Dear Yours,

I’m somewhat experiencing the same feelings as you do now! I recently met a guy whom i really admire as a friend, but i think that admiration has slowly turned into a crush, liking and perhaps a lil of love especially due to the distance caused by the COVID situation (they say absence makes the heart grow fonder..?) Haha. And it’s also frustrating sometimes because i wanna take it slow first.

Enough of myself haha. My point is that, we may be afraid when getting closer to a person as it’s something very new, and being easily affected by another person makes us feel vulnerable. But honey, i think loving anyone or anything actually involves a certain degree of risk. And to take this leap of faith we need courage, which is not exactly something easy to muster all the time. I’m not sure how long have yall known each other, but i feel that your heart actually knows what it wants. Even if he’ll be leaving soon, is it possible to still stay in contact over video calls to nurture the relationship? It’s actually so rare and precious to meet someone whom you adore so much and he feels the same way back. If you are scared of what was to happen as this progress, ask yourself will you feel totally alright if you kept silent about this thing, when it could potentially blossom into something if you decided to take the leap of faith. It’s scary, but do you think it’ll be worth it? (:

Lastly, the future is really uncertain, more so than it has ever been. Perhaps this is also teaching us to live in the present moment, savour the good times with ure loved ones while we can. All the best <3

Dear Yours:

“the fear of exposing myself too much is huge.. what if he thinks its too much?”- don’t share too much, share some. Share some of your thoughts and feelings honestly and in a way that is not dramatic, and it will be okay.

“I am trying to seem like this girl who has everything together and is completely fulfilled with her life as it is. not talking about the things that are maybe not so perfect in my life”- you are trying to seem like a .. superhuman. That may discourage him to share with you when he doesn’t have it all together, and which is not perfect in his life.

“I am always ready to meet when he proposes”- understandable to me, because you like him so much.

“I do not take a lot ..  initiative to make plans in case he rejects it”- if you take some initiative (vs. a lot), that’s good enough. If you took no initiative so far, initiate one meeting with him- it will be a good practice for you.

“I get down and a bit anxious if he moves our date or does not text me for an extensive period of time.. I just become quite obsessive and spend a lot of time thinking about the relationship”- no way to fix this anytime soon (it takes many months and years to lower and resolve anxiety on an ongoing basis), but you can manage this anxiety by taking a fast walk outdoors when anxious, and/ or a hot bath- these things help a lot!

Also, guided meditations and mindfulness exercises will help. I came across a website providing these, called headspace. com.

“How can I work on this so that this time I can do things differently?”- when you feel a relief from your anxiety and obsessive thinking, enjoy the break and expect the anxiety and obsessive thinking to resume, so that you don’t get alarmed when it’s back. There is no quick permanent solution, it is about managing anxiety, using tools (ex.: a fast walk, a hot bath, a guided meditation, yoga, listening to music) whenever you start feeling the anxiety rising, and long term: working toward healing by exploring the origin of your anxiety.

Did we discuss the origin of your anxiety?

anita

Dear Yours:

I went over your previous thread looking to see if we discussed the origin of your anxiety and found out that we have not. We focused on your then relationship of four years with a man who selfishly refused to sit with you at the kitchen table for dinner (instead of having his dinner on the sofa in front of the TV) because .. he didn’t feel like it. The thread was about breaking up with him and you accomplished it successfully.

I did spot a pattern in your dating experience: “I .. have been in 3 consecutive relationships since I am 18. It have been nice relationships but I always end up breaking up after some years because I feel I need time to be with myself- consequently immediately falling head over heels for a new guy”.

The pattern within your previous relationship: “We are fine, stable.. then I start feeling restless, I want to do more of the things together that I enjoy like take walks, eat together… I explain, try to apply changes.. we fight, makeup and forget about it- I start focusing on myself and we are again stable for a couple of months until I again start feeling like something is missing for me in the relationship”.

We did not discuss anything about your childhood experience. Based on the above patterns, seems to me that when you were a child, living in your childhood home, you had times of comfort, feeling safe and loved, but there were other times, too frequent or too long, when you felt unsafe and emotionally distressed. This led to a conflicted state of mind: wanting to be at home, enjoying the safety and comfort at home when it was there, feeling distress about it not lasting, sometimes wanting to run away from home and be elsewhere, where it is always safe and comforting and good.

Does any of it ring true to you?

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by .

