Dear Lea:

I will respond to all of your recent posts:

You wrote regarding your mother: “Until today I had the hope she had changed a bit”- better let go of that hope. People adjust, but adjusting is not the same as changing. Here is an example: your mother is a negative person, but at the beginning of her relationship with her current boyfriend, she adjusted to her new relationship by hiding her negativity in his presence (“At the beginning of their relationship.. she didn’t really dare being too much negative”), but as time went on, she resumed her negative behavior toward you and she started being negative toward him (“now she doesnt even care. She spends a lot of time being negative towards him as well”).

“I’m glad that at 25 I’ve already matured enough to step back and stop taking everything she says too much at heart.. all those words, I would need to hear them from her, and not from someone else in order to stop being anxious”- the words that you needed from your mother (that she approves of you and likes you just the way you are, that she wants you to make your own decisions in life, etc.),  you needed to hear those words early on. There is a time-limit for a child when her mother’s words can make a difference. If you heard those words back when you were a child, you wouldn’t be the anxious person that you are now. If she tells you these words now, she will not undo your anxiety.

It is only the child part in you that may think that if she tells you now what you needed to hear then, it will make a significant difference to you. But as a young woman, you are already formed: the connections in your brain have been formed, your mental habits have been formed. New words from your mother will not undo these.

“It’s been 3 years now I go back only for summer and for Christmas.. and STILL, she successes to be extremely conflictual/ negative.. she always find a way to ignite conflicts”- your current contact with your mother, telephone contact and those 3 visits per year, are keeping those connections in your brain, those mental habits and anxiety strong. If these connections loosened a bit when you are away from her, they get tightened when in contact with her.

“Standing for what’s right for us is certainly the quality I respect”, opposite to the behavior you disrespect, such as your mother’s boyfriend being her “mental slave” and a coward, as you referred to him, not standing up to her- I admire this quality about you, Lea: being a rebel.

Regarding the guy, you asked: “am I overthinking it?”. My answer is: yes, you are and have been overthinking it because thinking about him is not productive: no positive changes in your life (or his) result from all that thinking.

He is a young man who gets “so exhausted” when socializing with people, and he needs lots of alone time. He was able to talk with you for hours on the phone because of the limited nature of a phone call: you were not there with him physically- he was still alone when talking with you because you weren’t there in person.

He talked with you recently for 1.5 hours when you met him randomly because he didn’t spend any time anticipating the meeting and getting anxious about it (it was an unplanned meeting).

“I told him I didn’t expect anything from him.. so technically nothing was supposed to trigger him anymore right?”- wrong. Remember what I wrote just above, in regard to your mother? What she told you when you were a young child formed the connections in your brain. If she told you now, while you are an adult, what you needed her to day then, it wouldn’t undo those connections. Same with him: he is an adult. What you tell him now will not undo what he heard when he was a child.

If his mother had expectations of him when he was a child, expectations that burdened him so much and caused him lots of anxiety, then you telling him that you don’t have expectations from him will not make a difference to him.

“I just wished he would have been direct with me about what I was for him”- I think that for him, when you get too close, you are a threat to him.

“he has plenty of female friends whom he’s very close. Why would I be different from those girls then? Why would I trigger his anxiety while these girl friends no?”- if he is very close with other girls, then that closeness would trigger his anxiety, just as his closeness with you triggered his anxiety.

“my friend says ‘he wants you in his life”- not too close, I say, not as a girlfriend and a partner in life. Frankly, I think you are wasting your time thinking about him.

anita

Dear Lea:

You are welcome. I am glad to read that you will be starting therapy soon.

Not all therapists are created equal, so to speak. I hope you choose a therapist who is competent, empathetic, hard working and professional, that (like the therapist I had, who practiced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with a heavy touch of Mindfulness), after a few sessions of getting to know you, he or she will come up with an evaluation of you, and objectives for the therapy, that she will give you homework from session to session. Also, in the first few sessions evaluate the therapist yourself: ask him or her questions about what she believes in regarding topics that matter to you most,  and what she feels about this or that, so to determine compatibility.

Thank you for your appreciation and best wishes for me in the future, I wish you the same!

anita