trust difficulty- fear and insecurity

[agualibre777]

So please try not to judge me too harshly, as I judge myself enough as it is.

 

As a back story- I was raised by two parents that abused me and my siblings and kicked us all out as teenagers. I raised myself essentially, went on to college to attain two degrees and received honors. People consider me a very confident person, funny, cool, and friendly. Yet, something people don't realize is that I had a slew of bad relationships, including an experience of date rape. Essentially, I was naive at one point, but gradually learned to believe not to trust myself in terms of trusting others. In other words, I learned not to trust my taste in men. I snooped second serious boyfriend after moving cross country with him and learned that he had lied to me about another woman, and much later learned he had cheated on me with a housemate. I felt, however, EXTREMELY guilty for snooping, and in fact felt responsible for the demise of the relationship for a very long time. To this day, I feel bad about it. I have snooped just a bit in two other relationships- once to discover the boyfriend was hitting on a friend of mine, and the other time to not discover anything at all really, but my gut feelings turned out to be correct that he was not to be trusted.

 

Fast forward to now. I am in a relationship for six months now with a truly amazing man, younger than me, who read large personal portions of his diary when we first started dating, said that he is open about his email/phone etc. I felt amazingly secure with him for the first time in my life, but as we got closer and more intimate, my security began to become more anxious. I resisted reading his email until one time he told me he checked mine, and so I did, and since then I've checked his email (on his open lap top) a few times. I did discover something once, that was bad, and we talked about it, almost broke up over it, and then resolved the issues (essentially he was writing a girl on eharmony when he and I were having relationship difficulties- and he thought we were breaking up- this stopped 3 days after it started and he never met her or exchanged phone numbers).

 

Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of that episode, I became very anxious, and read part of his journal. I stopped myself, just read the part after we met to see if there was anyone else involved. I did learn somethings that I didn't want to know about him, but can't blame anyone but myself because I chose to violate his privacy. This was a couple of months ago, and though I know where the journal is I will not do that again. I think the only reason I let myself go there was because he had read it aloud to me before. As even with my ex, I never ever did that. I know I shouldn't have done it anyways, though. He didn't say I could go back to read it. I don't think he'd want me to really.

 

I know that I can't keep snooping. At this point, I do trust him, but every now and then when I get anxious, fear crops up and I want to check his email/phone just to make sure. I haven't had this urge almost a month now, but still - I truly feel awful that I even started this at all. It's truly like an addiction- like I can't believe someone would truly love me and be committed to me, and so I want to find proof that i'm right. I want to find proof that I'm being deceived.

 

Any suggestions on what I can do?

[CSLX9]

Have you ever told him the history of your previous relationships

and how you feel insecure on the trust thing at times?

[lerira]

I don't think it's all that healthy to be checking each other's E-mails so frequently. You have to get passed this insecurity. You can't control everything in life.

[Jd1983]

I know that it's hard, but you need to learn to stop snooping.

 

I was like you at one point, I always felt the need to 'check up' on my bf. I wanted to see what he was doing, his phone, his computer, etc. Don't get me wrong, I would snoop and other times he just freely let me check through it because he said that he had nothing to hide. However, it got to a point that my insecurities was getting the best of me. I didn't feel at ease because I was too busy worrying about what he may do and I can imagine how frustrating my bf was feeling because no matter how hard he tried to please me, it never seemed enough.

 

Slowly, I started to stop being so inquisitive. I stopped constantly worrying about what he may be doing and I just learned to trust him. In my opinion, if someone was really going to cheat on you, there is nothing that you can do to stop them anyways. I don't think my bf is going to cheat on me, but I'm not going to be sitting there stressing myself trying to control his every move either. It really does make you feel better and less stressful.

 

You have to tell yourself that your bf is with you for a reason. Try to learn to trust him and stop stressing something that you can't control. We all need space from time to time to do our own thing.