Your experience Chelsea is not an uncommon one and I have been on the other side of a smiliar relationship a few times. As with all things on Tinybuddha.com, the way forward will come from within and you’ve already recognized that your mind is playing tricks on you by fabricating completely irrational scenarios about what may or may not happen. The risk is that if you start believing what your mind is telling you, it could eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy – our minds have this horrible tendancy of wanting to be proven right and it might be searching for reasons to justify its paranoia around every corner. Therefore, unconsciously, you may create a set of conditions where your boyfriend will decide to leave you and then your mind will be like, “See! I told you we should have never trusted him!”, which I’m sure is not what you really want to happen.

Like all of us, I’m sure you want to be in a wholesome, loving, open, honest, and most importantly, trusting relationship based on observable and well-reasoned facts and not fabrications of the mind based on past hurt and pain.

I agree, some therapy could be beneficial – actively working with a professional and your mind to help you recognize certain patterns of thought that are unhelpful. Reading and talking about it with someone will definitely help.

And of course, I always recommend meditation and mindfulness. The mind is like a muscle and in order to be able to do some of the heavy lifting required to turn againnst the tide of irrantional thought, the strength comes from practicing to observe our mind and connecting with our breath.