I appreciate the bluntness of your comment toolman65, but I think you underestimate how much of my condition/weakness/shortcomings I already understand. Yes, as I admitted in my very first post, I have trust issues, and I feel I've been quite honest with myself and others about this. Yes, I am working on them (hence reaching out for help in this forum and seeking professional help to deal with letting go after some pretty intense suffering I've gone through in my life), as opposed to making them my girlfriend's problem. Yes, I may have desires to control people in order to feel less vulnerable. No, I have not acted on these desires and have instead tried to reach out for help, because I know that, deep down, what I actually want is freedom and my desire for control is a lie to myself and won't ever truly prevent myself from getting hurt.

An example: because I fear being out of control for fear of being vulnerable, I also fear flying. Does this stop me from flying? No, not at all (in fact I'm flying again tomorrow morning). Giving in to this fear would infringe on what I truly want deep down. Do I go and accost the captain to make sure he's doing his job properly? Of course not. He knows what he's doing and my rational self trusts that.

It's the other part, the anxious, irrational, child-like part, that needs to be "talked down" in a way - something I'm learning to do on my own that I realise I never learned when I was a child, when I was supposed to. This is something I've learned to do quite well actually when I was on my own, prior to being in a relationship, but for some reason being in a relationship amplifies this feeling of vulnerability for me at the moment. I trust it won't always be like this though: I just need to learn how to manage myself in this new context now.

In addition to this, I know that I've made some really bad decisions for myself in the past (e.g. in being in a serious relationship with a narcissist, where I actually thought at the time that being with her was good for me), and so part of my process right now also involves coming to deeper insight as to how to make better decisions for myself.

Have you ever been in a relationship with a narcissist, and lost your entire sense of self as a result? There's a good book you can find on Amazon in this regard, and it describes what I put myself through (unbeknownst to myself at the time). The title of the book is "Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, & Other Toxic People".

I don't want to control my girlfriend, and haven't explicitly tried to in any way. I want other perspective(s) to help me to see if I'm making good decisions for myself in being with someone like her, until such time that I can stand on my own again and trust my own decision-making paradigms again. So far, it seems like I've made a really good decision for myself in being with her.

It's most certainly not about the pets. My anxiousness and intuition are, however, flagging something here to do with her relationship with her ex, and I'm trying to isolate what it is. If it truly is purely just my anxiety and there's genuinely nothing to worry about (like in the case of flying), then it'll be relatively easy to talk myself down. If, however, my intuition is telling me that she isn't good for me in some way, or that their holding onto their dysfunctional relationship isn't good for me in some way, then my strategy most certainly wouldn't be to try to control her.