Dear Narsil:

Reads to me that the fantasy you built regarding this relationship (“every moment spent together was so  perfect, our bond so strong.. we were absolutely perfect, nothing could ever go wrong with us”) was about experiencing the opposite of your childhood experience.

The more distressing a child’s reality, the more fantastic is her imaginings of a future reality.

Your intrusive thoughts: “what if I don’t love him anymore”, imagine a child wondering: what if my mother doesn’t love me, and this is why she is saying these hurtful things to me, or maybe she doesn’t love me and that is why she is nice to those other people, but not to me. Scary thoughts. What if what is happening with you now is a reactivation of such thoughts with a twist: what if I don’t love him?

When you finally moved in with him after a mostly long distance relationship, your reaction was: “I had the worst panic attack I had ever experienced in my life.. everything was a lie.. I started vomiting, trembling, hyperventilating for hours”- maybe it is an activation of your experience as a child, the fear of being stuck in a home where everything was indeed a lie.

Your therapist suggested that “the source of these thoughts.. are linked to a feeling of disappointment (reality vs. fantasy)”, reads to me that the source of these thoughts and anxiety is fear, not disappointment, a re-activation of a fear-filled childhood experience.

When we look back as adults at our childhood, and we don’t remember extreme abuse of the horror movies kind or something to match abuse stories we heard others have experienced, we don’t think that we were really afraid. But it doesn’t take that much to scare a child. For a child, to be alone is very scary, to feel scared for any reason but not have anyone to hold the child and comfort her, that is very scary. For a child, to be alone, unseen or unheard, day after day, month after month, year after year, that is enough to cause chronic anxiety.

I wonder if you discussed your childhood with your therapist?

anita