New to the idea of polyamory and my conundrum

The odd thing is that for many with anxiety / depression / etc., is that while they may not like it, it is familiar and comfortable. Trying to improve presents the unknown and it is almost never a comfortable process. And if an individual comes to believe it is a personality trait rather than an addressable issue, she has given herself an out - she doesn't have to change because she believes she can't.

If this is where she is, you could find yourself waiting indefinitely.

That is how she views it, and that stops me from being able to help her because she tells me that I should love her for her and not try to change her personality. I try to tell her that it is a defense mechanism that is completely separate from her personality, but she just can't see it.

I also feel her beginning to distance herself from me since we had a conversation two weeks ago where I told her how much this was effecting me and made her aware of the prisoners dilemma that her anxiety is putting me in. I think that the anxiety gives her so much comfort that she is willing to push away and sacrifice our relationship so that she can still hold onto it without hurting me. We are planning to take some time apart in order to gather our thoughts and so that she can look inside of herself. I hope that she will find some inner strength that she does not know that she has. I have seen that she has it in other areas of her life.

I know that this whole thread has been focusing on the issues of our relationship and the reasons why I care about her and see potential in her have not been brought up which can color the view of anyone outside of our relationship. It will be a shame if we can't save all of the good that is there just because of fear.
 
The thing of ot is it is not a question of whether you love her not - you obviously do - it is a question of whether you can happily live this way. She is throwing out red herrings with statements like, "you should love me for who I am," the implication being that if you loved loved her, you would be happy to live within the constraints of her irrational fears.

Given that fear is such a powerfully uncomfortable emotion, it is easy to feel sorry for the person who is afflicted, but I've seen the exact same argument used by a woman who was afflicted by different emotion: anger. She had unpredictable temper. Her husband, could never predict exactly what would set her off (seemed to be entirely mood driven) and he was always the target. Although, he loved her dearly, his life grew increasingly uncomfortable. She once questioned aloud whether she was emotionally abusive, to which he replied, "I have considered it." And yet her response was "you should love me for who I am." Again, not a question of love, but a question of whether he could continue to live like that. She was quite distraught, baffled, and betrayed when he finally left, forever failing to understand how adversely her behavior affected him.
 
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It's good that she's going to take some time to work on herself. That's important and helps earn your faith in the relationship.

I still feel the majority of this situation rests with you though. Perhaps she goes off and comes back able to give you what you need. Perhaps she doesn't. If she doesn't, only you can decide how long you can live without your need to be poly. If it's a month, a year, indefinitely...there is no right answer, but in the end, only you can decide when you've had enough.

Are you willing to make a decision when she comes back from the time off? If she comes back and says, I need a certain amount of time, are you ready to measure that against the time you can wait for your needs to be met?

While it seems like she's dictating a lot, she only has the power you give her.
 
While it seems like she's dictating a lot, she only has the power you give her.

This is an important thing to realize and remember for anyone living with a needy person like the ones described in this thread.

I am one. And just the other day I was trying to figure out how to be happy in a relationship. I had realized my neediness a long time ago and I don't like the trait or what it does to my relationships. I've tried to find people who don't get sucked in (while I work on my issues), but they always do. They try to be there for me and help me and do all the good and loving things, but it just makes me (act) weak and needy. When I'm not in a relationship I manage fine on my own, but somehow when there is another person I can lean on, I lean too hard. And they let me. And that pisses me off and then I'm unhappy. (sorry about the personal stuff on your thread, but I'll get back to your story soon.)

I realised I need someone, who'll stay by my side and tell me that I'm strong enought to figure things out on my own while they wait by my side. Then I realised that I don't really need another person for that. I can tell myself that I'm strong enough. That way I won't risk anyone getting sucked in.

Don't get sucked in her needs and fears and whatever her issues are. Stand back, but don't go away. Let her work on her issues. Don't give her power over things you don't want. It will only make both of you miserable sooner or later.
 
This is an important thing to realize and remember for anyone living with a needy person like the ones described in this thread.

I am one. And just the other day I was trying to figure out how to be happy in a relationship. I had realized my neediness a long time ago and I don't like the trait or what it does to my relationships. I've tried to find people who don't get sucked in (while I work on my issues), but they always do. They try to be there for me and help me and do all the good and loving things, but it just makes me (act) weak and needy. When I'm not in a relationship I manage fine on my own, but somehow when there is another person I can lean on, I lean too hard. And they let me. And that pisses me off and then I'm unhappy. (sorry about the personal stuff on your thread, but I'll get back to your story soon.)

