Hey! Seems to me like this was a big step moving away to college… I think a big chunk of this anxiety you are feeling is that you are uncomfortable and scared of being in this new place, maybe you need to first feel comfortable in you’re new environment. Just think of everything you need to do, write down you’re “tasks” down like a grocery list. It’s like grocery shopping, sometimes it looks like it’s going to take you forever to get everything for the week, but once you start grabbing stuff it doesn’t seem that bad. You probably don’t want to hear this but people grow apart. Especially in college. It’s okay to realize you don’t want something anymore. I think you need to make that grocery list and along the way things will start making sense, don’t freak out… Things change.

Dear lindsey:

Just in case it helps, I want to explain the following: when we feel fear (anxiety is ongoing fear), we can’t feel affection/ love at the same time. The two can’t co-exist.

When we feel ongoing fear our thinking goes on overdrive, we think a lot, but not rationally. We think so much that we obsess.

Seems to me that this is what is happening with you: the changing circumstances of your life increased your anxiety by a lot, your thinking got escalated, you can’t feel love at the same time you are afraid. Then you have fear added to fear when you noticed you don’t feel love for him and that increased the overthinking even more. Then you told your boyfriend about not feeling love for him, his feelings got hurt, he withdrew from you, and that increased your anxiety and overthinking even more.

This is why you need to relax, a whole lot of relaxing, to slow down your thinking, to make it possible for your thinking to be rational and proceed from there.

anita

Dear liz:

The more you panic about losing the loving feeling and the more you “just want to get the loving feeling back”, the more that feeling will stay away. Give up on it, and it will creep back in, on its own timing (not if you wait, check, then check again and panic, thinking something like: why isn’t it back? I waited for a whole day!)

What happens with any loving couple is that each does not feel love all the time for the other. Sometimes it is gone, then it returns. But the person does not notice or doesn’t get alarmed, doesn’t panic.

What happened with you is that you got caught in the thought: I don’t feel love for him, what does it mean… am I never going to feel love for him again? You got alarmed, you panicked.

You focused on something normal (not feeling the love in a relationship temporarily) and you panicked over it, fearing it is permanent.

anita