Dear Kibou:

On April 23, I wrote to you: “in your October 2020 thread you described the different phases of your ‘interesting journey of self-discovery and healing’. Your descriptions of your journey are almost entirely descriptions of how you felt during the different phases. There is very little and very vague descriptions of the nature of your thoughts and actions, and of what actually took place during your journey”.

You recently shared: “When I decided to share more of my stories and my emotions with my two close friends, one of them retreated… I would ask whether they are okay with the length of my messages… they shared that they did retreat.. reading the long messages and me having too many emotions were tiring”-

– it may have been for them a similar experience to mine when I read your many emotional descriptions that were almost entirely devoid of grounding in a reality of actions and events. I can see it  being difficult for most people to follow and to respond to such messages, especially when they are long, and that it can lead to people retreating from communication.

In your most recent post you wrote: “I have finally finished my replies. They are long… I do not think I can write such long replies often. They take energy and time”- your replies take so much time and energy because of what I believe to be your difficulty with processing and presenting information.

Earlier you expressed such difficulty in regard to writing your thesis: “I pretty much worked throughout my whole thesis in my head and there’s a lot of information in my head, but providing a quick summary of the whole structure was a bit messy because there was too much information, which was still all  over the place. In an effort to jot everything down in my head, it can lead me to over-explain or write very long sentences. Or my sentences are confusing for others. Thus I try to shorten my sentences or write more succinctly, but I feel like I lose things I want to express or the situation is wrongly expressed. This is how I am feeling when I am trying to explain something on here”.

You wrote earlier: “we are not completely on the same page with everything, but I also saw how I did not explain the situation well enough”- thing is you are not the only person with difficulties processing information. Most people reading, once they read something that catches their attention and activates a strong emotion, they focus on that one thing and proceed to not pay attention to the rest of the reading, reacting to what they read based on the emotion activated and their personal life experience around that emotion, and making assumptions that are partly or wholly incorrect.

Also, many readers simplify what they read according to the distorted thinking known as black and white thinking, and so, they miss on the complexity of what is presented. I make mistakes too, of course, and am still working on thinking more accurately and seeing the complexity in situations.

Not every misunderstanding therefore, is based on your failure to explain things clearly. But I can see your individual difficulties in processing information and presenting it to others: a difficulties in determining what is relevant to the topic and what is not, and determining the priority of relevance and importance, so to present what is most relevant and important first, and what is least- last.

You wrote to me earlier: “With the previous posts, I still see that it is difficult for me to talk like a child or keep it simple. I will try again and hope that I can clear up some misunderstanding, or better said, add in the rest of the information”- it will be an excellent practice for you to try again and write simply, like a child. You did well on May 9, on your first practice here.

I mentioned black and white thinking vs complexity. Here are examples of possible misunderstandings of your story based on the first kind of thinking: 1) All of your difficulties in life are because your mother failed you. 2) All your difficulties in life are because your father failed you. 3) All your difficulties in life are because you moved around a lot, or because your friends failed you, etc.

The complexity of the situation, as I see it, is that humanity is not well, and we, humans, have failed each other for a long, long time. Your mother sounds like a wonderful woman, from what you shared. But she was not able (and no  one in her place would be able) to not pass on her suffering onto you. Let’s say that your mother as a child was yelled at a lot, but she never yelled at you, always respectful, often empathetic. But when you, as a child, over a long-enough period of time, became aware of her great suffering- you were deeply affected because of empathy alone, because you loved her so much. It was as if (in this example) you absorbed the yelling your mother experienced through osmosis, because of the physical and emotional proximity to her.

In summary, I am sure that you can improve your processing information skills. I am not familiar with ways to do so other than the exercise I suggested, but seeing a professional about this can do a lot of good for you.

anita