I realised I need someone, who'll stay by my side and tell me that I'm strong enought to figure things out on my own while they wait by my side. Then I realised that I don't really need another person for that. I can tell myself that I'm strong enough. That way I won't risk anyone getting sucked in.

Don't get sucked in her needs and fears and whatever her issues are. Stand back, but don't go away. Let her work on her issues. Don't give her power over things you don't want. It will only make both of you miserable sooner or later.

I definitely agree that that is what I need to do. I have already wrote a letter that I was going to leave the night that I left that among other things focused on telling her of her inner strength.

I do see one key difference between you and her though. You could already stand on your own in the first place. You are aware that you have the ability. She still believes that she does not have the ability and that this anxiety is a ingrained part of her personality. This means that in her mind, the battle is already lost.

I'm also not sure if I hear too much fear as the cause behind your need. Was it more of a reaction because it was convenient to lean on them? Or was it that you felt that they needed someone that needed them?

Me standing back is probably the healthiest thing for me to do, especially for me, but from your experience, what do you think your chances of overcoming your needing the other person excessively would be if you had never developed the "tools" to do so before the relationship (i.e. were just as needy outside as in) and also believed it was a physical part of you instead of just a behavior?
 
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As cold as this may sound, it's not your fault that she doesn't have the tools. Assuming it's not your fault that she doesn't have coping mechanisms, are you going to assume the burden when you weren't the cause?

I'm not saying drop her immediately or at all. You may love her so much that you decide to make sacrifices for her that other people wouldn't. But you paint a picture of someone without a choice and who is trapped without a way out. If you don't save her, then who will? I'm saying you shouldn't feel trapped because you don't immediately see another way for her to learn to cope. You'd be surprised what people learn to do when they're forced to. Perhaps this is her time to address these issues.

Again, you don't have to pull the rug out from under her. But don't neglect yourself until you're critically unhealthy.
 
. . . Both of us would have to be open to at least a poly-esque mindset in order for even deeper forms of platonic love to not be seen as a detraction form our relationship.

This is an absolutely false assumption.

Up until about four years ago, I was staunchly monogamous - yet I never begrudged my husband any time he spent, or wanted to spend, with his platonic friends, both male and female. He also never held me back in wanting to develop any friendships with women or men. We trusted each other and we could even talk about attractions to other people, or flirt with others in front of each other, and so on - there was nothing threatening about it because we knew neither of us would act on it. There was no distrust or insecurity around that. Both of us viewed our marriage as a mutually supportive and respectful partnership. Nor did either of us feel that we both needed to do activities with the other's friends together - he went out and socialized without me, and visa versa. A "poly-esque" mindset is not necessary for a person with healthy self-esteem to want to nurture and support a partner in having friends and investing in those friendships, and to expand their life outside of the relationship in other ways (hobbies, education, careers, etc.). We eventually separated due to other issues, but cultivating friendships and outside interests was never an issue in our mono life together.

Polyamory is not the only ticket to having expansiveness, open-mindedness, confidence, and generosity in love relationships - monogamy can have all that, too. It's not the relationship structure that gives you those things, it's up to the people involved to create what they want.

It seems to me your gf's issues are about trust and possessiveness over your time. Also, and I'm sure you may not realize this, but you do judge her a bit for not being able to tackle her issues (in your opinion) as easily as you seem to tackle yours ("breaking limits," etc.). I am not saying this to be critical, but to point out something that struck me as I read your posts -- there is an element of a slight sense of superiority in what you write about your conundrum: basically, the way in which she is standing in your way of self-development. I think that it would behoove you to examine how you stand in your own way, and set aside the judging and blaming. The more you tiptoe on eggshells around her, the more you fan the flames of a situation you don't want, so you are participating in creating your own dissatisfaction 100% as much as she is.
 
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It seems to me your gf's issues are about trust and possessiveness over your time. Also, and I'm sure you may not realize this, but you do judge her a bit for not being able to tackle her issues (in your opinion) as easily as you seem to tackle yours ("breaking limits," etc.). I am not saying this to be critical, but to point out something that struck me as I read your posts -- there is an element of a slight sense of superiority in what you write about your conundrum: basically, the way in which she is standing in your way of self-development. I think that it would behoove you to examine how you stand in your own way, and set aside the judging and blaming. The more you tiptoe on eggshells around her, the more you fan the flames of a situation you don't want, so you are participating in creating your own dissatisfaction 100% as much as she is.

