Dear Nar:

It’s been so long, almost 4 years and 3 months since you posted last. What a fascinating thread this is. I want to get back to it later.

Anita

Hey Dear Confused:

First (since I am on the computer right now), Copilot’s response to your recent post:

What you’re feeling right now — the flatness, the lack of sadness, the difficulty crying, the sense that emotions are “missing” — isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you or that your feelings for her disappeared. It’s a sign that your system is tired and overloaded.

When someone spends a long time being alert, anxious, or afraid something will go wrong, the body eventually hits a point where it says: “I can’t keep running at this level. I need to shut things down for a while.”

That shutdown looks like not feeling sadness, not crying even when something is meaningful, not feeling excitement, not feeling the same energy as before, feeling like emotions are far away or muted.

This isn’t because you don’t care. It’s because you’ve been running on high alert for so long that your system is protecting you by going into a kind of energy‑saving mode. It’s the same thing that happened to you in November — your body got overwhelmed and went flat.

Numbness is not the opposite of caring. Numbness is the opposite of capacity.

Your feelings are still there. They’re just covered by exhaustion, stress, and fear. When your system gets a chance to rest and feel safe again, the emotions come back on their own — you don’t have to force them.

And the fact that you want to feel like before, that you remember how good it was, that you’re staying steady for her — all of that shows that your emotional connection is still alive. It’s just quiet right now because you’re overwhelmed.

🤖 Copilot

My response- when I get to the phone.

Anita

Thank you, Thomas, for wishing me well and for saying I’m not doing anything to disrupt the forums.

I too hope that Laven is okay 🙏

I too wish more people participated in the forums. I think that what has been happening is that although millions (!) of people are coming across the tiny buddha’s blogs, advertisements, etc. (what you see on the “home page”), hardly ANYONE knows that the forums even exist-

Because the millions read what you see on the home page- not here, on the tb website- but on Facebook, Instagram and other social media outlets (as feeds, pieces of what you see on the home page). These forums don’t appear on the social media feeds.

I think that in the beginning lots of people posted in the forums because they logged into the website like you and I do, but over the years, hardly anyone does.

So the forums are in reality, tiny buddha’s tiny secret 😔

So, old participants in the forums stop posting over time (that’s normal), but unlike in the past, new people don’t join us because they don’t even know about the forums, and they’re busy communicating with each other- not on any particular website’s forums, but on social media.

Websites’ forum participation is a thing of the past 😔

At this point, I am bringing up really old threads so to learn from them, to see how I used to reply to members and why, it’s about my desire to learn about how I changed and am changing since I first participated here in May 2015.

I thought of sharing all the above because it may interest you, or explain things. Does it?

✨️🌿✨️ Anita

Good Saturday East Coast Saturday morning, Thomas 👋

As you know, it’s been very slow in the forums, and like you, I wish more people would visit and interact here 🙏

I wanted to bring up your thread to the top of Page 1 of list of topics.

✨️🌿✨️ Anita

Hi Mollie

You are very welcome 🙏 ✨️

Humphrey Bogart is most famous for “Casablanca” (1942), where he played an American nightclub owner in Morocco during World War II, a story about sacrifice, moral courage, and lost love.

I just looked up The Banshees of Inisherin (2022… 80 years after Casablanca), a dark tragicomedy set on a remote Irish island in 1923. With no warning, Colm tells (the devastated) Padriac that he wants nothing more to do with him and ultimately tells him that, if Padriac persists in attempting to relate to him, Colm will amputate one of his own fingers, which he did, but Padriac kept trying to reconnect with Cold, so Colm cut off four more fingers.

I am reading that Psychologically, Colm represents the person who retreats into isolation and self‑destruction when overwhelmed, while Pádraic represents the person who clings harder when faced with loss, unable to tolerate emotional separation. Colm cannot tolerate closeness and Padriac cannot tolerate abandonment. Fascinating, Mollie, I am intrigued!

Mollie: “I really am a dog person… not a cat person… because when I was younger a cat scratched me… I was scratched by a cat when I was about 10; and then bitten by a dog when I was 21!”-

Fascinating and I suspected you were scratched by the 🐱 as a child, and years later, bitten by the 🐶. The term “formative years” refers to our childhood years because that’s when we’re psychologically formed, and I suppose the scratching by the cat formed you into “not a cat person”.

Really a pleasure talking to you this Saturday morning. No special plans for the weekend. Hope you have a pleasant weekend!

✨ 🥰 🤍 🐾 Anita

Regarding the “it” we, who grew up in “loud, obnoxious, negative and angry” homes (Adrian’s words) can’t face –

In my experience- IT is how terrible it really was growing up in a hostile home. We soften the reality we survived, making believe that the people who terribly harmed us are really good people who offered us a “good childhood” (Adrian’s words)

It’s what a child does to survive a hostile home :see the ones who caused severe harm as kind, nice, lovely people- it makes the child feels safer.

In adulthood, the make- believe doesn’t hold water, so the anxiety keeps going and going, changing shapes and forms, but it stays.

Because we didn’t face the truth- not because we’re not intelligent- but because it’s normal and instinctive for a child to soften reality, so to survive it.

I kept seeing my mother as a good person even though I was angry at her for so long, thinking of her as a Monster (not a Mother).

I figured long, long ago, as a child, that the fault was mine, that I was bad ( well, she told me I was bad, again and again and again).

It’s natural, instinctive for a child to take the blame (and the shame) even when not directly accused, blamed and shamed.

Taking that on feels more survivable than the alternative: that we are really (really) stuck with a person who is harming us.

Anita