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Long term relationship anxiety/confusion

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  • March 17, 2019 at 2:45 am #284919
    coconut
    Participant

    anita: I feel like I didn’t explain it well enough.. because his jokes are not that bad and he is never serious about those things, but I find it annoying when I don’t get his jokes.. when I understand them even though I don’t find them funny, I just ignore it and don’t feel anything bad. I told him about it and he said he’s gonna stop.

    Inky: I wanted to move in with him for like 2 or 3 years I think, for a very long time. But he didn’t want that because he thought we won’t get along because of my behavior that hurt him in the past. Indeed, it took me too long to finally convince him to move in together. What convinced him was the fact that I felt like I lost my feelings for him and things were going good for the past few months but that didn’t convinced him enough because of the past.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by coconut.
    March 17, 2019 at 7:20 am #284943
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear coconut:

    I re-read your posts trying to understand better. You clearly stated that you don’t want to break up with him, and that the idea of breaking up scares you a lot: “I don’t want to be without him, it scares me very much… I couldn’t ever heal from this break up.. The thought of breaking up scares me very much. I don’t want that… I don’t want to break up with him”.

    On the other hand you are scared while living with him, currently: “But at the same time I feel anxious now, while being together”.

    One thing that scares you now is the thought that “maybe I don’t love him anymore”. You are also afraid when you think: what if he doesn’t love you anymore (“if he was feeling for me what I feel for him now-confusion- or if he would tell me.. that he doesn’t feel anything”).

    My input: fear is a powerful feeling. When we are afraid we can not feel the soft feelings of love. And so, when you feel no love for him, it doesn’t mean that you don’t love him, it means that you are afraid.

    When a person is afraid, the brain automatically starts thinking about ways to escape the situation in which the person is afraid. In your case, the situation in which you are currently afraid is living with your boyfriend, so thoughts automatically occur about breaking up with him.

    Next, you get confused, you are afraid of breaking up with him, you don’t want to, but you don’t understand why you have these thoughts of breaking up with him, at times. You know you love him, but you are confused about why you don’t feel love for him a lot of the time. And then, you are afraid he will not feel love for you anymore.

    Key is for you to relax. You wrote that you can’t afford therapy. But you can afford the many ways available for you to relax. I are probably blogs on the home page of this site, click Blogs, then Mindfulness, with suggestions. You can take long walks, exercise, do guided meditations, listen to soft music, relaxing yoga and on and on. Once you feel relaxed, you will have the clarity that you need, and you will feel love again, if you relax.

    What do you think?

    anita

     

    March 17, 2019 at 11:52 pm #285067
    coconut
    Participant

    Hello anita.

    I will try some techniques to relax for the next time.

    I didn’t feel like that anymore this weekend which made me really happy.

    March 18, 2019 at 12:43 pm #285157
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear coconut:

    I am glad you had a better weekend and I hope you experience better and better weekends and weekdays. Post again anytime you want to.

    anita

    April 28, 2019 at 7:24 am #291571
    coconut
    Participant

    Hello again. It seems like those panic attacks and confusion came back. I cried, I had several panic attacks these days. Then I kind of stopped having these panic attacks but I still can’t feel love/affection towards him and I don’t know what to do. I told him everything, he listened to me, he didn’t change his behavior towards me he is still loving and affectionate and kind. I don’t want to break up with him or lose him/be without him. Since we moved in everything is better than ever, he is really affectionate, we don’t fight anymore, things are really nice. I mean, everything seems perfect.

    But I feel like those “love” feelings are not there anymore, I don’t feel like being affectionate, I don’t feel anything when he is affectionate…at least not these past days. I don’t want anybody else, I don’t like anybody else and I know nobody would compare to him or our relationship. He is in my heart and he is my everything and I can’t see myself without him. But since those thoughts and panic attacks came back again I just… can’t feel anything. I know breaking up with him is not the solution, but at the same time… I don’t know what to do. I want him, I want a family, I really like how things are, he really cares for me and I care for him, he is amazing.

    Should I break up with him? Can I get those feelings back? (considering that things are really great between us, so in the present there is no problem or something that needs to be fixed…and I still can’t feel ‘love’) Maybe for me this is the problem that everything is great, and I really trust him 100% and we don’t fight anymore…Maybe I need that to feel…”love”? Before we moved in even though we loved each other our relationship was kind of toxic, we broke up once, we were fighting almost all the time …. I don’t know. I know that I don’t want a break up, but at the same time being with him makes me feel unsettled for some reason, all because I don’t FEEL THE LOVE….