I did miss phrase the poly-esque mindset part along with that whole paragraph that it was in, as I also misspoke in an earlier post on that subject as well. I was still trying to put what was going on in my head into words and I did not completely grasp it at the time. I believe that what I was trying to get across was better explained in post 19, although it is probably not perfect either. Keep in mind that I am still trying to figure things out and that I have misspoken and probably will misspeak again. In that post I explained how I think I allowed myself to react to the jealousy that I knew was there by closing off the depth to people outside of our relationship. I just meant by the statement that you quoted that, although not healthy, based on an average of monogamous relationships that I have seen, that there is some resistance to forming deep connections with the opposite sex. I do not say that that is ideal and it sounds like your relationship was much healthier in that regard than most that I have seen, but that is all that I meant and why I mistakenly stereotyped that assumption.

I also apologize if I am not using any terminology the right way in this culture. Remember that I just found out about it recently and am still learning. It takes time to learn the language of any new concept. There are nuances that I as well as any new person will not pick up on right away. I am trying.

I just want to say that it is not so much a place of superiority, but a place of exhaustion. This type of issue has always been easier to overcome and as a result I have never had to struggle in overcoming them to this degree (I have had a few struggles of my own that took a couple years in high school); like I have let myself do here by accepting her struggles as my own. The part I was struggling with was that in the past I have had control over my own struggles and because they were my struggles, I only had myself to blame if I didn’t overcome them. Here I accepted onto myself (at the time being only partially aware of what I was doing) a struggle that I do not have control over the direct outcome. I have always recognized that it is her decision and that no amount of pushing on my part will help (The only place one can have any semblance of control is in their own mind). I have helped people overcome their fears before, but never in a relationship which is how I personally became involved in an unhealthy way by taking the struggles onto myself instead of keeping a healthy distance. I believe that I said in several posts how hard it is for someone who is not ready. I fully acknowledge how difficult it is. I admit that I allowed myself to get involved to the point where I feel trapped and probably have added to it. I believe that I said in another post that because I did not see that I was putting myself into this position at the time that I have become a crutch and I think that is why it has gotten worse and not better (post 19). It didn't really present itself for the first year and then gradually grew worse over this last year and I didn't even see it until recently (These posts helped a lot).

I understand that I tend to analyze people, and anything else, from more of a withdrawn scientific perspective when I am trying to figure something out. This is not meant to sound superior, like a robot, cold, or withdrawn either. It is me trying to see the situation objectively. I understand that the lack of emotion at some points where I am writing like this it can come across that way.

I also want to say that I still do plenty of the things that allow me to grow and live life on my own. What I want and what I have been missing is someone to share them with on a deeper level. I feel isolated when I am learning/ discovering/doing all of these new things and can't talk about them. It is not that I am stopped from growing and I am not blaming her for stopping me from growing. I just miss sharing it with someone (as said before, post 19, the me doing these things more “alone” than in a deep connection with someone outside of the relationship was also something that I subconsciously did to myself because I knew how jealousy made her feel). I guess that I also worry that if I grow too much that we will grow apart. That hasn't stopped me from growing, but I think it is the reason behind why I wish she could experience more with me and why I have been so hoping that she could get past it. I just came to this realization now. I think this might have been another reason that I was exploring poly (other reasons on post 19). I might be feeling like a gap is forming between us and I have been trying to fill it by either her overcoming her fears and joining me, or by me finding another person to fill that gap to take the pressure off of both of us. I will admit that this again is also not the healthiest mindset I could have been in. As I said at the beginning, I am trying to make sense of any number of thoughts going through my head right now and am trying to make sense of them all. Some are more clear to me than others, but I have never claimed to have had it all figured out. Although thanks to everybody’s help I feel closer

I think there was some misunderstanding especially in my earlier posts where it came across that need to be poly as some people have posted. I think that it was best said in post 19 when I said " separate from this relationship, I think the idea really has some merit and see the benefits of not restricting oneself to love one person when it really is infinite. While I don't need to be poly or mono, It seems like a really freeing philosophy and many people on this board seem to be very relationship conscious which is refreshing and I have not seen as much of in monogamous culture". I do not see it as a need. That would almost put a different restriction on how one loves. As I also said there, I no longer believe that poly is the answer to the issues that we are facing and that I was exploring the possibility of it with this thread (see also post 6 and 19). It is something that I definitely still feel open to, but do not need.

