Dear Lena:

You wrote that you clicked with him “on a level that’s hard to express and reminds me of being a child, when things were much less complicated”, and that “sometimes we would just look at each other, or hold hands, and it was magical. It felt like I knew him. Something about the way he looked at me felt so familiar; I got the overwhelming feeling sometimes that he reminded me of someone”.

We forget how it felt to be a young child. We didn’t feel separate from others, there was a magic in being together with others- no suspicions, no distrust, no self consciousness, no doubts, no overthinking- but a feeling of safety and great comfort. If you think of every person in the young child’s life (before separation) as a flame, then every person- and pet- was the child’s twin flame.

And then life happened that caused you to experience the “‘anxious’ attachment style” you mentioned, and him- to experience “really deep-seated issues that prevent him from fully connecting romantically with someone”.

I am guessing that as a child, feeling anxious, someone in your life back then did something similar to what S did: “he would look at me from across the room and wiggle his eyebrows or do something ridiculous to make me laugh”- some adult in your early childhood noticed that you were anxious and tried to make you feel better. I think S reminds you of that person who made you laugh, and had “something lighthearted and positive about him”, unlike the heaviness and negativity about one of your parents, or both.

“It just felt really good to be around him, in an effortless way”- as a child, from one point on, it required effort on your part to be around any one of your parents, or both. It required that you choose your words, or facial expressions and pretend something that you were not, that you be on guard.

If we started life as flames and every person was our twin flame, increasingly as older children, teenagers and adults we become separate from others and ourselves, separate from the simple, effortless life that used to be, to just be ourselves with no part of us observing and criticizing ourselves.

I want to trust myself enough to live more spontaneously, less self consciously, less critical of myself, less on guard- like a child.

anita