Hey Confused:

Your mother’s input regarding her partner was inappropriate. She should have shared those things with another adult, not with a child, and particularly not with her own minor-age son!

Why did this come up with her? I don’t know
Maybe because you felt safer with her for a long time than you did with other romantic interests prior to her.

Yes, you can change internal things about yourself, like core beliefs ( such as what is love, really, true love, that is), and you can change old adaptations (managing other people’s emotions), as well as becoming more authentic. It takes time, persistence, and that thing you mentioned 🙂 patience.

Can you reactivate your feelings for her? I think 🤔 that if the pressure (to manage her feeling, the pressure of feeling responsible for her feelings) alleviates- then your loving feelings for her may return.

What surely doesn’t work is pressure to feel.

🤍 Anita

Good morning, Confused:

This morning, processing some of what you shared yesterday in your many posts, I feel like I understand you better than ever.

Your first reaction to her poem was genuine appreciation, but immediately afterward, your mind flipped into: “I SHOULD feel more.”, “I’m a bad person if I don’t.”, “Now I have to be careful not to hurt her.”, “She’s really into me — now I’m responsible.”-

This is not a reaction to love; it’s a reaction to expectation, pressure, and fear of disappointing her.

“I feel responsible for other people’s emotions”- This is the biggest theme in everything you shared. You interpret friends wanting you around → burden, girlfriend expressing love → pressure, people including you → obligation

Your therapist’s observation is spot‑on: you don’t receive love as love. You receive it as demand, expectation, or dependency.

Everything you described points to a deep belief: “Love is conditional. If I don’t meet expectations, I’ll hurt people or be abandoned.” So, when someone loves you, you don’t feel joy — you feel pressure to live up to it.

When someone expresses affection, you don’t feel warmth — you feel fear of failing them. When someone depends on you, you don’t feel valued — you feel trapped. It’s a protective emotional style built from years of learning that love = responsibility.

For people who grew up feeling they had to earn love, affection can feel like a demand (to live up to it, to justify it, to work hard to maintain it), not a gift. So, instead of joy, you feel obligation, fear of failing and emotional shutdown.

You wrote: “I don’t feel excitement when receiving love or gifts”- when you grow up with conditional affection, you internalize the idea that love = pressure, and you learn to perform emotions so to keep the peace.

People (like me and you) who grew up in homes where their genuine feelings weren’t safe, welcomed, or effective, adapt by showing the emotions that would maintain harmony (emotions that will be effective) rather than the ones they truly felt. So, instead of expressing disappointment, confusion, or discomfort, they learned to smile, act grateful, or appear excited because it prevented conflict or criticism. Over time, they internalized the belief that people only accept them when they react the “right” way.

This creates a lifelong habit of managing other people’s emotions, meaning taking responsibility for how other people feel and adjusting your own behavior, reactions, or emotional expression to keep them stable, happy, or un-upset.

It’s a pattern that develops early in life in environments where other people’s (often a parent’s) moods were unpredictable, demanding, dangerous, or easily triggered. So, instead of simply having your own emotional experience, you become hyper‑attuned to what others might feel and you shape your words, tone, and reactions to prevent conflict, disappointment, or tension.

Over time, this becomes automatic: you smile when you’re uncomfortable, act excited so no one feels let down, hide your needs to avoid burdening others, or soften your opinions to keep the peace. The result is that you stop expressing your authentic emotions and instead perform the emotions that will keep the situation smooth.

Managing other people’s emotions is the internal responsibility, feeling like it’s your job to keep others calm, happy, or stable, adjusting your reactions so they don’t get upset, monitoring their mood more than your own, and believing their emotional state depends on you. It is hard work and it’s exhausting. That’s why love feels like pressure, affection feels like obligation, gifts feel like expectations, and emotional closeness feels like a burden

Managing other people’s emotions is people‑pleasing, but on a deeper level. It’s a protective strategy that once helped you feel relatively safe, but now makes relationships feel heavy, pressured, and exhausting.

In my mind, it’s no wonder you shut down emotionally.

What do you think, Confused, does this resonate?

🤍🌿 Anita

Did your mother complain to you that he (the man in her life who happened to be your father) used her? Led her on? Passed his time until he got bored with her?

And you’re afraid being that kind of guy?

(just checking, maybe yes, maybe not)

“that I hold something fragile”- I know the answer is right here, or should I say, the core of the answer.

What’s fragile in you, Confused? What are you afraid might break?

When you realized “things were getting more serious”, you felt that .. ??

Redefine “love”?

Love is not arguing, fighting, causing hurt, being hurt

Love is being calm, helping, not hurting.

Too many people, too many mothers are not capable of loving. They have moments of feeling and expressing affection within a continuum of hurting and harming.

The moments of affection are not love when harm keeps being perpetrated against the “loved one”

Not wanting to escape the feelings that you liked so much, I am thinking, but wanting (subconsciously) to escape feelings you wouldn’t like AT ALL, like what shows up on the other side of love (what you experienced as a child, the arguing, the violence)?

Remember you said that you don’t remember if you dissociated as a child ((I think you said it early on, Dec 19)?

Well, my guess is that you did like any child would, and you “forgot” how badly it felt when love (your mother’s affection) turned into arguing and violence.

And what you’re trying to escape is not love and affection but what followed it, in your early, real-life experience.

🤔 Anita

Hey Confused:

I wasn’t thinking that you used her as an escape. I was thinking that the fact that it was a LDR was an escape from the stress a close physical proximity relationship would have caused.

Coming to think 🤔 about it.. is the shutdown an escape in itself?

Escape from feelings?

I have no doubt the two of you had genuinely loving exchanges.

🤔 (I love this emoji, lol) Anita