I also tried to acknowledge the posts about the decision that I am faced with, at the end in post 19, although not as explicitly as I could have, I think, because I still have hope for our future. To clarify, At this point, it seems that the options are: 1) to wait and search in myself to change any behaviors that may be exacerbating the situation and hope she is able to overcome her anxiety, while gauging if I can shoulder any burdens/restrictions that I may have to choose to take on in the process, 2) to try and figure out how long that I can wait (which I have to say is difficult, how do you even put a number on that (This is why I asked copperhead in my last post for her own experiences)), 3) move on and let her down as easily as possible, and 4) some path that has not presented itself yet, but I am illogically hopeful that still exists (only half joking). I am fully aware that it is a decision that I alone have to make and am not asking anyone here to make it for me. All I have asked for was advice in order to better weigh the options.
 
This is a shame. Sounds as though it would be very difficult for your girlfriend to accept you having people close to you other than her.

Be careful, though, about treating your girlfriend as if she is broken in some way. Sometimes your words sound as if you see her as in need of being fixed.

I have been anxious for longer than I can remember. My mum tells me that even as a toddler I would worry - sometimes for weeks at a time if I heard something upsetting. She said that it also affected what I wanted to do physically. I was careful how I moved. I tended not to ride bikes. I've never climbed a tree. I have never experienced the usual fearlessness of childhood.

I don't know where it came from. Maybe some of it is from being dropped down the stairs as a baby. Or maybe some of it came from my very demanding brother being born when I was 18 months and everybody I depended on suddenly leaving me alone a lot of the time so that they could deal with him. Maybe some of it is inherited (one of my nephews has strong similarities to me).

Anyway - it is part of who I am. It's more part of who I am than my sexuality is. My sexuality has undergone lots of changes over the course of my life. When I was a child, I would have considered myself a lesbian if I'd had the language. Then I would have strongly identified as heterosexual. For several years in my 20s I considered myself to be asexual. Now I find I have a strong sex drive and a wide range of people that I'm attracted to.

My anxiety, however, has remained a constant in my life. It is part of my personality. Being this way is not at all an entirely negative thing. Being worried helps with observational skills - something that is useful in my professional and personal life. Worried people are often conscious of everything around them and that can be useful. It helps me to be more empathetic. I don't just worry about myself - I worry about others too. I think about their feelings and I take care to try and act in ways that won't hurt them.

Being this way also encourages me to do new things. This is to keep it in check. I am very aware that this is a trait that could lead to me hiding at home and refusing to do anything if left unchecked. So I challenge myself all the time. I have lots of interests and lots of friends who challenge me and with whom I do new things.

It does annoy me sometimes that I worry - especially when I can't sleep or have to talk myself into going out because I'm convinced I'll be in a car crash. It for sure affects who I can be close to - I have a friend who needs to stay a casual friend. I consider his lifestyle to be so risky that if I was close to him, I would just worry about him all the time. So he and I remain distant friends. Even with these drawbacks I wouldn't want now to be rid of my anxiety. It can be a very useful thing and I think has brought me more positives than negatives.

I would not be tolerant of having somebody in my life who wanted to change that aspect of me. Maybe for your girlfriend, her anxiety is part of her in the same way as mine is part of me?

I'm sure you wouldn't be terribly impressed if your gay friend tried to fix you by telling you that your heterosexuality was limiting his ability to enjoy a close relationship with you.

IP
 
IP,

I don't think the OP wants or hopes for his partner to become a carefree, live totally in the moment person. It reads to me that he wants her to be able to let go of control and open up to him and to life in general. I agree that to treat her as broken is not helpful and would be counterproductive. However her anxiety and need to control her environment is impacting her life and relationships on negative ways.

You are managing your anxiety - it is not controlling you. You have learned skills to cope and even use anxiety to your advantage. From the little we know here, the OP's partner has not been able to do the same so far. Hopefully she will.
 
Sorry to have kept you waiting. I missed your questions earlier. Good thing I came back to this thread now.

I do see one key difference between you and her though. You could already stand on your own in the first place. You are aware that you have the ability. She still believes that she does not have the ability and that this anxiety is a ingrained part of her personality. This means that in her mind, the battle is already lost.

