About me caring about you so deeply- this is the legacy of my whole life- caring about you so very deeply, Ima. Yolanda Ben-Shabat- Shlesinger, her name. Yolanda Ben- Shabat- May your memory be a blessing.

This caring is in the core of me. A caring- dissociated, and then- reconnected.

An Undying Love.

Yes, I Love You. I love you.

Yes, I love you, oh.. oh.. Love, love you (listening to the Moody Blues)

My mother, Ima- no one means more to me than you do.

And yet, you don’t know.

I don’t know how to get over this, how to.. Let Go.

I think I’ve been writing these things, hoping someone reading will connect me to her, connect me to the core of me: someone to hear me, someone to understand me.

Who are these people who understand me? Alessa, I think.

Yana (Jana) is gone. I miss her. I will probably never hear from her again. I am sad.

I will miss you, Jana.

anita

Dear Alessa:

Thank you so much for your kind words and encouragement. It truly means a lot to me as I navigate this journey. Your belief in me gives me strength. ❤️

I’m really glad to hear that this work has helped you in such a profound way. That’s reassuring and inspiring.

Also, I wanted to say—I missed seeing you in the forums since your last post. Your presence and insights are valuable, and I hope you’re doing well.

Sending you warmth and gratitude.

anita

I read further that healing from trauma involves not just processing the painful experiences themselves, but also addressing dissociation. Trauma is the original wound. It’s the event(s) that caused emotional pain, fear, and distress.

Dissociation is the survival response. It helps a person cope by disconnecting from overwhelming feelings and memories. While it serves a protective role, it also keeps parts of a person’s experience locked away, making full healing difficult.

If dissociation remains unaddressed, it can keep you emotionally disconnected from your own truth—making it hard to validate your feelings, trust your experiences, or fully integrate your past into your present self.

Healing means reconnecting:

* Learning to feel safely instead of pushing emotions down.

* Bringing awareness to dissociation so you can recognize it when it happens.

* Trusting that your emotions and memories deserve space and acknowledgment.

* Rebuilding a sense of wholeness, where your past, present, and emotions all feel connected rather than fragmented.

— I never realized that healing from dissociation is part of healing. I don’t remember this ever crossing my mind. It’s not only the trauma that needs to be healed, it’s the response to the trauma (dissociation) that needs to be healed as well.

Back to reading: dissociation is meant to be a temporary response to trauma—an instinctive defense mechanism designed to help someone survive overwhelming emotional distress. However, in some cases, dissociation doesn’t fade after the trauma is over. Instead, it becomes a persistent or even chronic pattern.

Temporary Dissociation occurs during or immediately after trauma (e.g., abuse, violence, extreme fear). The brain disconnects from the painful experience to reduce suffering, creating emotional numbness or a sense of unreality. This can present as feeling “zoned out,” detached from emotions, or having gaps in memory surrounding traumatic events.

Once safety is restored, dissociation gradually fades, allowing emotions and awareness to reintegrate.

Ongoing or Chronic occurs when trauma is ongoing (e.g., childhood abuse, chronic neglect). The person never had a chance to process or resolve the trauma in a safe way. Their environment reinforced dissociation—for example, they were encouraged to “not think about it” or suppress emotions. They didn’t develop other coping strategies, making dissociation their default way of handling stress or discomfort. In this case, dissociation can persist for years, even decades, leading to Chronic detachment from emotions, relationships, or reality, Feeling numb, disconnected, or unreal often or all the time, Difficulty trusting memories or experiences, leading to self-invalidation, and Emotional “flashbacks” where past trauma feels present, but without clear memories.

anita

*** I like you, Peter, just the way you are! I think you are the bee’s knees 🐝✨No one like you!

* As far as the future goes, my mindset is to live one day at a time, and I embody this philosophy. I really don’t plan for the future. I don’t imagine a future. It’s just this day, this evening, this night.. Oh, surprise! Another morning, Yeah!

I carry trauma within my body every day, every hour of each day and night when I am not sleeping, in the form of tics- the flight-or-fight response trapped within my body, muscles running with nowhere to go. Muscles twitching, movement trapped. It feels like physical tension and there’s pain when I twitch a certain muscle too often. I can’t help it. I can’t stop it.

I tried to stop it. It is Impossible. it’s been going on since I was 5 or so, every single hour that I am awake. It feels really good to not twitch, the moments I don’t. It makes me think how fortunate the many who do not twitch really are, but they (you) don’t know it. If you knew the difference, you’d be ecstatic that you don’t have these tics going on and on and on.

