Dear Richard:

If you never lived with a woman, or if you did, not for long, I imagine that when your girlfriend moves in with you- you will feel anxious living with her, and that it will take the two of you work, time, and the practice of EAR (Empathy, Assertiveness and Respect) before you can reach a state of mind where living in close proximity to her will significantly reduce your anxiety, and keep it much lower, on an ongoing basis,  than it has been before living with her.

“What is crazy to me is I know I have felt like this before, I have gotten through it, and have felt a lot better again.  But…when the two-headed monster that is anxiety and depression come roaring back it is like I cannot even imagine ever feeling good again…even though I know I have done it before.  It is really weird how the mind and emotions work”- I read something similar from another member today, referring to emotional pain (“the pain feels like it will never end every time”). I felt like this before myself, many times.

What I figured it might be, this “crazy” phenomenon as you referred to it, is that as young children, when we experienced emotional pain, it felt like forever. That’s how a young child views time when in pain: forever, like it will never end and he/she’ll never feel good again. When emotionally hurting as an adult, that early experience gets activated, together with its-forever feeling.

Nature’s purpose for designing it this way, I think,  is that when let’s say, a young child is lost and scared and his mother is nowhere to be found, he/ she must feel that his pain will never go away unless he finds his mother immediately, so all his attention, all his focus is on finding her.

anita