Dear Leanne:

This off feeling, like there is something wrong when you are with your boyfriend and the detachment from reality, the dissociation, sounds to me like a Left-Over-Feeling/ experience from childhood, from an attachment relationship in your childhood that was wrong and caused you then to dissociate. An experience that gets reactivated now. What do you think?

anita

Dear Leanne:

What was your relationships with your mother, your father when you were a child? How are those relationships now? The answers are most likely there.

anita

Dear Leanne:

One’s early relationship with one’s parents is very powerful. It literally creates connections in the brain between nerve cells, connections that keep firing into adulthood.

Has your boyfriend called you names? Yelled at you? Abused you in any other way? Some other person before your bf or otherwise?

If not, when you were a child and your father called you names and your mother yelled at you, repeatedly enough, as a child you did not feel safe, you were scared to be called names and yelled at. You didn’t know when that will happen so you were anxious. When you were yelled at or called names you probably tried to not be there, that is you spaced out, detach yourself. These emotions imprinted in your brain via neural connections get activated when you are together with your bf.

In that case, insight, understanding, skills, therapy perhaps… can help with your current “always feeling off” with your boyfriend.
anita

Dear Leanne,

First I want to offer a lotus for you for your bravery in sharing.

I am also currently suffering from having a “disconnect” with my partner. I realize that even though he is present with me, many times I feel “off”. I also attribute this to my past with my parents. It could also be something passed down from our grandparents & ancestors, because they were more focused on survival rather than how to deal with our emotions. We are lucky in this generation that we are able to sit & recognize it. Recognition is already a big step!

How do we deal with it? We need to cultivate more “self-love”. Because we feel that our partner is a trigger, we need to first love and nurture ourselves. We need to take care of our inner child and find joy within ourselves. We can find beauty in nature, in talking to nurturing friends, in walking or just enjoying the food we are consuming…then we begin to feel the love from the world around us and know that our existence is precious. Once we have a strong “self-love”, then we can begin to explore our relationship with our partner. We try and let go of any expectation of our partner and just try to “be”. A calm moment together in silence can already be very nourishing.

I wish you the best of luck Leanne! Reading your post has helped me as well as I was feeling alone on the path.

Thank you,
Jennifer

• This reply was modified 9 years ago by Jennifer.

Hello Leanne ^^! I’m glad your feeling better. You’ve got some amazing advice here. I can’t use any love experience, since I’ve never had a boyfriend, but what I will say is that every relationship goes through a rough patch. As long as love and intimacy is still present, things can get back on track. All there needs to be is some work from both you and your boyfriend. I hope that all will go well in the future!