Dear Agathe:

Your situation involves a sudden and unexplained change in your feelings toward your partner, which is causing you significant distress. I’m sorry to read that you’re going through this difficult time. Emotional changes like the one you’re describing can be incredibly unsettling and painful, especially when they happen so suddenly and without a clear reason.

From what you’ve shared, it sounds like there might be a few possible reasons behind these feelings:

* Emotional Burnout: Sometimes, when we’re intensely attached to someone, we can become emotionally overwhelmed, leading to a sense of numbness as a way to cope.

* Underlying Stress: Stress can linger even after the stressor is gone. Residual stress or anxiety can still impact your feelings and emotional responses.

* Shift in Relationship Dynamics: As relationships develop, initial intense feelings can evolve into a different, calmer, form of attachment. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve fallen out of love, but rather that your feelings are maturing.

Here are some things that might help you navigate through this:

* Self-Reflection: Take some time to reflect on your feelings and the relationship. Journaling your thoughts and emotions can sometimes bring clarity (you are welcome to do it here, on this thread, or one you may choose to start).

* Self-Care: Make sure you’re taking care of yourself physically and emotionally. Sometimes, focusing on your own well-being can help in understanding your emotions better.

* Open Communication: If you feel comfortable, consider having an open and honest conversation with your partner about what you’re experiencing. They might offer support and understanding, and it could strengthen your connection.

* Engage in Activities You Love: Reconnecting with hobbies or activities that you enjoy can help reignite your passion and might even give you new perspectives on your relationship.

*** I want to elaborate on Roberta’s sentence: “Grasping & attachment bring suffering & so does aversion”- When we become overly attached to something or someone, we start to cling to them tightly. This clinging, or grasping, often leads to suffering because it creates fear of loss, and anxiety about the future. Too much attachment can be harmful to our emotional well-being.

On the flip side, aversion refers to a strong dislike or avoidance of something. Emotions like sadness, anger, or fear can be difficult to experience, so we might try to suppress or ignore them. However, ignored emotions (emotions that are not acknowledged and processed) linger and resurface in more intense ways (so to get our attention).

When we fight against our emotions (emotions about the people and situations in our lives), instead of accepting them, we create internal conflict. Embracing an accepting attitude will eventually reduce this tension and promote a sense of inner peace.

It’s about allowing life within you to flow naturally rather than constantly trying to control/ suppress/ avoid it.

Sometimes, Agathe, our emotions need space and time to be acknowledged and processed before they can settle. You’re not alone in this, and reaching out for support is a courageous and important step.

Sending you strength and hoping you find some clarity and peace soon.

anita

Dear PeKaMi39:

I appreciate you sharing your experience—your insight and self-awareness are truly powerful. The way you describe your journey, from past toxic relationships to finally finding safety but struggling with intrusive doubts, shows how deeply trauma can shape the way we experience love. It makes sense that now that you’ve found a secure relationship, your mind is reacting with fear instead of letting you settle into happiness.

When someone has experienced toxic relationships and abandonment, they often unconsciously associate love with emotional extremes. A stable, secure relationship contradicts what they’re used to, making it feel unfamiliar and even unsettling. The brain equates intensity—emotional highs and dopamine bursts—with love, reinforcing the idea that love must feel dramatic and overwhelming. When a relationship lacks those extreme emotional swings, it can trigger doubts about whether the love is real.

Once someone finally feels safe, their mind shifts from survival mode to processing past wounds. Suppressed fears—like being abandoned or not being “good enough”—can surface even when there’s no actual threat. In chaotic relationships, the mind prioritizes reacting rather than reflecting. But in a secure environment, old wounds have space to emerge, leading to anxieties like “What if I’m abandoned?” or “What if I’m not enough?”

When love has always been tied to unpredictability, steady and predictable affection might seem strange, even suspicious. Stability can be mistaken for boredom simply because the brain is conditioned to equate emotional extremes with passion.

Essentially, when survival mode switches off, past emotional wounds rush in, sometimes causing anxiety or disconnection—even in the healthiest relationships. Learning to trust stability instead of fearing it takes time, but recognizing this pattern is a huge step forward.

