Dear Brian:

Spring of 2018 you fell in love with a girl in college, “just being around her felt like a bliss”. She had a long distance boyfriend, but throughout the summer and into the Fall of last year, the two of you “Spent a ton of time together getting dinner, ice cream, etc.”, she leaned against you when sitting with you and you felt “more connected than with anyone else”.

During the Fall semester the reality of her long distance relationship “began to rear its ugly head”. Next, you told her how you feel about her but that didn’t change things. Next you suggested she signs the lease where you live and replace one of your roommates who will be moving out, and she now intends to do so, and you regret that you suggested it to her.

You felt progressively worse and “Toward the end of the semester I was binge drinking on school nights” and “felt little motivation to do anything”. You felt better when the Fall semester ended, during winter break, because you “didn’t see her as often and the stress of school was gone for the moment”.

Before the start of the semester last month you found out that she and her long distance boyfriend broke up. This caused you to feel worse, especially expecting to be living together with her as your roommate later  on.

“Every time I’m around her I feel anxious and sad”. You tried to move on many times, to be okay with being friends with her, but “nothing is working”. You think about her all the time and you don’t take care of yourself and your school performance is negatively affected. You wrote: “I feel like I am just doomed to feel this way until I graduate and leave this town”.

To understand better, I read your Jan 31 2015 thread, you were then 17 or 18. A friend set you up with a girl for the senior ball. You were okay texting her, “but when in person I froze up and couldn’t think of anything to say to her” the day you met her. The next day, at the ball, you “didn’t talk much and I froze up a few times”.

April 2015 you wrote about the ending of a one month relationship you had with a girl (same as above?). You were sad at first but felt better when talking to friends. You  wanted to be friends with her, but “I cannot bear to be around her or even look at her or see a picture of her on Facebook. Whenever this happens I immediately shove it out of my face and start to freak  out. My heart sinks like a rock and I lose all focus. I’m scared I’ll never be able to feel better around her. I could be having a good time with my friends and if I see even a glance of her my joy dissipates. I try to occupy my mind as much as I can but the second it isn’t I start thinking of her and it hurts”.

Now, my understanding: you suffer from significant anxiety in the context of a romantic relationship, soon after the relationship begins and long after it ends (a year following a one month relationship with one of the girlfriends). This anxiety disturbs you greatly and disrupts your life in serious ways, interfering with your studies, lowering your motivation. Any visual of the woman disturbs you, any and every contact with her depresses you. You find yourself thinking about her a lot, unable to attend to your own life.

This anxiety is too powerful for you to heal from  on your own. It takes a good psychotherapy over months to help a person lower and manage significant anxiety. If such is available to you, better you attend it as soon as possible. But because it takes a long time and work better you do the following:

1. Ask her to not move in to your apartment. If that will not happen, move out yourself and find a different apartment to live in, as far away from her as possible.

2. Let her know you will need to have no contact with her and stop any contact with her that is possible for you to  avoid.

3. When you do see her and can’t not see her, in college, train your brain to dissipate the visual, imagine the visual dispersing like a cloud that disappears and the sky is blue and clear again.

4. Make sure you do not attempt a romantic relationship with any woman before you graduate and before you attend quality psychotherapy in combination with other disciplines (ex., yoga, tai chi, guided meditations)so to be able to lower and manage your anxiety.

5. If seeing to it that you do not live with her as roommates and if ending all contact with her that you are able to end does not help with your anxiety regarding this one woman, you may have to change universities, so I do hope #1-4 above work.

anita