Dear Scott:

Anxiety is the repeating experience of fear in the absence of danger. Again, there is no danger to you if the relationship with your girlfriend ends.

Try and let this sentence sink in: there is no danger to you if this relationship ends.

You wrote: “there is always something to lose” – correct. And anxious people fear losing all kinds of things. After all, a person can become fearful if their favorite TV show is cancelled on a particular night. Or if the person thinks: what if my show is cancelled! Does it sound ridiculous to you? Not to the person experiencing the fear. You can try to talk to that person, to tell him there is no danger here, but he feels the fear and fear is convincing.

Anxious people, most evident with people suffering from OCD, fear their thoughts. A thought itself is experienced as danger (I may lose my TV show, or I may lose my girlfriend). Thoughts are not dangerous. Neither are feelings, and so, fearing a thought and fearing a feeling is what anxiety is about: repeating, ongoing fear in the absence of danger.

You asked:”is the amount of worrying I’m doing normal or the type that I’m doing?” – the amount of your worrying is normal for an anxious person and not, for a person who is not anxious.

If you experienced a safe childhood, and not the fearful childhood that you did experience, you would not be anxious now.

If your aim is to heal from your present anxiety: individual work is one way. The other is directing your behavior when you communicate with her. If you don’t act fearfully in communication with her, you will, over time, weaken the fear. You can make a specific list of your fearful behaviors with her and make it an objective to no longer behave in those ways.

anita