Dear Katie:

You are welcome!

You wrote: “Not that a conversation with her about it would change anything. Or would it? What do you do when you recognize why you are the way you are? What’s the next step?”

I don’t think a conversation with her will change anything except keep you stuck. You already had enough of a conversation and she reacted by being defensive. More conversation is likely to bring more of the same reaction.

As to your second question, when you recognize where your anxiety is coming from (your mother’s closeness/withdrawal pattern of behaviors with you during your formative years), what you do next is not to look for the solution in your mother and in a relationship with her. This is where the problem comes from, and where the defensiveness is still the reaction.

You look for a solution not in your relationship with your mother (I can’t stress this enough), but in your relationships with other people, be it a psychotherapist (may be necessary), or any other person in your life, including the guy you are seeing. The next step is to weaken the connection formed in your brain between relationships and fear of abandonment/ withdrawal.

You can’t will this connection to be weaker. It takes courage and support from another (therapist perhaps) to open yourself to a different relationship experience than the one that formed you, a relationship where you can trust the other person to be reasonably consistent. Once you experience this, the connection I mentioned will weaken.

You mentioned that when you talked about your feelings with other men, when you discussed the status of a relationship, that caused the ending of those. If you share what you discussed with other men, paraphrase your wordings to them, it may help me see if there is a problem with your input and how to better communicate so to create that different experience that you need (with the right man, one who is indeed consistent).

anita