Your reaction, PeKaMi39, isn’t a sign that you don’t love your partner—it’s a sign that your brain is adjusting to stability after years of associating love with chaos. Your awareness and willingness to work through this show how much you value your relationship and yourself. You deserve steady, safe love, and the work you’re doing is proof of that.

While I haven’t experienced ROCD specifically, I have struggled with OCD, and I understand how exhausting obsessive rumination and intrusive fears can be. The way our minds fixate on doubt, convincing us our feelings aren’t valid, is frustrating and draining. The fact that you recognize this and are learning to trust despite the uncertainty is truly inspiring.

Thank you for sharing your journey and offering resources—it’s helpful to hear from people who genuinely understand these struggles. Wishing you continued strength as you navigate this process, and I hope you keep finding moments of trust and peace.

anita

Thank you, anita, for your kind and wise response. I only saw it now, but it feels like just the right moment for it. I’ve been so busy the whole summer that I haven’t really had time to think. This fooled me to think I’m better, but I see now that obviously it was only a coping mechanism: “If time passes and I keep myself busy this will go away itself (without me doing actually anything about it).” Now that I’m off work the thoughts hit me like a train again. Your words reminded me how deep rooted trauma is, and how powerful it is. And that it is programmed in us. Somehow I have understood it, but traumatized mind is so strong and wicked to fool you to believe in the reality it creates that clear facts are forgotten. It doesn’t just go away overnight. Or in three months. Or maybe next year. It needs motivation and action from my part. What makes it hard is that I am a perfectionist, and feel like I need to carry everyone’s feelings on my shoulders. I f I am happy and strong, they are happy. If I just hang in there, everybody are happy. And tgere I loose myself and start trying to solve the problem from the wrong and fast end. I forget nobody needs me to survive and be happy all the time. But I just always forget it. Always. When I start the surviving mode, I go deeper and deeper into the quicksand. And there I am exhausting myself because I’m not actually helping anyone, least myself. What I need is to help myself by accepting that I need help and that people are willing to help. I need to do the work myself but I can have and also need help for it. And it is not a weakness.

Luckily I’ve started with a new therapist now. It is truly important to have a right kind of therapist for you. Mine is a cognitive behavioral therapist specialized in ocd and trauma amongst other things. I feel hopeful now since with her I finally feel I am able start the new programming of my nervous system.

I would appreciate your perspective on a long-term pattern that I am trying to understand from a psychological and attachment-based point of view.

My difficulties began about five years ago. I was in an anxiously attached relationship and was extremely emotionally invested. My ex partner suddenly broke up with me because of his insecurities. We later resolved the conflict and got back together, but at that point something in me shifted. I felt as if he had become a stranger overnight. I lost all romantic feelings and instead experienced numbness and even a sense of aversion. I started treating him really harshly and dumping all my fears about this situation on him all the time. Spending time with him would make me uncomfortable.

Despite this sudden change in my emotional state, he was very kind toward me afterward and essentially the same person I had loved before. I tried for two to three years to regain my feelings, hoping that consistency, reassurance, or time would reverse the shift. However, my internal experience remained completely unchanged. Eventually I gave up trying to make the relationship work because nothing I did produced any emotional movement.

Starting from the time i lost feelings, my overall emotional capacity also changed significantly. I lost interest in socializing and was unable to feel connection or affection for anyone. My general enjoyment of life disappeared. I became depressed and emotionally flat. Interestingly, my social anxiety also vanished because I no longer cared about how I appeared to others. For the first year I experienced intense somatic symptoms including anxiety, heart palpitations, cried all the time, and constant rumination about how to recover my feelings. I also developed resentment and some fear toward him because there were times when he had been controlling.

My feelings never came back for this person and i would start avoiding him more and more.

