Dear Cristiane:

He was born with no dark secrets, no dark side. Then things happened, “childhood and neglected from his absent father“, to start with, and he got sick as a result: “he had long history of mental illness precisely depression… a compulsive obsessive disorder…  pre diabetes, broken back, gastrointestinal issues and severe insomnias“, and a dark side was born: “he enjoyed inflicting pain to the women he had relationships… He had high body count“, a high count of pain-inflictions.

“I consider myself a spiritual person and for me high body counts it’s mean broken soul. When you lie down with someone you don’t just give your body and pleasure. You give your soul to someone else. Every time you give yourself , you lose one part of your soul. It’s like your soul is shattered in 1000 piece of glasses. On the long run, you lose yourself!  Once your soul has all these lesions and cracks, you need to find a therapist to help you how to heal!“- very well articulated, talented writing of a loving soul.

A broken soul should not break other souls. Need to contain one’s broken soul and heal it. And then spread the healing to others.

anita

Good to read back from you, Shandrea! I’ll post more tomorrow.

anita

Dear Klast:

“What is god? The ultimate self responsibility avoidance“- that’s hilarious, never read this before. We better do better than god, then, so that he/ she/ it can look up to us for guidance.

“I have been through all the depersonalisation, derealisation and dissociation… It is only just recently that I have been throwing a tantrum about it all, triggered by my emotional development restarting“- re-associating with anger, re-personalizing your life: making it personal and real.

“I have been doing everything I can to encourage neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. However I feel that is now no longer as effective due to the natural mental declination of the aging process“- I say that aging = practicing death until we get it right.

“I get mocked or treated with disdain, mostly at work. If I wasn’t constantly being triggered at work, and feeling obligated to work to cover living costs, I would be happier“- a reminder of how important it is to not mock others, to treat others (with aphasia or not, tics or not, short or tall, lean or obese, etc.) respectfully.

“My aphasia has gotten much better over time… These days you wont get anymore than a couple of sentences out of me“- improvement nonetheless.

“At the start of my radiation treatment, intuition made me look through the paperwork… It took them 4 hours to correct the error that day before beginning. I could have ended up a vegetable in a wheelchair or worse.“- saved by intuition! I had to google intuition to understand what it means because I forget the meaning of words, words I read and used many times before (a feature of my personal version of brain damage).

anita

Dear me: I very much like reading this: “one day all disease will be a thing of the past and that’s a good thing.“!

anita

Dear me:

I am sorry for bringing up the other thread, and I will not refer to it again. You are welcome to get your frustrations out here, on this thread. If you want a thread that’s free from my mention of the old thread, you can start a new one.

anita

Dear me:

* I am adding this note after a few hours of putting together this post, close to being ready to submit it. This might be a post that’s too long and too complex for you to be interested in reading through it. So, please feel free to read or not to read, to respond or not to respond, to all, or any part of it. (In the past, at times I sent you long replies, and it was okay with me back then when you didn’t respond to the content of those. it will be okay with me today as well, if this is your choice)! Here’s the long, complex post:

A little walk on memory lane: your first post on tiny buddha and my first reply to you were on Sept 18, 2016: we were both EIGHT years younger!  In the first 2 days of our communication, you expressed this: “I believe I’m supposed to suffer… I feel I deserve the pain I am getting… Just a feeling I’ve always had“. I offered, but you didn’t want to look into this core-belief that you are supposed to suffer.

You shared something very meaningful, very profound about staying away from people because you didn’t feel worthy of people’s time and companionship, and about putting on a happy mask to hide the sadness inside (Dec 7, 2016): “I never think I’m worth anyone’s time. People invite me to do things with them sometimes but I normally decline. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I don’t feel worthy of being around people. I’m stuck here at my PC being miserable all the time, wishing I was someone else, but it’s a habit at this point. Girls think I’m fun to be around and I’m always making them laugh, guys always seem to like being around me, but I don’t like being around me. I can have the biggest smile, turn around and walk away only to have the biggest frown and go completely quiet… filled with nothing but hate for myself, all in the blink of an eye. So I just lock myself away in my room, it’s better this way”, Dec 7, 2016.

You mentioned growing up with little to no love, and some hate (Dec 20, 2016): “My mom never gave a sh** about me… My dad and what he’s done, plus he tells me… like I’m nothing and how I ain’t a loss“.

You shared that you experienced depression and loneliness, and, at the time of the quote that follows, a desire for closeness with people (Dec 2, 2018): “By loneliness I mean I don’t have anybody I am close to, just sit around at home all day being depressed. I had my first taste of being close to another person and now that’s all I want is to be close to people, maybe not romantically but like super close friendships. Being around people that make me feel awesome!“.

