Dear Anna:

“I don’t want to take a decision about continuing the relationship with him or not now.. I  just want to figure out, to understand and how to reach him out”-

– let’s try to understand better:

“His mother is quite strict.. she kind of pushes him to keep studying while he would have wanted to take a  break from school.. and he needs time to rest.. yet, his mother keeps pressuring him about school”-

– when she pushes him and pressuring him while he is tired and needs a rest, he gets angry at her, naturally.

“I feel like it’s more his personality rather than his mental health which makes him withdraw from everything. In the sense that every time things get a bit too intense, that he has to make efforts, it simply becomes too hard for him to deal with and therefore it is easier to stop… he stops talking for days and sometimes for weeks without any reason”-

– seems to me that (1) he withdraws from his studies because he gets tired, and like you said, he “does not feel ok and he needs time to rest both mentally and physically”, (2) part of his depression and his exhaustion is the anger he feels toward his pushing/ pressuring/ bossy mother, (3) projecting his mother into you, he withdraws from you when he gets angry at you. He “stops talking for days and sometimes for weeks” because that’s how long his anger at you lasts: sometimes it lasts a few days, at other times it lasts a few weeks.

anita