Dear Anita,

While I find sharing my past threads both illuminating and heartbreaking,  I find it hard in how listing all of these themes is beneficial to my inquiry. I feel like the way these themes that are listed were almost presented in a chronological manner; which is not helpful.

I feel like I’ve also grown from my previous relationships and have done good work in improving my self worth, feeling less shameful in having emotions, and improving my communication skills from my earlier behaviors. Your response fails to acknowledge this nor even provides the inquiry to illuminate this. Instead it mad me feel like a failure in relationships who is incapable of communicating. Who is a source of emotional distress to potential partners. Who is needy and incapable to empathize due to being neglected when younger. That was hurtful to hear, and again how does that response help answer: “How can I seek comfort in loss? How can I trust myself and my intuition?”

I acknowledge now that I do get anxiety in relationships with men and this is where I am doing most of my work. I am working on communicating how I feel and where my anxiety is coming from. I know my communication has improved by taking the necessary steps of asking for space to process, to be ask more questions and not assume, and ‘challenge’ the negative thought pattern. Additionally, I enjoy listening to my partner’s experience; it helps me see them see the situation differently and not let my anxiety take over. Also, I don’t want them to agree with me, but to just emotionally support.

Although not mentioned, when the person I was seeing expressed how deeply he was still heartbroken from his last relationship and in love he was — I immediately felt for that. I was holding both his vulnerability in expressing this information to me and also my need to feel safe too in a relationship with him. I knew my anxiety would take over if I stayed so I provided in my opinion a healthy boundary to be on a break so he could reflect more on his hurt feelings without my presence. It felt right because he agreed as well.

I decided to write another post on here, because setting healthy boundaries is a step towards addressing my anxiety and emotions. I was seeking on how to better lean into that since that is new, and just like anything that is new it can feel uncomfortable. However, your response failed to support that.

However, it is difficult to not respond to the followed up post itself. So here is my response:

All of the themes were painful to read, but the most difficult one was (3) since it is not in my nature to discourage someone for trying. If anything I will reflect more on this one. It is not so much that I want my partner to calm down my emotional distress, but instead I want to feel emotionally safe with my partner in a conversation. When I try to express a relationship concern after reflection and talking calmly, my most recent partner would stonewall, interrupt or use words such as ‘always’ and ‘never’ so it made me feel emotionally unsafe which made it feel like emotional vulnerability is difficult for them.  So some of my old habit patterns would come up … but instead of ‘crying’ or ‘shouting’ or ‘blaming’ … I shut down. I go silent.

So instead of speaking up about it due to the fear of going into this cycle … I was beginning to ‘hide my feelings’ and becoming a scared to voice up anything — which is not in alignment with how I want to grow… so I brought up the conversation on what are some ways we could work on showing emotionally availability. Offered some examples, and he was open to them. He states that it was very hard for me because he feels like he still not over his past relationship…which brings me back to the conversation in my initial post above.

Thank you for attempting to answer my initial post and taking the time read it — I don’t expect a response, and no longer really seeking one here.

Thank you Ellie for sharing that I am not alone. Hopefully, more answers would come about in the future for the both of us 🙂

If not, then it would then only depend on personal life experiences as the answer.

– Lexie

To Maria Mango:

I agree with what you stated that it is not on him. It is just challenging for me to fully embrace those thoughts, when I am feeling deep emotions of pain and hurt.

You have definitely provided two questions that I need to explore and discover. I am not quite sure and will have to think on it (and journal). I am also unsure what conclusions I would find, but I will definitely post it here just to express it.

I think that it will also help me determine what kind of friendship I would like to maintain with this person (or even if I want to maintain any type of relationship with them).

Thank you for your kind and supportive words.