Dear Ada:

This is what you shared and what I understand about you from your two posts: You suffer from anxiety and from depression that gets worse around the winter months, and overall, you are “feeling very dissociative in life… like an observer in my life and the choices I was making weren’t what I wanted to do, they were things I felt like I needed to do“.

You’ve been “genuinely obsessed… extremely obsessed with him“, that is, with your long-distance boyfriend for 11 months. You are afraid to break up with him and remain alone: “I fear I will be all alone… I’m worried that I won’t experience love and acceptance like this ever again“. You often feel guilty about what you happen to think feel and how you behave: “I feel guilty in saying my first thought was if I broke up with him…  it broke me to think I had upset him because how standoffish I become… I feel guilty…  feel like the bad guy… I just don’t want to hurt him“. Within the relationship with him, you looked up to him: “I’ve seen him to be above me in a way, I would always value everything he had to say and do whatever he would like“.

In your first post you shared: “things that he used to say to me before now make me feel ill“.  In your second post, you detailed some of the things he said/ texted to you (at times, I will adjust pronouns):

(1) I have no hope for our relationship, and I feel like maybe breaking up with you (said “out of nowhere” followed later by him talking to you “like normal”). When you brought up to him that you were “upset and a little shook” by what he said. He said: sorry (“and moved on”).

(2) In regard to a girl he met at his university: “always talking about her, and things that she and him would do together, situations of her flirting with him and him being clueless and things that happened… things he helped her with and things he did for her“. After listening to a lot of such talk, you brought your concern to him, and he said: you always felt off when I spoke about her. You said: “Well how am I supposed to react to you telling me all about this other girl who doesn’t even know you have a girlfriend?”

(3) While he attended a Christmas party, he texted you in regard to the girl: “Some guys just came up and asked me if me and ——— were dating”. You didn’t answer the text for five minutes, and his response: he sent you multiple texts and rang you, “crying and apologising profusely to me over what he had said“.

(4) Most recently, “he brought up this dream he had a few months back where in the dream I hadn’t been replying to his texts… mumbling and leaving silence between his words but with the bits I heard it was like he was blaming me. Afterwards he just went on like nothing happened“. Next, “he brought up coming to see me… like nothing had happened“.

From what you shared he is in the habit of apologizing compulsively, quick to say “sorry” “for everything so that habit made his warranted apologies less sincere…  no matter what I always accept his apologies even though I think some of his apologies come with him not even knowing what he’s apologising for”.

These are my closing thoughts: I think that it will be best for you to (1) see a psychotherapist if it is possible for you, so that she/ he helps you with the fear and guilt involved with the next thing I suggest that you do, (2) break up with him.

You have your own mental health challenges, and your LD boyfriend has his own. It is possible for two people to help each other and be better for it, individually and together. But in this case, his impulsivity and severe carelessness are harming you. By impulsivity, I mean that he says whatever comes to his mind without thinking how it would affect you, and by severe carelessness, I am referring to him talking about the other girl: it’s not that he happened to say one thing about her at one time- he went on and on about her and did so repeatedly, on different occasions. This is not… normal carelessness. It is severe carelessness, and such would harm any woman who’d be in a relationship with him.

On one hand, he talks impulsively and apologizes compulsively, on the other hand, he gets stuck, going “very quiet and talks in very split sentences… mumbling and leaving silence between his words” – of course, he needs psychotherapy too, but like I said, the two of you do not work like a team, benefiting each other. He is harming you, being impulsive and careless. You are very careful to not hurt him, to not make him feel guilty, etc., but you can’t help him because he needs professional help.

You shared that you are “like an observer” in your life, that you don’t make the choices that you want to make. I figure it’s your fear/ anxiety that keeps you from being a participant in your own life, making the choices that you want to make, choices that are right for you. This is something for you to work on in quality psychotherapy: to shift from an observant to a participant.

Also, quality therapy should help you so that in the future, you will be able to choose the right guy for you: one with whom you can work as a team of two equals, for the benefit of the two.

This is not psychotherapy, and I am not a psychotherapist, but you are welcome to post again anytime, and we can continue our conversation.

anita