Sex
The attraction is real and it doesn't fit your life and the trying to suppress it has been making it louder.
The attraction is to a coworker, a friend’s partner, your own partner’s friend, someone much younger or older, someone whose role in your life makes the attraction inconvenient. You haven’t done anything. You think about them. You arrange the day to see them. You catch yourself running the loop.
The attraction is real. The acting on it would cost you something you don’t want to lose.
The attraction is back the next time you see them.
You very likely came up with a particular relationship to forbidden desire that taught it to be especially intense. You may have grown up in a household or a culture where any wanting outside the lines was treated as a moral catastrophe, and the suppression has been the very thing that gives the wanting its charge. You may have built an adult life around being the kind of person who would never have these feelings, and the existence of them is harder to integrate than the feelings themselves. You may have arrived at this point in your relationship feeling unseen or understimulated, and the new attraction is filling a gap that was already there.
When you try not to think about someone, you have to think about them to know not to. The trying-not-to is the thinking-about. Each effort to suppress trains the next thought to be more accessible.
The voluntary attempt to use willpower has the same problem as every other involuntary response. You can’t will an attraction away. You can change what you do with it.
If the attraction is to a person you don’t have available to you, see I’m in love with someone who doesn’t love me back . If you’re in a relationship and considering acting on it, see I’m in love with someone other than my partner .
The attraction isn’t the problem. What you do with the attraction is the problem.
Strategic therapy uses the suppression paradox in your favour. Instead of trying not to think about the person, you think about them on a strict prescribed schedule that drains the charge from the thinking. The mental visits stop being stolen moments and become assigned ones, and the attraction quiets because what was feeding it was the trying-not-to.
The thinking stops running you when you stop running from it.
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