I Need Help

What a great question! It's obvious you both love each other and I have no doubt that we can get your relationship back on track in no time. Tell her that you want to have many conversations with her, like the ones you had before. Tell her that what you want to talk about first is why she's thinks the relationship is off track. Tell her that while she may think that she's over what happened that on a deeper level she isn't fully over it.

If she were over it, she wouldn't continue to feel disconnected or not on track with you. Next we want her to understand that disconnection is a defense mechanism, an unconscious way of protecting the self from harm. The defense also protects the self from unwanted or dangerous feelings. Of course, all defense mechanisms ultimately backfire. In this case, pulling back, will actually end up hurting her and the relationship in the end. In order to get back on course, she needs to be liberated from the clutches of this defense.

In order to let go of the defense, she needs to understand what purpose the defense is attempting to serve. In other words, we need to find out how her unconscious thinks the defense will protect her; and what feeling the defense is protecting her from. I suspect that her trust has been tarnished and she is afraid of being lied to again. Cutting off or pulling back may be her unconscious mind's way of protecting her from being hurt again. If she's cut off from you, her unconscious mind thinks that it's protecting her from being hurt by you again.

If this is true, then she needs to feel safe with you. To feel safe she needs to be sure that you won't lie to her again. Keep in mind that lying is a defense mechanism that you use in order to protect yourself! You lie in order to avoid confronting the truth and the fallout that would result from the admission of the truth. You learned this defense as a young boy and it won't be easy to let it go.

The key is awareness. Observe yourself and recognize the urge to lie before you do. Then ask yourself, what feeling am I trying to avoid by lying? Am I hoping to avoid a confrontation, her anger. Am I lying because I think that she will try to control me or stop me from doing what I want to do? Observe and understand your defense. This is the only way to be free of it. When she sees that you are working on yourself, she will feel safer to trust you.

To return to her defenses. She may be cutting off as a defense against feeling angry toward you. She loves you and wants to be connected to you, and as a result, her anger has gone underground. When this happens, a person will feel disconnected, dead, cut-off, not on track, etc.

When you get her talking about the purpose her defense serves and the feelings that it shields her from, you will be amazed at how readily the defense vaporizes. Then and only then will she come back to herself and fully enter the relationship with you once again. Let me know how you do.