Dear Eliza:

Isn’t it amazing, this thread is almost 10 years old, welcome to it, Eliza!

You shared that you’ve been “in an on and off… so turbulent, and very rarely stable” 2-year relationship with your ex-boyfriend because of anxiety, not because of anger and fighting.

(I am adding the boldface feature selectively to the following):”I have had really horrible anxiety the entire relationship… so nervous to hurt him… so scared that I’ve ruined his life and am the reason he’ll never be happy… I seem to crave freedom… at times claustrophobic, even though I love hanging out with him… would have moments of intense panic… In the end I couldn’t tell whether my gut was saying it wasn’t a match or it was my anxiety…. What’s wrong with me? I really do love him…. will I ever have clarity over how I feel? Why can’t I be content with him? and will I ever get over this!!!!”-

– clearly, The Problem is fear, persistent, ongoing fear, aka anxiety.

I relate to your anxiety just as you described it. I will summarize what it was about in my case: as a child, I was very hurt, a whole lot of hurt, and for a long, long time, all of my childhood, really. But as it happens, very hurt/ scared children instinctively repress their distressing emotions (hurt, fear), so that they can survive, because feeling too scared, too hurt, for too long literally destroys the body.

Fast forward, I am an adult, my hurt and fear still repressed (felt, but way less intensely than in early childhood). The moment I felt love/ empathy for a person, I saw myself in that person, more precisely, I project my child-self (the child that I was) into the other person, and imagined that he/ she was about to get hurt as badly as I was hurt (pre-repression). I was afraid to hurt the person, and I was afraid to witness the person hurting, so I wanted to be with the person and away, all at the same time, very anxious, uncomfortable.

The interesting thing is that what I was afraid of, as an adult, was to feel my own hurt at the pre-repression level, at the intensity back then.

Do you relate to any part of what I am saying?

anita