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Dear RJG:

I thoroughly read and studied all your posts on this thread. This is my current understanding:

You are now 30, single and employed: “I do have a very well paying job and I like my work- keeps me sane, fed and occupied”.

You have been suffering from depression for years: “I have been into depression for a good number of years… My depression over the years have left me with no hobbies and I hardly have interest in anything… apart from  (job), there’s absolutely nothing I look forward to”.

In the context of relationships with men, you feel very anxious: “I am completely an anxious attachment style 30 year old woman… Recently a month ago, I met a man in a club.. I was anxious… A day later given my anxiety I started texting… I keep ruminating over it… My insecurity shot up and sky rocketed .. I did overthink a lot”.

In the context of relationships with your parents/ family members (something you shared nothing about), you may not feel anxious, but not because you didn’t and don’t suffer anxiety in this context from an early age, early on, but because you shut down emotionally.

You wrote: “I want to be absolutely unaffected and independent emotionally”- I think that you successfully managed to feel unaffected and emotionally independent in the context of your family, not because of absence of significant, ongoing conflicts and anxiety in this context, but because you have shut down emotionally early on.

This emotional shut down is the reason why you, an intelligent woman, are so clueless in the context of relationships with men, not seeing what is clearly evident in front of you. Functioning well in the context of intimate relationships (not only of the romantic kind) takes an emotional intelligence that you are lacking because you have been shut down emotionally for a long time.

This early life emotional shut down involves pushing fear away from awareness. It allows you to function as well as you do. But it also brings about depression as the brain/body is exhausted pushing fear away on an ongoing basis, and it is impossible push fear away/ shut it down best you can,  without  also shutting down joy, curiosity, and that call-of-the-wild.

This early life emotional shut down is the reason for your poor emotional intelligence, or understanding. This shut down is not complete, by the way, so you still feel some joy, some excitement here and there, but depressed most of the time.

You wrote: “there was something in this man… it was something real.. something that filled me with bliss (not just physically)”- you misunderstood that bliss to mean that this short relationship was about love. The misunderstanding is that a feeling on your part means a reality outside yourself.

Let’s look at the reality outside yourself in this short relationship: a man met you in a club and asked for your number, the day after he called you, met you in the eveningat his place and made out, “it was all physical”. The next day he met you at his place again, “it was all physical” and he spent the night with you. After you left his place, he called you (day # 3 of the relationship) to ask if you arrived home. He didn’t contact you the rest of the day or the day after, and after you texted him repeatedly he said he’ll call you later. He did and had you come over to his place again and “again we got physical”, he spent the night with you (night #4). The next morning (day # 5) you left his place. He didn’t call you that day, or the day after, of the day after that. The next time you saw him was  on day and night # 14, he had you in his place and it got physical once again. He did not contact you since.

You stated that “Throughout the entire period”, 14 days and nights total, that you spent time with him, there was “no attempt whatsoever from his side to strike a real conversation or to know about me, or meet me outside”, and one time, around midnight when you spent the night with him, he got a call from a woman, “it was a woman on the other end trying to fool around by saying they had met at a bar in a different city.. and they had shared their numbers”.

The story of your 14 day-and-night relationship so clearly indicates that the man was interested in one thing and one thing only- sex. It takes a very emotionally shut down woman to not see what is so obviously clear.

You observed and recorded certain facts but you don’t put them together into a picture of what was going on. You replay “some of the nice things he said like- ‘I am so into you’, while asking me to come over his place”, and that, you wrote, “makes me think if he did not mean anything beyond physical why would he say these things”. You don’t see that a man who says “I am so into you” in the context he said it, within the 14 days, means that his interest in you has been sexual and only sexual.

You wrote about this relationship, “I want to make sure it’s dead before I could bury it. I have so many questions & got answers to none”- you don’t see that on his part there was nothing alive that is now dead other than his sexual drive. There is nothing to burry, and no questions unanswered.

You wrote that your first boyfriend ghosted you, out of the blue, and you were “Absolutely clueless about what happened”- you were clueless then as you are now. It is possible that he did ghost you out of the blue, but I will not be surprised if you didn’t see what was evident then.

Let me know what you think about my understanding at this point, and if you want we can continue to communicate.

anita

Dear RJG:

You are very welcome. Regarding the early life emotional shut down I suggested- no human can shut down and feel nothing at all, become a sort of a machine, a robot. We are emotional by  nature, born that way and always will be emotional. When we resist a particular emotion, we get anxious, distressed, because emotions are meant to be felt and as we feel the emotion, we kind of.. listen to the message in it. For example, we feel fear, the message is: pay attention, or run-away, or freeze/ play dead. We feel anger, the message is: someone is hurting me, run away or fight, and so on.

The early life emotional shut down is about a child feeling fear but she can’t run away, or feeling anger, but she can’t fight, so she is stuck, nowhere to run, no way to fight, the fear and anger are strong.. can’t survive like that, so she shuts down, turns down the volume of the fear and anger.

And so, a child survives childhood and on in the context of life with her parents, but when she interacts with other adults, her fear and anger are not there to give her the messages required. She feels anxious, depressed, distressed, sometimes scared and angry, but the emotions are in a mix up, and the woman is unclear, lost, not knowing how to interpret what is going on, or misinterprets.

anita