After about five years of this, things shifted when I formed a new friend group. I felt an unexpected level of joy, connection, and emotional aliveness. I never felt so happy in my life and i remember thinking at some point “wow, i don’t feel depressed anymore!”. I grew especially close with one person and gradually developed romantic feelings. This was the first time in years that I felt something strong. I was so surprised because i was starting to think maybe im aromantic or asexual or something. However, when he told me he reciprocated, a large part of my emotional intensity disappeared immediately. I suspect this may reflect an avoidant attachment response that developed after the earlier experience. Some feelings returned slowly, but not to the original level. The thouhgts of “not feeling strongly enough” bothered me so much, because i expected to have a similar amount of love like i had for the previous person (or people really) when things were good (e.g thinking about the person all the time, wanting to be around 7/24 and just having those strong butterflies constantly, complete obsession etc.). Eventually I told him it wouldn’t work, and only after I said that did I feel some of the feelings return, maybe because the pressure and vulnerability of being in a relationship dropped. Later on he also mentioned that he might need to create distance from me in that case, so that he doesn’t get too hurt by developing a really strong bond, which made me feel terrible.

Recently, several stressors occurred at once. My ex reacted very negatively when I told him about my feelings for the new person because he still likes me after all this time. He made threatening jokes toward my friends, which frightened them. They told me they might need to distance themselves from me to protect themselves from his behavior. This was deeply upsetting. At the same time, the person I cared about unintentionally disappointed me during a moment of high emotional distress, which triggered a panic attack. I remember thinking “WHY HIM! WHY do i like someone who doesn’t know handle a situation like this?” while having a breakdown. He apologized and has not repeated it.

A few days later I experienced a familiar shutdown. I lost all feelings for the person I liked overnight. I detached mentally from the entire friend group, especially from the people who said they might need distance (so a girl and the person i liked). Just being around those 2 make me feel uneasy and stressed out, almost nauseous.
My enjoyment of activities disappeared. The emotional flatness from five years ago returned along with physical anxiety, depression and heaviness.

It feels exactly like what happened five years ago. It’s like I suddenly “fall out of love,” disconnect, and lose the ability to feel connection or enjoyment. I’m not sure what to do about this, i feel like this will keep repeating with any relationship i get into, even friendships. I feel distressed because it seems as though everything I worked toward has collapsed, and my life has shifted back into instability after having my first genuinely positive year following a long period of depression. I lost all these connections I made… I am afraid that when this kind of emotional shutdown occurs, the relationships become irreparable in my mind, leaving “moving on” as the only perceived option, due to my previous experience. I’d like to hear what you think!

Hello, reading this thread gave me relief since i’m suffering from the same thing for the first time in my life in the past 1.5 month.
Being madly in love with my LDR girl for 8 months –> sudden loss of feelings overnight for no apparent reason, dissociating, being numb to everything, depressed, not enjoying activities that i used to enjoy before, constant rumination for my feelings, feeling like a burden and like i am responsible for her feelings, rocd themes and the list goes on.
It kinda gave me hope that i might be able to work through those awful feelings and thoughts and maybe find love for her again, because she is very loving and deserves it, but now i feel like my emotional capacity is very low.I have started therapy with someone that specializes in ocd/depression/relationships but i cant feel any difference. Maybe its too soon.

Hello anita

Yeah this is what describes me for the past two months almost sadly..Could you maybe shed some light in my situation in order to gain some clarity myself?

Idk if thats the correct term, but i felt like i was frozen, i wouldn’t leave my bed, barely getting up to shower, like my mind was not in the right place, missing words in sentences and stuff, i dont know if thats the appropriate word for it.

In my case too, the relationship with my mother was very chaotic, violence and arguing constantly, throwing some awkward affection here and there, then rinse and repeat. I cant remember if i was dissociating when i was a kid, definitely trying to escape in imaginary worlds and games though..

Yes i agree with what youre saying.. My question tho is, was what happened to me because of that? Or is it a legitimate loss of feelings all of a sudden? Hasnt happened to me before.

Dear Confused:

I mean, a legitimate loss of feelings may be about you being tired of the LONG-DISTANCE aspect of the relationship, understandingly wanting something that’s physically close..? (there are quite a few ingredients to the puzzle, if you care to explore)

Anita