Dear Appletree123:

I read and re-read a lot of your posts on this thread. This is my current understanding:

Your main challenge is that strong emotions scare you a whole lot  and when you experience those, you automatically shut down and go numb.

You intensely crave a close, connected, intimate relationship with a man, but you are also scared of the strong emotions involved: it is very difficult for you to endure strong emotions.

With your current boyfriend, you are not so scared because you don’t feel very intensely for him. With him, “sometimes it feels I am invisible”- within a distant relationship, you get to be invisible- to not experience the strong emotions you fear. But with the man before, you got to be like Rose in Titanic (“Like that part in titanic with Rose on the edge of the ship”)- very visible. But the emotions were too scary, so overwhelmed, you left that edge-of-the-ship and went back to the belly of the ship, invisible and numb.

“I felt so much for the person I had the affair with. so much”- too much for comfort.

Regarding a possible future wedding, you wrote: “I have not really dreamed about the dress or the big day,  I just wanted a little ceremony in a forest ..somewhere quiet”- you try to avoid excitement because excitement, that is, a strong emotional experience scares you. Living with the other man would be like a big wedding party. Living with your current boyfriend is like a small wedding ceremony- not exciting but also not so scary.

“True love to me is when you feel so comfortable around someone and relaxed”- well, you can’t experience true love for long because it is very uncomfortable for you, and the opposite of relaxing.

Clues as to why it is so difficult for you to endure strong emotions are in the fact that you spent a lot of time in a hospital or hospitals as a premature baby and later on, if I remember correctly, sick as a young child, as well as your father shouting and raging at you, feeling “anxious and trapped” and feeling that your family was crazy but that no one else noticed, only you, and so you were alone with … a crazy family (“I felt very anxious and trapped… ‘my family is crazy’ but no  one else saw it”).

I think that a second try to take an SSRI medication prescribed and monitored by a responsible psychiatrist/ medical doctor is probably a good idea for you. Fear is a powerful force and an SSRI that will work- will take the edge of your emotions and make it possible for you to endure emotions. While on an effective SSRI, you can continue guided meditations, yoga, hopefully effective psychotherapy, so to increase your endurance of strong emotions without the use of psychiatric drugs.

anita