Hey 🌿 Confused:

Your 1st message is on page 104 and the 2nd on page 105, and because I’m using my phone and can’t open a 2nd window, I’ll answer the first here, and the second next.

I am listening to the news about the heat wave in Europe. At least 40 people drowned trying to cool off in lakes, rivers and such. I understand your GF sufferring, but glad she was able to laugh nonetheless.

How’s the weather in Greece? Do you (or GF) have ACs? I don’t and during the only heat wave I experienced here since I moved here in 2013 (summer 2021) I filled in the bath with cold water and kept soaking in it every hour or so, plus using ice packs in- between.

You say you don’t remember if you were scared when your father threatened plenty of times that he’d leave. Considering how very attached you were to him (you shared that you were), it’d make sense that you were not indifferent to his threats, at least not in the first few times that he threatened.

Your 🧠 doesn’t remember but your body remembers: “Heart racing, body heat rising” (yesterday).

Two more weeks (SSRI) and report back to him makes sense.

Anita

Hey 👋 Confused:

You getting “scared shi*less” when you couldn’t reach your father, and making scenarios about him being hurt, fits with you being scared of losing your GF.

When you were a child and your parents fought and he left, were you afraid he’ll never come back?

As a child, I used to be terribly afraid of losing my mother, afraid she’d be gone (she threatened that she will). I couldn’t sleep at nights. Seems like for a child, losing a parent, remaining alone, is a terrible, terrible feeling.

Do you remember feeling scared of losing your father back then, when Confused was a kiddo- Confused?

Anita

Hey ✨️ Confused:

Maybe that dream was about you practicing loyalty to your girl, when you come across other attractive women in the future. In that case, well done ✔️ 👍

The idea of the two of you building a brand new dental clinic makes me smile (and it reminds me that I need my teeth cleaned if I want to look as good as this: 😁)

“Nowadays I feel nothing in the thought of loss of love”- 👍 ✔️.

“Because I don’t like it any other way, I think I’m not enjoying life otherwise”- you mean you don’t like or enjoy life unless you’re perfect? 🤔

“I’m trying to be delicate and it’s good so far”- ✔️👍✔️

“Passion for anything is pretty much absence”- when videocalling most recently, when you wanted to kiss her, etc., wasn’t that passion 🔥?

✔️ 🌿 👋 Anita

Sounds like you really do need some deep rest. Put yourself first, Robi. What you need, what you feel IS important! I hope to read from you after you rest!

Dear Robi:

As I was reading and studying your earliest thread (“My story and my search for answers”, June 8, 2018- July 4, 2018, age 25) and part of the second, I came across a term called Identity Diffusion which may have applied to you back in 2018 and maybe still. It definitely applied to me for the great majority of my life.

Identity diffusion means the person doesn’t have a consistent sense of who they are across time, they feel like different people in different situations and their view of others swings between idealization and devaluation. This creates a self that feels fragmented, inconsistent, or hollow, especially under stress.

Identity diffusion forms when early caregivers were intrusive, inconsistent, emotionally absent, frightening, and/ or unpredictable, and it leads to unstable relationships, shifting self‑image, intense emotions that feel unmanageable, idealizing then devaluing others, feeling empty or unreal, and difficulty making decisions or commitments

It’s the adult expression of a childhood where the child had to ADAPT to the emotional environment instead of DEVELOPING an inner center. The child grows up without enough emotional space to develop an inner center, suppressing their own preferences, feelings, and impulses because expressing them either doesn’t matter or creates conflict. Over time, the child oriented around the parent’s moods, expectations, and needs, building a self that is externally shaped rather than internally rooted.

This produces an adult who feels blank, indecisive, easily overwhelmed, and dependent on relationships or external structure to feel real, shifting identity depending on who the person is with, mistaking intensity for connection, and collapsing when alone because there is no stable inner “me” to return to.

Identity diffusion feels like blankness when someone asks what you want, fog when you try to make decisions, and collapse when you’re alone. You might feel intensely connected to someone one day and disconnected the next. There’s a constant sense of being pulled by external forces — partners, expectations, moods, fantasies.

Identity diffusion shows up in relationships as a kind of shapelessness — a person who becomes whoever the relationship needs, then collapses when the role becomes too heavy. It looks like shifting preferences, values, or desires depending on the other person. It shows up as clinging when alone and avoidance when intimacy gets too close, because both closeness and distance feel destabilizing when there’s no inner center.

It creates cycles of idealizing a partner, then feeling suffocated, then feeling guilty, then feeling empty — not because the partner changed, but because the person’s internal structure is too thin to hold steady. It also shows up as romantic over‑investment after minimal connection, or sudden doubt and emotional numbness once the initial intensity fades.

The above, Robi, is general information. Does it resonate?

Anita

… Lella?

Dear Robi:

By this time I imagine you sent her a message? If you did, did she reply?

And today, you’re supposed to resume talking with your girlfriend- did you?

I wonder what it is that kept the two of you together all this time..?

The Shakespearian quote just came to my mind: “To thine own self be true, and if follows like (I’m paraphrasing here) night follows day, you will be true to everyone else.

I hope to read from you soon.

By the way, I liked 🙂 the visual of Robi transferring wine from a barrel through a small hose just so to have a 🍷

Anita