Dear Patricia:

Reads to me that you are afraid of getting hurt, either left by the one you love or betrayed by him, and so, to hurt less, you feel less. It is a way to protect yourself, to hurt less.

When you found out that he texted his ex girlfriend, your past hurt awakened (the family issues and past relationship you mentioned), and so was the fear of more hurt triggered. Your brain/ body’s response to that fear was automatic: feel less, go numb, disassociate/ detach.

anita

Hi Patricia,

“I don’t feel like I want to leave him or anything
I had been so crazy over him”

In most of your comments there is a desperatedness about wanting this person.

This doesn’t seem to be detachment. In fact this is attachment.

True love is neither attachment nor detachment.

It’s like a gardener who steps-in and steps-out only when required. A gardener who should step inside the garden when it is required to water the plants and step out when not required, else the plants will die.

It is as if  “When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily.”

It’s like if you close your hands with a butterfly inside it then it is going to suffocate, but when you open your hands and allow it to fly – there is great beauty and love in the overall experience which both you and the butterfly will internally experience. The point is we should not be holding to it.

You don’t want to badly need this person and give away everything to this person and then after a period of time when there is a setback start a new thread on tinybuddha “Loved my boyfriend a lot but only got was hurt…don’t know what to do?”. Don’t take me otherwise. Look out and you will find such threads on this forum.

So don’t have the intense neediness of this or any other person in life.

Assuming you have good relations with your mother and you love your mother. Do you desperately “need” your mother and that you somehow always want her in any case? I don’t think so. But you still love her very much. You may say a motherly love is different than a love with a spouse. A mother will send her child to an overseas country for further studies even though she cannot live without the child. That is true Selfless Love and not Obsessed Love in which there is no ‘wantingness’ or ‘neediness’ for any person. There is no suffocation within yourself and the other and in the relation.

So then after you remove this neediness, coming back to your original question of the post on how to experience love towards this person?

You may not like it but – It is by self-love and only by self-love.

It is only when we expand our love towards ourself, we become so FULL that we then extend it to others. There is no other way of true love.

See if there are any blockages to self love and inculcate more of that and extend it towards your boyfriend.

You just don’t need to do anything else and your love life will be back on track.

Best Regards,

VJ

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by VJ.

Hi Patricia,

Thank you so much for posting this. I think you are really brave and hope that you can see that. You also are strong enough to face your fear head on instead of run away or succumb to it. For me alone that shows the growth that you are making as a person and I personally find it really inspiring. I wish you could be as kind to yourself as you are when you speak about your boyfriend because I think self-love and relaxation will help you. I have so much to respond because so much resonates with me. I wish I could give you a hug. You have made me feel so much less alone, I thought I was crazy for the negative and stressful thoughts but you have made me feel like it’s ok not to be ok, so thank you.

I am also in my first relationship and constantly overthink it. I am in a gay relationship which for me added some extra difficulties and can be confusing. For example, I have days when I completely freak out and shut down. This usually stems for a very poor childhood experience that is still unresolved. I noticed that it happens to me around big occasions, for example our 2 year anniversary was yesterday and all I could think about was what if he leaves me? What if I don’t love him? IS he good enough, is he educated enough, is he attractive enough etc? These are quite painful and difficult emotions to deal with but what I have learned is that I am not my thoughts and can choose which ones to follow. And remember to just breathe. So like you said you CHOSE HIM. So the next time a negative thought pops in, say to yourself but RIGHT NOW IN THIS MOMENT I CHOOSE HIM. Thank the thought for trying to protect you. I literally label it and say ‘Oh here’s my anxious thought popping up trying to protect me again. Thanks for that but I am ok and choose my boyfriend and love over this thought’.

The best thing in my opinion is to create as much honesty between you both as possible. Talk to him about your feelings and ask him to be kind and non-judgmental about it. I am lucky enough to have a boyfriend that I can say to ‘I have been really worried about whether or not this will work out to the point I downloaded Tinder for 5 minutes and swiped realizing I didn’t want anyone else but I am finding it really hard to accept and receive our love’. As you can imagine, that is a lot for anyone to take. I beat myself up for months about it, and even repeated the pattern until one day I decided to just breathe. We always have our breath. And I started meditating regularly.

Oh the buzzing feeling. This happens in the honeymoon period, but be kind to yourself. Do you have some days where you look in the mirror and think WOW I AM THE HOTTEST PERSON ON THE PLANET? Probably not, but like love, attraction can come and go. I literally have days where I feel full of passion and want to make love, and other days where stressful negative thoughts take over and I think ‘I don’t know if I find him attractive’. This is all down to our self esteem and how we feel about ourselves. Relationships are like mirrors and reflect the best and the worst of what we see in ourselves.

I realize this is a long message and I really could keep going, so I am going to end this with some bullet points about how I try and cope and has helped me:

– Keep a diary. I write everything and it literally feels like a breath of fresh air.

– I sometimes try to combat the negative thoughts by having a time frame to think about them. So my ‘thinking time’ is 5 – 6pm. If a thought comes to my mind outside that I say ‘Sorry cannot think about that now – come back later’. It really has worked.

– I use a free guided meditation app, called Insight Timer and love it. It really helps me to calm in my scary moments

– DON’T GOOGLE THINGS. That was the WORST pattern for me. I have done it again recently, but google can tell you any answer you want and actually will just increase the anxiety and stress. We don’t live in Hollywood and every relationship is different so there is no right or wrong way to be in your relationships (obviously I mean healthy relationships, not abusive/violent etc.)

– Remember not to focus your whole world on your relationship. You are a WHOLE PERSON that forms part of ONE Relationship. I think it is really important to find your own personal happiness outside the relationship and enjoy that.

I am going to stop now because I am actually meant to be working but was so so so happy to see your post. I hope I haven’t gone overboard and that this helps rather than stress you.

Remember, just breathe. Wishing you so much happiness and strength.

Derek