Dear Vivian:

“I felt madly in love”, you wrote, as if it’s a good or desirable thing to be madly anything.  Madness is insanity, a mental disorder, “a behavioral or mental pattern that may cause suffering or poor ability to function” (Wikipedia). Let’s fix the madness then by looking at your mental pattern aka thoughts, see if they are congruent with reality or distorted, and if they are distorted, let’s correct these thoughts so that they are congruent with reality (the principle behind CBT).

In the following 4 items,  I will quote your thoughts that I believe to be distorted and correct them to thoughts that I believe are congruent with reality:

1. About your boyfriend: “He is perfect in my eyes”- no, he is not  perfect. (And better that he is not perfect in your eyes)!

2. “He saved me”- no, he didn’t. (If he saved you, you wouldn’t be the severely anxious person that you are while he is in your life)!

3. “He is my everything”- no, he isn’t. (He is definitely not your peace of mind)!

4. “He is truly the most wonderful, kind, funny, smart, helpful, caring, adorable human being I have ever met”- not necessarily so. (I don’t think that you know him long enough to determine these things, plus I can’t trust this sentence when it is said by a “madly in love” person)!

Let’s look at how it happened that you got so scared: “He is perfect.. He is my everything.. He is perfect in my eyes and I want him in my life.. everything was so perfect”- no wonder you got scared: when a person believes that they met a Perfect Everything Savior (PES), and part of the person knows that no human is a PES, than the person gets scared, scared of waking up to the reality that .. this young man, a teenager (?) is only human.

“I felt madly in love with him and then about a month ago, in literally a split second, I thought ‘What if I don’t love him anymore’. It was so sudden”- a thought takes only a second or two, a thought therefore is a sudden occurrence, nothing unusual with a thought being “so sudden”.

* “the second something gets comfortable, I get really anxious and think that I don’t love the person anymore”- you mentioned this as a pattern, having happened in a previous relationship. This is most likely related to your childhood experience which I wrote to you about in my previous post.

Please take your time before you respond to this post, and when you are ready, do address each item that I brought up here.

anita