Dear Yours:

“I feel fine as long as I have at least one guy interested in me, and when I don’t, I feel a little empty”, “and I try to take my mind of it by eating”-

– the emptiness that you try to fill in with either a man’s interest or food, it started in your childhood home: what happened there between your father, your mother:  what did he say and do, what did your mother say and do.. what was it like to be there?

anita

Dear Sam:

After I read your recent post, I re-read your posts in your previous thread and in this one, shining the light of the  new information into the older posts:

The key sentence for me is the following, regarding your father: “He is very controlling, judgmental and has repressed us a lot, tho of  course he is also very loving in his own way.”

Of your two parents he was always the powerful one, and children gravitate toward the powerful parent, wanting the love of the powerful parent. Your father’s love was your motivation: what you needed and desired.

He wanted you to be thin and physically fit, and you accommodated him to the best of your ability, still do: “never truly feel good in my skin unless I am exercising a lot and am crazy fit”. He wanted you to not have an opinion he did not agree with, so you hid any such opinion. He didn’t want you to want something he didn’t approve of, so you hid any such wants. He cared a lot about perfect appearances, so you accommodated him best you were able, pretending to be and feel perfectly, hiding what is imperfect. He “wanted absolute loyalty and obedience”, and you gave him that.

Your brothers “completely show.. who  they are and my father hates them for it”. You don’t want your father to hate you, so you hide yourself from your father.

The way you operated with your father is the way you operate with men:

– You gave your ex boyfriend the obedience that your father demanded: “I have given him the impression that he has a lot of control to make the decisions”.

– You gave your ex boyfriend the perfection that your father demanded (pretending to be and feel perfectly, and give up/ hide what is imperfect): “he is very happy in the relationship and says I am the best girlfriend he has had… I feel I have cheated him by pretending to be so okay with everything all this time.. agreeing so often to giving up things I find important in a relationship”.

* With your father, you felt that if you became independent, if you showed him what you think and feel (with which he would disagree), you will betray the obedience and loyalty that he demanded, and that will hurt his feelings terribly. Hurting your father terribly would make you a terrible little person.

This fear that you will hurt your father terribly and be a bad, guilty person for it spilled into your exaggerated fear and guilt regarding hurting your ex boyfriend: “the fear of hurting him so so badly… I feel like a horrible person for hurting him… He does not have much of a support system and that worries me.. I see him suffering as he can see I have distanced myself.. last night I told him that I worry about him”.

I am assuming your ex boyfriend is as okay (or as not okay) now without you in his life as he was when you were in his life. And I think that your father will be just as he is now, if you no longer obey him:  he will not collapse.

A child confuses her feelings with her parent’s- it is she who needs the parents terribly, she who feels so terribly hurt when her parent rejects her, but she imagines that it is the parent who needs her terribly, and that the parent will feel so terribly hurt if she, the child, rejects her parent.

“how to just let that go of what made me this way and focus on the future and who I want to be. Try to really see myself for who I am without the pretending”- it will take you believing that your father will survive and be just as he is now after you no longer obey him and dare to be you. If you believe this, no longer feeling like a bad person to choose to be you, you will be able to start the process of becoming who you already are inside, showing what you’ve been hiding for so long.

* I think that your intense fear of hurting your father terribly is expressed here: “I have tried to break up before but I just haven’t been able to utter the words, it literally feels like they are stuck in my throat! Like when you scream in a dream but no noise comes out of your mouth”.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by .

Dear Sam:

“Only when I feel complete by myself can I invite someone else into my life”- no matter how much you work on yourself as a single woman, once you invite a man into your life, it will be a challenge. Because relationship issues have to be worked in the context of a relationship.

If you met now the right man for you, it would be an opportunity to work on what you need to work on, with his help, the two of you working together as a team. Working on yourself as a single woman is an excellent idea, it can help a whole lot, but still.. much work will need to be done when you enter a relationship.

“how to start this process?”- what is the status of your counseling/ therapy?

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by .

Dear Sam:

Best would be quality psychotherapy- notice the modifier quality. If such is not available to you, then I can tell you about my experience with the quality therapy I received in 2011-2013, which started in the process of emotional/ mental healing. I thought you mentioned having gone to counseling/ therapy before. If you did have any experience with therapy, do let me know what it was, and we can take it from there. Take your time answering; I will be back to your thread tomorrow morning, which is in about 14 hours from now.

anita