Hi Tee,

I know exactly what you mean. Doing therapy without seeing progress is so defeating. It makes you feel so broken at least it did for me. I spend most my life trying to fix myself so I could be normal like everybody else.

Yes not good therapy. I was forced from a young age to do things that was way too overwhelming for me, and I wasn’t ready for it. That’s the thing when it is mental, people expect you to go from 0-100 and if you can’t they say it’s because you don’t have the will.

People didn’t (and still to this day) respect my boundries. Which is one of the reasons my i am so hard on myself. I was always told just to push myself harder and that it was not okay to say no because that way your anxiety wind. So listening to my body and giving it rest when it needs is super important. Be my own gatekeeper and if my body is giving me the red light, people should’t try and convince me that it’s a green light.

Seeing the situation with the guy as a game to take the pressure off, is a really good idea! That would make it a lot easier. Same with empathy and compassion. Towards him and myself. We both have a lot of trauma. His worse than mine. As my guy colleague who works with him said, you both have the exact same behaviour just not at the same time. Which is true, one pursues the other shuts down and then we’d swap.

I have felt very help less in terms of feeling like it was out of my control. But there were soo many times were he trying to conect with me but I didn’t have the courage to take the chance.

I should have stayed that day in the bar where i got jaloux because the girl was hitting on him. He wasn’t flirting back.

The day he came to my little housewarming he forgot his hat and wrote me about it after. I wanted to ask him if he wanted to come back for it (then we would have been alone at my house) but I was scared that he might reject it, so i just told him i would bring it to him.

Him indicating that he wanted to have a drink with me before going to our friends housewarming, but I was too anxious to say yes and I could tell he felt abit rejected.

And the turkish restaurant just to name a few. There were many times where I could have Challenge myself but I was too scared. It helps think i g about because it gives me some sense of control back. Sometimes we want something so badly but just aren’t able to take the neccesary steps to actually making it happen.