as a child, witnessing your father abusing your mother, you felt very distressed, your anxiety was up. You were in practical terms boxed in and trapped in that awful marriage between your parents.

You empathized with your mother, felt great emotional pain seeing her unhappy in her marriage and you wanted very much to help her, protect her, or rescue her. You probably tried to help her, to make her happy in the small ways a child tries, maybe you talked with her about her marriage when you were a teenager, trying to help her understand better and exit that marriage, but your efforts failed.

As an adult, throughout your life so far, whenever you found yourself in a relationship with a man that started getting serious, you automatically felt boxed in and trapped and your anxiety automatically went up. In other words, you relived your childhood emotional experience. The only relief was to undo the relationship and return to the lower anxiety or calm of single life.

Within each getting-serious relationship you were alarmed by any personality quirk you observed, suspecting the quirk to be an abusive element, and that the man is or is soon-to-become abusive. These repeating alarms and doubt kept your anxiety up.

As a child, observing your parents’ marriage, you were too young to understand why that marriage was awful, and later, you weren’t objective enough to understand, your strong empathy and anger at your mother didn’t allow objective understanding. Therefore, you suspect any trivial thing about a man to mean an abusive relationship to come about.

I think therapy with a capable therapist is a good idea. If you want to examine parts of your previous relationships with me, maybe one of those, so to gain better understanding of what makes a relationship healthy and what makes it awful (what about a man is trivial and what is truly alarming),  you can share with me and I will look into it with you.

anita