Dear IMBACK:

What you are experiencing, I believe, is a mix of fear and love. When you love something, you want that something (or someone) in your life; when you are afraid of something, you want it out of your life. Your girlfriend is someone you love (and want in your life), and she, same person, represents something you fear (and want out of your life).

The love part: “We just hit it off from the start. We had our first kiss and I was over the moon for this girl. We started messaging each other and we fell In love… We were together almost every day, and we wrote messages to each ALL THE TIME… every time we talked or wrote to each other I became happy…”

The fear part: “A month ago..  I started questioning everything. I was not sure if she was THE ONE or what I was feeling… I could also feel that it got too much and that we needed space so the both of us could do something outside of the relationship… I started questioning my feelings for her…”.

The problem: “I was not happy outside of the relationship. I had lost my friends and I barely talked to my parents anymore… . I was very lonely, and still am. I have still almost no friends“, “She was and is my only source of happiness. Nothing else makes me happy“-

– a human being is a highly social animal (particularly teenagers, and you are 18), and like other social animals (wolves, dogs, etc.), if a social animal is alone for too long, it get anxious and depressed. A social animal is not meant to be alone. You live with your parents, I imagine, so you are not physically alone, and you go to school and parties, so again, you are not physically alone, but you are emotionally alone (aka lonely), and you have been emotionally alone for too long, lacking close, intimate connections with others.

When you spend time with your girlfriend you feel so.. good, happy, it’s like being on top of the world, isn’t it? It is an emotional high made possible by chemicals secreted in the brain (neurotransmitters) and other chemicals secreted into your blood (hormones).

After and in-between the times you spend with her, when you are back to being emotionally alone, it is too much of a shock to the system: it is like falling from the top of a mountain (being with her) to a deep valley underneath (being alone again). And so, your brain (thinking and overthinking) is looking for a solution to this scary emotional falling down experience, and the solution it comes up with is to not go to the top of the mountain anymore (to not  love her anymore, to not be in a relationship with her anymore). If you don’t go up the mountain, you will not fall, so the logic (behind the fear) goes.

“Yes thank you very much. I have one last thing. Could it maybe be that I just need space? We’ve been physically together almost everyday the last 7 month and we message each other all day, everyday“- You are welcome. The Problem is not that you spend too much time with her; it is that Fall I talked about above: the going back to the Low of loneliness after experiencing the High of spending time with her.

“when I think of her all the time, I get the thoughts of breaking up, but the less I think of her, the more I want to be together. I don’t know if this could mean something I just got the thought.“- yes, it means something: you will need to think of her less, but how can you make it happen (to think less of her)? I think that the answer is quality psychotherapy/ counseling where you form a close connection to a caring, capable therapist, thoroughly express your emotions and learn to regulate them, to lower the intensity of your distressing emotions (aka emotion regulation).

anita