Not to mention having made fun of for twitching as a child, a preteen, a teen, a grown up.

The current people in my life don’t make fun of me. All are genuinely nice about it. Thank you!!!

I had a long, meaningful talk with a woman I like very much this evening, in real-life. She’s about my age and has been anxious since she was a child. But no tics, none whatsoever. Yet her anxiety is ongoing. She rarely looks calm.

I talked a bit with a younger man and with an older man, 76 years old. Have known him for years. He is the one into whose yard I ran when I accidently sprayed my face with pepper spray months ago, using his water hose to water my burning eyes.

This is Community, and it is so very important to me. It means Everything.

The people in my life, in real-life, are good to me. I am fortunate.

Oh, I was going to talk about this topic: Suppressed Anger.

My mother suppressed her anger, putting on a facade of calm and peace and generosity until she couldn’t take it anymore. She would then EXPLODE. Her anger exploded and all hell broke loose. Similarly, there has been a person in my life, online, who had a suppressed anger problem as well, presenting a facade of calm and peace and generosity.. until she couldn’t take it anymore, and then, she exploded in her own way. I tried to accommodate her, to please her.. all in vain.

With some people there’ll always be an explosion, sooner than later. No Win with some people. The Only Solution is Distance (OSD, if you will).

The facade- my mother’s, others’- call it what it is: a mask, masking temporarily the Suppressed Rage Within.

anita

Dear Peter:

“What does a hurt feeling feel like? The space between emotion to feeling to a measurement, label, judgment… it’s the breath-thin space where mindfulness lives…”-

Without words like hurt, how can we possibly communicate here? All we have to connect us are words on a screen. But I do understand—words can limit, reshape, or even distort emotions.

What does hurt feel like to you, Peter?

I tried to experience the feeling of hurt just now. My mouth turned downward, my lower lip extended forward—like a child’s hurt face. And the feeling itself? It was like an emotional wound. It simply hurt.

“A criticism of Krishnamurti who was himself accused of being too clever with his words and paradoxically path to love was though negation, Emptiness, Kenosis, silence the undoing of words – what I think of as non measurement.”-

To move beyond intellectual constructs and allow reality to be felt rather than analyzed. I suppose, in this context, it’d mean that I will type something like this: “I feel tired right now, the left side of my body is hurting because of the way I am sitting. I just changed the way I am sitting and it hurts less. I am a bit hungry. My left shoulder just twitched. I can hear my pulsative tinnitus”,

Instead of something like “I feel tired right now. It must be because I didn’t sleep well last night, or not long-enough because I was at the computer doing my stream of consciousness after midnight. I wonder if I should stop drinking wine… I wonder if I should get another brain scan to check if some blood vessel in my brain is blocked after all, causing the pulsative tinnitus. Or maybe not, if I die- I die. I can’t believe I just said that.. am I depressed?”

“In the space between emotion and feeling were feelings hurt?”- I believe cognition is always intertwined with emotional pain—hurt, shame, guilt, fear, that it’s a matter of extent—how much cognition exists between raw emotion and the experience of feeling.

“No one that knows me would think me clever though as I have expressed before I have been accused me a lacking feeling, that my communication style and personality type is lacking, a way to avoid feeling… I don’t disagree, sadly its a core part of who I am. A trigger where I fill the space with a suspicion I’m not suited for relationship, something I fear my history confirms.”-

What if you rewrote the above using the words a 5- or 7-year-old might use? It could be a powerful exercise in connecting—both inward, with yourself, and outward, with others—in a deeper, more raw way, through straightforward self-expression.

I’m imagining myself as 7-year-old Peter right now, rephrasing it like this:

🧒 People say I don’t feel things. They say I don’t talk like other people, like I don’t show my feelings right. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know.

🧒 Sometimes I think I’m not good at being with people. Like something’s wrong with me, like I can’t get close to them the way I should. I look at my life, and it feels like proof. And that makes me sad.

“Funny when I saw this topic the first thing I wrote was a warning to myself, that any discussion into insignificance would only stir up existential angst and likely not end well.”-

But even with that warning, you still chose to engage. That tells me you care about these questions, about exploring meaning, even if it’s tough.

🧒 I thought about this stuff before, and it made my tummy feel weird, like something wasn’t right. I told myself not to think too hard about it, or it would feel bad again. But I still did. I don’t know why. Maybe I can’t help it. Maybe I need to know, even if it makes me scared.

There’s something tender in that version, something simpler—but still holding the same truth. What do you think, Peter?

anita