Hi everyone - hope you're all doing okay today. After some anxiety-fraught posts in the past few weeks I've been better (at least for now!) and wanted to share some coping strategies that worked for me today. 

Without going into too many details, last week the guy that I'm seeing (it's pretty complicated) had plans for a certain event with his friends that required a lot of trust on my part. He let me know ahead of time, reassured me, and called me afterward, so I felt as good about the whole thing as I could. I trusted him and other aspects of our relationship have been really good recently, so overall I didn't feel bad about it and set it aside in my mind afterward.

Today I met up with one of our mutual friends, who gave an account of the event that was slightly different. None of it was inconsistent with what my SO said, and any differences were only subjectively off, slightly. It would have been very easy, however, for me to make several assumptions and conclude that my SO had lied to me. For a few seconds my brain was running in that direction, but I caught myself doing so. I catalogued all of the presumptions that I had to make in order for that conclusion to be true: the fact that my friend said X means Y, the fact that he didn't mention Z means that the opposite must be true, etc. And then I realized that if I take my friends version of the story at face value it was actually completely consistent with what my SO had told me - I had no real reason to think that my sense of security and happiness should be challenged, but my mind still jumped to the possibility of that at least briefly. 

I had a really bad tendency of allowing a lot of assumptions to spiral into conclusions of abandonment and then hysterically responding to that. It was like an emotional avalanche that would hit me and the object of my affection with sudden intensity and very little notice. The past two months have been rough and I'm really proud of myself for being able to handle this calmly and recognize the instances where my mind started racing. Therapy really works! I feel hopeful for myself right now. 