I wasn't always like this. But I've learned from experience and through lots and lots of thinking. But to learn, one must be motivated and you can't force feed motivation on anyone. I always say that I've over-trained my willpower. But there are times when sheer willpower has gotten me through the most difficult things and has made it possible to learn skills I've needed.

I'm also not sure if I hear too much fear as the cause behind your need. Was it more of a reaction because it was convenient to lean on them? Or was it that you felt that they needed someone that needed them?

Fear? I've never really been afraid to be alone (without relationship), but I've always been afraid to end up without friendship. So maybe it has been fear or not… All my partners have been my best friends, and the most tragic thing in a breakup is loosing that friend (although I always try to preserve that). I can't remember how things were in the past, but now it is a bad habit. Convenient is a good word for it. I don't do mirror games anymore, so I don't think what the other person might think. I ask.

Me standing back is probably the healthiest thing for me to do, especially for me, but from your experience, what do you think your chances of overcoming your needing the other person excessively would be if you had never developed the "tools" to do so before the relationship (i.e. were just as needy outside as in) and also believed it was a physical part of you instead of just a behavior?

I started this process from a place where I wasn't even aware of what the problem was. All I knew was that I was miserable and the people close to me were too and I wanted to change that. I can only change myself, so I started to randomly experiment anything that was different from my previous reactions or actions. If I thought the result were better than the ones I'd gotten before, I kept at it, if they were worse, I tried something else. After a while I had a theory on what was the problem and then I started to read and think. It's taken me ten years and three relationships to get where I am now. I'm hopeful that next time I might have it 'right'. But I'm glad if that time too I'll do better than before. I never look too far ahead, because the change would seem impossible. I look at the small things I can actually change and then I try my best and I'm confident that I'll be able to do it sooner or later. I try untill I make it, or until I think of something better.
 
Opalescent, you are right. Whether it is viewed from the point of view where this is a permanent part of her personality that is hurting her (and others around her) that she hasn’t developed the mechanisms to deal with healthily yet, or from the point of view where it is a behavior that she can change, it all amounts to the same thing. It does sound like Infinite possibility has developed several ways to deal with and even turn her anxiety into something that can be helpful in her life. My girlfriend unfortunately has not. She is in her head almost as much as I am which, in this case, means that her anxiety does not help her to notice things in the world around her like it does for Infinite. It instead has the effect of shutting her off from the world and further trapping her in her anxieties, giving them even more control over her. Worrying can definitely be used to help a person be more empathetic, in that you worry about the effects that you and others may have on other people and how they might feel. The difference here is when the worry is driven by irrational fear. The fear has the tendency to convert the focus away from the other people and what they are feeling into something that is more inwardly focused onto the worrier’s fear of loss of those people not on the people themselves and the way they feel. Infinite, you driving yourself to do new things is a perfect example of a method that you developed to deal with your worrying. I am not certain of this, but I would venture to guess that because you are prone to worry, that the new things that you try are even more exhilarating to you than they would otherwise be. It sounds like you do enjoy pushing yourself and it has opened up several friendships and interests that you would not have otherwise tried. My girlfriend never learned this way of dealing with her anxiety. She does not push herself in order to counteract her nature (whether it is a part of her or a behavior) as you do. Instead, she sometimes becomes paralyzed with the fear. Because she doesn’t try to challenge herself to push past it and instead chooses the safety of not having to deal with it, she ends up relieving the same anxiety over and over again.

I am by no means one of those people that are able to be completely care free and live in the moment without a safety net or certain necessary precautions either. I am talking about being open to new things (ideas, philosophies and physical although this sentence applies more to the physical) that may appear to be dangerous but are actually safe because of all of the safeguards that are in place. I definitely understand that a certain amount of worry is definitely healthy to keep a person from self-destructing. The problem is when it is a paralyzing irrational fear that does not help in any way and can actually stop you from experiencing any new things in the long term. That is what can cause a person to stop living and just exist in safety. In order to try anything new there exists some danger. This is the same for trying new food or looking at a viewpoint that is different than your own. These are not “safe” acts. They do however help you grow as a person and their safety can be managed. For her, the anxiety is controlling her and preventing her from growing as a person in several ways and she has not developed the same (or different) ways of coping as you have.

