Fear, Anxiety and Healthy Relationships
I am at an impasse, with my writing and with my feelings. Of course, these issues are related.
Last month, I began writing here about mending my relationship with my ex-boyfriend Bob, and we've been getting along very well in the meantime. We've reached a point of sharing that is different than at any time in our past: I've been able to share my feelings - past and present - with Bob and he has admitted a level of honesty I never expected from him. I was very happy, until I sought to write a long piece about our relationship for my personal blog and I couldn't come up with a way to tackle the topic. That's when I knew that I had some negative reactions mixed in with my warm fuzzies.
Fear of New Behaviors
Now that I'm trying to operate from a place of emotional honesty, I've had to get rid of my old defense mechanisms: using sarcasm to mask discomfort; rationalizing my emotional dishonesty as protecting other people; compensating for my feelings of relationship inadequacy by working all of the time. But the thing about defenses is that they work, so when you strip them away it's difficult to get used to a new - albeit healthier - coping strategy. For me right now, that means acknowledging my fear of getting hurt, teasing away my knee-jerk instincts to hide it, and sharing with Bob his behaviors that hurt me in the past. This kind of honesty is hard work, but I'm working through it slowly.
Fear of Bipolar Reactions
Where there is fear, is there love?
APA Reference
Lloyd, T.
(2012, January 11). Fear, Anxiety and Healthy Relationships, HealthyPlace. Retrieved
on 2024, April 16 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/relationshipsandmentalillness/2012/01/fear-anxiety-and-healthy-relationships
Author: Tracey Lloyd
When I was severely mentally ill with Borderline Personality disorder, I took my marriage out of context. Every time my husband tried to be good friends with another woman I ended up accusing him of having an affair. I ended up checking his phone, timing him when he got home from work, questioning him and even checking up on him to see where his car was. I took the whole thing out of context and reacted in absurd ways! I somehow managed to convince myself that what I was thinking was true and because I was thinking it, it was happening. I even ended up looking for evidence which simply did not exist because it wasn't happening. What I learned was to 'turn my mind.' Your brain makes you think things and it can convince you it is true even if it is not! This is 'distorted thinking' which is not easy to deal with when you've been through the nightmare of relationships where it has happened, its happened with your parents and you never healed from it. A past full of violence can cause this thinking too.
The key I have learned is to learn to trust your partner and your self that he is telling the truth, to be mindful that your thinking it and figure out why your thinking it and what doesn't add up.
My husband has a preference for female company and he works with females, this sometimes makes me anxious but I trust he knows his boundaries so when I'm 'obsessed' with the idea he could be having an affair, I do something to boost my confidence and I look at it through his eyes by understanding he could be thinking the same thing, since we don't get much time together now because of work.
Does love exist anymore...how would you know when you don't feel the love for anything like you use to.
Interesting info. It's funny to read it because I was asking myself the same question. I guess we all feel the same feelings, don't we?
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Stunning quest there. What happened after? Good luck!
The situation is a work in progress, that is, I'm writing about it in realtime...thanks for reading!