I just did a 20-minute coaching session on this, and it seems we opened up the can of worms that is my brain and all its stories about the situation — so many more unanswered questions than I’d realized, ha!

We were working on this model:

C: BF hasn’t said “I love you”
T: If he doesn’t love me now, maybe he never will.
F: ?
A: Practice embracing uncertainty about the future of this relationship, commit to achieving my goals independently, work more actively on my goals, enjoy spending rest and adventure time with him.
R: I am happy. The more productive/satisfied I feel in my work and goals, the more warm and loving I feel towards him.

I was really struggling during the coaching session to decide with an F to go with this T. We tried “inadequate”… but that doesn’t seem to line up with the actions I actually seem to take when this circumstance is on my mind, which are listed above. What my brain did have to readily offer was a lot more Ts about this T.

I did a thought download immediately after and found myself asking if this T (If he doesn’t love me now, maybe he never will) is necessarily negative. Maybe an F isn’t becoming clear because the F is “neutral” or “acceptance”? Maybe this isn’t the T that belongs with the F “acceptance,” but for the most part it does seem to cause positive results in my life when I face and embrace the idea that I can’t know the future of this relationship. And even if he had said he loved me, that would still be true…

Next I asked myself if this is even a problem then. I guess my problem is that two days ago I told him that sometimes I have to work at not stressing over the fact he hasn’t said “I love you.” It’s true it takes some thought work for me to show up the way I want around this circumstance. And since then I have worried that things I said in that conversation might push him away from me. So, here’s another model:

C: BF doesn’t say “I love you”
T: ?
F: worry
A: Ruminate, share thoughts with him in conversation, obsess over “figuring this out” in my head, make comments that might cause him to feel pressured, ask questions or make comments I regret later.
R: I bring heaviness or stress into our relationship that pushes him away from me.

Hm. Looking at it now I think I could slot the T from the first model into this one. Is it possible to have two models with the same C and T lines that diverge from there? Or do I definitely have the wrong T in the first model? Another T I considered to fill in the blank in this second model is simply “This is a problem” … Can you please give me some ideas for how to keep cleaning this up and sorting it out?

Thank you so much!