Dear Vivian:

“I am still startled by the idea.. I would not say the anxiety is gone- at all”: you gained a new understanding: that it is unrealistic to expect to always feel love, but your fear didn’t catch up to this new understanding- you are still afraid.

It is similar to a situation like this: let’s say  you are afraid of snakes, believing all of them are poisonous. A friend has a small snake in a cage in her home. You see the snake and you are startled, scared. She then explains to you and shows you proof that this particular snake is not poisonous. You then gain a new understanding: that not all snakes are poisonous and that this particular snake is not poisonous. You then forget about the snake for a while, and when you see the snake again, you get startled again: your fear didn’t catch up to your new understanding.

“Where should I go from here?”- you are likely to keep going to your boyfriend again and again because you have the experience of feeling better around him (“just seeing him made me feel better”). If it doesn’t  bother him, if he is pleased to see you as often as you need to see him, good thing. If it becomes a problem for him, you will need to reach out to him as the temporary fix for your fear less often.

As a longer term solution (which you stated earlier that you are interested in), try this for now: when you are relaxed, after a hot shower perhaps, sitting or lying down comfortably, uninterrupted, breathing naturally and calmly,  repeat to yourself that it is okay that you don’t feel love for him all the time, find your own words that state your new understanding and  let them sink in and melt that fear.

Other than that, for now, I recommend The Mountain Meditation, which is a guided meditation available online. It is about you imagining that you are a mountain, still, solid, unmoved  by the changing weather (similar to changing feelings). You  being the mountain is like you knowing that you love your current boyfriend and the changing weather is you sometimes feeling love (the sun shining) and sometimes not feeling  love (the sun is behind clouds, it is clouded and grey).

anita