    April 28, 2019 at 8:50 am #291577
    coconut
    Participant

    I feel like I can’t live without him. Everything about me involves him. I feel like I associate my identity with him. This scares me very much. Every memory about myself, even thinking about myself and how I feel somehow involves him too like we’re one and the same person. He knows everything about me, he knows me. All my memories are with him, all my dreams about the future are about him. I am extremely attached to him and dependent. I feel like is so unhealthy but I can’t see myself or my life without him in it. Things are going great, so why do I have these thoughts? Maybe I am scared of being dependent on him because I don’t love him anymore? And so, being dependent (even though I may not have feelings anymore) doesn’t let me break up because I would be devastated and couldn’t recognize myself anymore.

    I really need some opinions.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by coconut.
    April 28, 2019 at 9:12 am #291585
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear coconut:

    “Before we moved in even though we loved each other our relationship was kind of toxic, we broke up once, we were fighting almost all the time”-

    -this is my understanding this morning: you were angry with him before he agreed to live with you and you felt your anger was justified by the fact that he didn’t spend enough time with you. So you fought with him, relieved yourself from your anger at him, temporarily, and during those times you felt love for him.

    Since he  moved in with you, you are still angry at him but now, you don’t see a justification for your anger, because he is spending enough time with you and he is wonderful to you, so you don’t fight with him, nothing to fight about. But you are still angry at him and when we feel anger at a person, we don’t feel affection of love for that person. We don’t want to feel love for a person we are angry at.

    I am supposing that in your family of origin, at home, with your parents, you were angry too, weren’t you?

    anita

    April 28, 2019 at 11:09 am #291631
    coconut
    Participant

    Indeed, I grew up kind of angry and yelling.

    Now I don’t feel angry with my boyfriend. I feel scared that maybe I don’t “love” him anymore (even though, without any feeling of dependence and attachment I can say I am happy now with him 100% and with our relationship). I am a little…annoyed if I can say this, that he felt scared to lose me after I felt like I don’t feel anything anymore. We could have moved a long time ago if he realized then what he realized 2 months ago.

    At the same time I didn’t treat him well either….I can say I don’t like that we went through these years behaving toxic with each other…And we couldn’t understand each other.

    And it was that really bad break up that…broke me. Maybe my feelings faded away …. but I really want to work this out and I feel it’s really not worth it to break up.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by coconut.
    • This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by coconut.
    April 28, 2019 at 11:20 am #291637
    coconut
    Participant

    Everytime we were fighting and he wanted to leave him alone to calm down I had bad anxiety attacks and I felt so scared to lose him I just wanted him to love me again and stop being mad and angry at me… So in those moments I couldn’t really know how I feel. If he would want to break up now for example…. I won’t feel like I’m okay with it, I would feel hurt that he left me and I would feel like a victim.

    But now when he’s so great to me and understanding and loving I feel like I have the freedom to know how I feel without the fear of being left.

    April 28, 2019 at 11:52 am #291639
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear coconut:

    I read just a bit from your recent two posts. I will re-read (as well as read anything you will add) when I am back to the computer, in about 18 hours from now.

    You wrote: “Indeed, I grew up kind of angry and yelling”- it will help me understand your current situation if you elaborate on this sentence, will you?

    anita

    April 29, 2019 at 7:18 am #291679
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear coconut:

    I will retell your story (it helps me understand better when I do that):

    The two of you met in college. For the first 1.5 years of the relationship you saw each other daily, except for weekends and the summer. After college it was a long distance relationship. For 2-3 years of the long distance relationship that followed college, you wanted the two of you to live together and pressured him to do so, to  move in with you.

    You were “being mean, feeling jealous for no reason, picking fights etc.” that resulted in “constant disagreements and fights… we were fighting almost all the time”.

    Because of those fights, he old you then at one point that “he doesn’t feel anything anymore and that we’ll never get back together”.

    The relationship resumed following a temporary breakup.  You continued to pressured him to move in with you, “constantly telling him that I don’t want a ldr anymore. He told you that “he’s afraid to move because of the past when I hurt him with my behavior (being mean, feeling jealous for no reason, picking fights etc) and that he needs time to see that I have really changed”.

    Two months ago, the two of you still living apart, long distance, you told him that you “felt like I had no feelings for him anymore”. As a result of you telling him that, he finally agreed to move in with you, realizing that “he really doesn’t want to lose (you)”. Two weeks after, when he suggested that you may be interested in another man, you told him that you were attracted to your co worker.

    The two of you moved in together two months ago. You “don’t pick fights anymore” with him, and he doesn’t get mad at you in return. “he is really affectionate, we don’t fight anymore, things are really nice. I mean, everything seems perfect

    But you get anxious when he doesn’t understand how you feel at any one time, for seeing things differently, for disagreeing with you and for having “different opinions on trivial things, not the important ones”, for the fact that “he doesn’t find funny the things I find funny and vice versa”, and “Sometimes I can’t tell when he’s joking or not and I have to ask because he doesn’t clarify it by himself… I find it annoying when I don’t get his jokes”.

