Question 6 for Deeping a Dynamic

“When the ground falls out from under you — what triggers the collapse?”
https://fetlife.com/Vampyre/posts/12119957

Truthfully? Me. My anxiety. My ability to overthink myself into a catastrophic collapse.

I try to warn people about this stuff when I start a relationship with them. The abandonment issues, the massive levels of anxiety, the trauma history, the triggers, the way I overthink everything. I think being honest about it with a person in the beginning, and letting them know that these are things I am actively working on, is only fair. I read between the lines a lot. I search for patterns, clues in a person’s behavior that let me know what the safe path forward is. Sometimes that pattern recognition is correct from the start. Sometimes, however, I fill in the blanks with information I think is correct to complete the pattern and find out afterward how wrong I was.

My therapist will tell you that sometimes my self-awareness is a fault. The logical, left side of my brain can tell you in deep psychological manner what my issues are. But my ability to translate my self-diagnosis to helpful results doesn’t exist a lot of the time. Especially if anxiety is taking over.

One of the coping strategies that I work on is putting my thoughts on trial. I try to examine each extreme thought and break it down, investigate the pieces that have built up to the conclusion that I have come to, and challenge them to see if they are based in reality. I try to give…