Dear Danielle:

I think you are a very intelligent young woman. Unfortunately your anxiety cannot be located, analyzed and resolved with intelligence alone. The answers, the information you need is in your heart, the “emotional mind” as my therapist called it. To access the emotional mind, therapy with a competent, capable, empathetic therapist you can trust will do.

You are young. If you do good therapy, and work hard, you can make your life so much better soon enough. You’ve been suffering from anxiety/OCD for too long. Really, there is help for this and I do hope you get the help you need. You deserve to be well, to feel okay, to stop struggling.

Calm down best you can, take deep breaths, and look forward to the healing work you will be doing, I hope, in therapy and in between sessions (My therapist used to give me homework, audio meditations to listen to, handouts to read and answer…).

Your boyfriend, from all your accounts, reads like a good young man who loves you a whole lot. Rest in his arms, hush your thoughts, rest.

anita