    You wrote: “Me and my father have a similar relationship, he most of the time disagrees with me… I grew up kind of angry and yelling”.

    Here is my understanding at this point: you got used to a war-zone relationship, the one with your father. You are now living at peace with your boyfriend, but you are re-living your life with your father. We often re-experience a troubled past no matter where we go and who we are with, until we heal from that troubled past.

    What you experienced with your father is a combination of something like this: a strong emotional attachment to him, fear of the next time he disagreed with you (disagreeing with you when it was not called for, not necessary, in an eager-to fight kind of way), fear of his anger, fear of losing whatever affection he had for you, and your own anger at him.

    Same with your boyfriend, you are emotionally attached to him (“I am extremely attached to him and dependent”), afraid 0f losing him, feeling at times angry at him, and being afraid he will be angry at you in return. With your boyfriend, like with your father, you are very alert to any potential disagreements, and you feel threatened by any disagreements, no matter how trivial, any differences of opinion- because it didn’t take much for your father to direct aggression at you, any trivial disagreement could have led to his aggression.

    “Things are going great, so why do I have these thoughts?”- because until and if we heal from what injured us as children, we keep re-experiencing the same injuries, we keep re-experiencing our childhood.

    anita

    April 29, 2019 at 9:13 am #291711
    coconut
    Participant

    Hello anita. Thank you for taking the time to understand my story and give me your opinion.

    <>

    I used to get really anxious when I would feel bad, annoyed, anxious and acted bad towards him because I couldn’t control myself and instead of comforting me he would in turn become really angry and mad at me (which is kind of understandable), but that’s not the case anymore in the present. Also he doesn’t make those ‘bad’ jokes anymore and now I know when he’s kidding or not.

    By disagreeing with me I mean that he says his opinion and most of the time we have kind of different opinions and views and also we don’t really have the same sense of humor, but there are still times when we can make each other laugh. And this makes me think that we are incompatible, I don’t feel like he gets me or that I get him cause we see things differently and I’m talking about…normal stuff in conversation…not even the big things. I feel the need to be kind of alike on some level so I can feel…connected and at peace. I don’t like it when I talk about something or I find something funny and he doesn’t get it and doesn’t understand things the way I do or at least similar.

    <>

    The thing is my father is rarely angry, he is the kind of person that can make you feel really annoyed while he is calm, by telling his opinions that are totally different than mines and his mentality is kind of different and he annoys me when he says things the way he sees them but he knows I don’t agree with them. Most of the time when I said something or talked to him he would say things that made me really angry cause I didn’t get him and I thought his opinions are not right or according to reality but I couldn’t make him understand things. I think we have kind of a cold relationship, like we talk but also he doesn’t “get” me. But I like it when we finally and rarely agree on things. Instead with my mother I feel that she gets me and since I was 6 yo or something I had separation anxiety and panicked if my mother wasn’t with me.

    <no matter how trivial, any differences of opinion- because it didn’t take much for your father to direct aggression at you, any trivial disagreement could have led to his aggression.>>

    I don’t feel angry at my bf anymore since we moved in and I don’t feel afraid of him being angry at me cause he has no reason to be and won’t be.

     

     

    April 29, 2019 at 9:22 am #291713
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear coconut:

    You are welcome. Can you give me a few examples of your father saying “things the way he sees them  but he knows I don’t agree with them”, a few examples of “his opinions (that) are not right or according to reality”?

    anita

    April 29, 2019 at 9:38 am #291715
    coconut
    Participant

    When we were in a ldr my boyfriend was the one who came in my city to see me, but there were several times when I went to his city and my father would say things like “Why are you the one who goes there? He’s the boy he has to come to you” and it’s really annoying and makes no sense. 1. because he was the one to come like 99% of the time, and 2. because I didn’t see a problem for me to go there, and I don’t have this old mentality that he has to do everything because he’s the man and I don’t have to do anything because I’m the girl. This is the only example that comes to my mind right now. Or when I would fight with my boyfriend (because I would pick fights or felt unsatisfied on some level) and he would not answer to my calls/texts and completely ignored me and I was crying and panicking my parents hated to see me like that, but my father would say that he doesn’t love me… like he was supposed to accept me picking fights with him and not have any reaction.

    April 29, 2019 at 9:45 am #291717
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear coconut:

    Before your boyfriend was in your life, before you went to college, looking at as far back as you remember, when you were a child- can you give me a few examples of your father disagreeing with you or otherwise annoying you?

    You wrote: “I grew up kind of angry and yelling” and your father was “rarely angry.. (and) calm”- who was doing the yelling?

    anita

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