TW: mentions of emetophobia
Throwaway account because I don’t want him to find this. I feel so terrible so here it goes:
Backstory: My boyfriend is the sweetest and most supportive person ever. We really never argue and communicate really well with each other when we have a problem. I wouldn’t say I am not a supportive girlfriend, but I have some mental health issues that sometimes interfere with me coming across the way I want to at times. I have gone to extensive therapy before we got together and am much better off than I was. So I am NOT looking for mental health advice
(disclaimer here so hopefully it doesn’t get taken down). I just want to know what more I can do interpersonally to repair the damage I have done.
Now onto the situation: I have severe anxiety, ADHD, and emetophobia. My boyfriend has a tendency to overeat at times when we go out and when we went out the other day he over ate and looked like he was going to be sick. This triggered my emetophobia and I began hyperventilating and shutting down. I tried to get it together to drive us home (a short distance away) and once I thought I was stable enough to drive I began driving.
Driving at night also makes me more nervous so I wasn’t exactly calm but l knew it was a short drive so I went for it. I had told him that him spitting on our walk to the car was contributing to my emetophobia anxiety. He proceeded to fake spit out the window twice at the start of the drive before stopping when I had desperately asked him to stop in a very irritated tone. As the drive went on, I was still anxious but tried to focus on something else. We were talking about something unrelated and I picked up my phone to look up a song (yes I know I shouldn’t touch my phone while driving).
While glancing at my phone while approaching a stop light, my boyfriend yells/makes a fake crashing sound and startles me, increasing my anxiety again. I start to yell at him not to do that when I am already severely anxious. He then fake-spits in my direction and I completely flip out. I start screaming at him, telling him he’s being an asshole, pull up in the front of the house and demand he gets “the F out of my car” while I go park.
I have never yelled to that extent before, though I have had one other major anxiety/ADHD overload lash-out early in our relationship and some lesser-degree “crash outs” as he calls them which resolved with a less volatile/explosive reaction on my part. (He later explained to me that the fake spit in my direction was a poorly timed joke related to something we discussed earlier in that day which I misinterpreted as making fun of my emetophobia).
I feel bad for snapping at him as this isn’t the first time, but this was definitely the worst time. I am not trying to justify my actions by giving information about my anxiety/what was going through my head because I know that my reaction was extreme, disrespectful, and unjustified. I have explained my perspective and apologized multiple times but he still seems very hurt which is understandable.
How do I go about repairing my relationship? We took time to discuss the situation at length as well as areas in the relationship where we both may be falling short, but I still feel like this is a major setback for us. I was really looking forward to moving forward and hopefully getting engaged soon but now I just feel like I am such a toxic person and I don’t know if he is going to have second thoughts about us now. Any advice is welcome.
TLDR: I yelled at my boyfriend and feel like I hurt him majorly and caused a huge setback in our relationship. What do I do?