Dear K:

I read your new thread and the previous ones. This is what I figure: when you were about the ages of 7- 13, you witnessed your mother in emotional pain because your father cheated on her, “Watching her in so much pain”. Your empathy for your mother was complete and therefore you felt her pain, you felt her hurt and her anger at your father. Her hurt and her anger  became yours.

Fast forward, “as soon as (your current boyfriend) lets go of my hand or takes longer to text back”, your childhood hurt and anger are activated. Fear also gets activated, fear that there will be hurt and anger after he cheats on you, or leaves you, if he does.

“All this anxiety makes me start to wonder if it’s paranoia or is it intuition”- it is not intuition; it is your childhood hurt, anger and fear getting activated. Here are indications of your anger getting activated: “I.. leave without saying goodbye, get mad”.

In June 2018, you were dating someone for two years at that point. You wrote then: “now that I’ve started to fall in love I have this constant paranoia that he is (cheating). Every time his phone goes off I think it’s a woman… he has never once given me a reason not to (trust him), but anytime I see him on his phone the thought comes up again”-

– what you called paranoia is the fear of childhood, the fear, hurt and anger that you experienced by proxy, because of your empathy for your mother and taking in her experience as if it was yours, as if you experienced it personally.

You wrote June 18: “as for other relationships it’s been the same thing. I would eventually ruin those relationships by breaking it off because I had a ‘feeling’ they were with someone else”-

– to no longer have your childhood experience get activated in your present life, in your relationships with men, including a good man, like your current boyfriend, you will need to acknowledge and process that childhood experience.

Did you attend or consider attending psychotherapy?

anita