Based on the realizations I have had in these posts: I used to view what was happening as her coming to me with these worries and in response, I would explain the underlying causes of the worries and try to help her figure out ways to overcome them when she wasn’t ready to. I would then feel trapped because she would then come back with almost identical worries and the cycle would repeat. Because of these posts, I have seen that I subconsciously added pressure to her because I felt so trapped by this cycle and also (discovered in last post) because I have been going through several awakenings this year and I was feeling a gap begin to widen between us because her anxiety will not let her experience the new world I am experiencing with me (not just speaking about physicalities here). As said before, I have successfully helped people with anxiety successfully outside of a relationship (They were motivated but just didn't know where the root of their problem lay). I think that with me trying to help from within a relationship I lost my perspective and was drawn into it. I do not see her as a broken person. There is so much that is amazing about her. I was just feeling so trapped by the anxiety that I wanted it to stop! I always knew that she wasn’t ready and that I couldn’t force the change on her, but it just kept happening and happening and I just wanted it to end.

Copperhead, from the way you answered my questions it seems that you also developed methods to deal with your anxiety. You had the motivation to figure out how to move past what was convenient yet made you and others miserable. By the way, I read into what you were saying before and wasn’t implying that your worry was fear based. It sounded like it was one of the others. I was just trying to make sure because fear does seem to be the basis of my girlfriend’s anxiety which can have a different specific effect on how the brain treats it.

Your journey is eye opening and is similar in some ways to when I had social anxieties. I developed them when I was 7. I still do not know the cause except maybe that is the age that children begin to act more judgmental toward their peers and I was a more sensitive child. Before that I was very outgoing and what some would call precocious. I became closed off inside myself and didn’t really make any new friends. I had fun with and kept my earlier friends, but I was not able to make any new connections. I was able to talk to people, but I was not able to really form anything meaningful and felt anxious around new people and in larger groups (especially my own age. I was better with adults). When I was 15 I made the decision to learn how to be able to open up and connect to people. I made a lot of improvement throughout high school, trying new things and experimenting with what did and didn’t work like you did. Being a scuba instructor at my college really helped me to be able to speak in front of large groups of my peers. I don’t think that I really got over it until the summer I went to Florida to work as a scuba instructor at a summer camp. I knew only one person, but ended up having a blast. The counselors that I worked with were some amazing people and I enjoyed every minute of it. All in all, it took about 7 or 8 years for me. I am still naturally more introverted, I exist in my head a lot, thinking about any number of things. But I now enjoy and seek out social situations because it is so fulfilling. Do I still have those anxieties some times? Of course I do. But they are rare and getting rarer and much less potent every time I swat them away.

The fact that I had social anxieties didn’t make me a broken person because there was a lot to me beyond just social anxieties even before I was motivated (same with everyone that has any issue). However, overcoming and learning from them did make me an even stronger person. No one is perfect and everyone has ways that they can still grow in. just because a person’s ways that they can grow may be simpler for one person does not mean that that person is broken, even if they don't have the motivation to or do not yet understand what ways that they still have left to grow are.

What copperhead, infinitepossibilities and I seem to have had in common was motivation from within. My girlfriend is not showing signs of this. I know how long it takes to overcome something this big and know that I would be more than willing to be by her side throughout the struggle no matter how long it took. But without the motivation to begin with, it may never happen. The side effect of this is that with me continuing to grow in ways I cannot predict and her only method of dealing with her anxieties remaining to put them on me and not deal with them, then our relationship will not be healthy and will in the end fail. As said before, I definitely need to do what I normally would have done if I was trying to help someone that I wasn’t in a relationship with and stand back and let her learn to deal with it on her own because me being a crutch does not help either of us. If she does not show any signs of developing motivation toward helping herself, then I guess I will have to move on because it would hurt me too much to watch her suffering like that and not rush back in to take on the weight of her anxieties again which is what got us into this unhealthy thing in the first place.
 
Sounds as though you guys have some tough decisions ahead.

It may be that your girlfriend feels better off living a limited life. Maybe for her, the difficulties she'd have to go through in order to find ways to deal with her anxiety in a different way are such that she doesn't feel they would be worth doing so. I know loads of folk who feel that way about a variety of issues.

Having said that. It is clear that her choices profoundly impact on you and on the life that you and she share. Maybe it'll be possible to reach some middle ground where you feel able to have new experiences and a group of friends to share them with and your girlfriend is able to find a wider support network so that she does not need to lean so much on you.

I hope it works out that way for you guys.
 
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