Your last post on your old 68-page thread was on Feb 5, 2024: “I’ll be retiring this thread, maybe I’ll start a new thread… Anyway big changes for me for 2024…“.

Fast forward 6 months and 23 days to Aug 28, 2024,  you started your new thread: “A month ago I found out my father has stage 4 rectal cancer and he’s terminal with 6-12 months to live. I been pretty much feeling dead inside since… my memory has taken a severe shot too… The nurses all tell me I have done an amazing job take care of him… I don’t even wanna imagine what it will look like when I see him deceased when he goes to hospice eventually“-

– you lived with your father throughout the time we communicated in your old thread. I think that you lived with him your whole life.. am I correct? No wonder you are emotionally attached to him. From getting to know you through 68- pages of your old thread, seems to me that your attachment style is the Anxious Ambivalent Attachment Style.

Notice how the following quotes from the two online sources fit you in regard to the woman we’ve been discussing a lot in your old thread (and, I think that it fits your experience in childhood and all your social connections since):

From very well mind: “Anxious ambivalent attachment is characterized by a distrust of a person with whom you are in a close relationship with, and is associated with mental health challenges, such as depression and low self-esteem… Anxious attachment results when your caregivers are not consistent in their responsiveness and availability with you, leading to feelings of confusion, distrust, anxiety, and ambivalence. People raised this way may desire closeness to their caretakers and distance themselves from them”.

From the attachment project: “The anxious ambivalent attachment style (known as anxious preoccupied attachment in adulthood) typically develops in children in the first 18 months of life. During this formative period, a child’s caregiver(s) may have acted inconsistently toward the child’s needs… caregivers may have been attentive to their child’s cues, but on the other, they may have been rejecting or punitive towards them… As a result, the child starts to feel conflicted about how their caregiver is going to respond to them. When their parent is attentive, the child is content and happy, but when they’re not the child is confused. For this reason, the child may start to develop ambivalent attachment patterns and behaviors. They might feel distrustful of their caregiver, but also desperately want affection and for them to meet their emotional needs so they cling to them”.

In regard to your 3rd, most recent post in this thread: “I’m just at home on holiday, first holiday in like 4 years“- on the computer a lot, gaming?

“How have you been?“- I’ll connect my answer to the quotes above (your words and the online sources’): mentally, emotionally and socially, I am doing way better than during my whole life. Similarly to what you shared, throughout most of my life, I too felt that I deserved to suffer. I too thought that I was not worth anyone’s time. I too wished I was someone else (and I day-dreamed about being someone else a whole lot, as a teenager). I too was miserable a lot of the time, and I too was stuck. As a child I was stuck at home alone, listening to music and daydreaming (not in front of the computer, I grew up before computers), and I was very lonely. As an adult, I was stuck in repeated dysfunctional patterns of behavior, depression.. alone and lonely most of the time. Like you, I desired closeness with people, but couldn’t trust people for long, so I couldn’t remain close to anyone for long.. there were only moments of closeness, tiny moments in a desert of loneliness.

Fast forward: I’ve experienced lots and lots of moments of closeness (online and in real-life), more than ever: this is what life is about, this is the joy of living! Life can get better! There are things that sadden me, scare me, but I no longer believe that I should suffer, so I don’t suffer unnecessarily. I no longer wish I was someone else. I am no longer alone and lonely, confused, miserable and depressed.

Connecting my answer to attachment styles: all my life I suffered from an anxious, ambivalent attachment style, and now, I am as close to a Secure Attachment Style as I have ever been!

.. And how are you today, me?

anita

Dear me:

Oh, it’s you!!! I didn’t figure it out until you mentioned the other thread, which you deleted? his is YOU, how exciting to read from you again! Where about are you on holiday?

anita

Dear JC:

“I’m struggling and depressed, I’m sad all the time, and especially when I think about my oldest daughter and her daughter… She’s blamed us for everything that has ever gone wrong in her life. I’ve told her I would like to help her, she told me to buy her a house!… told me it might ten years for her to forgive me, that I’d always been a bad parent, I was the sole reason she was the way she was and it’s my fault her life had turned out this way… Finally I decided I was going to set some boundaries… I told her that I didn’t want her verbally abusing me anymore, it was hurtful and unfair… She explained that she couldn’t help herself because she was so angry that it automatically came out but apologized again…(and said) that she just hated me.. I’m toxic… I told her I never meant to hurt her… I feel so bad about how she was treated, but I don’t know how to fix it..“-

– I’d say it’s time to implement The Serenity Prayer: god, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.

You can’t change anything that already happened. You can’t change your oldest daughter’s Anger and Hurt (even if you buy her a house, as her anger and hurt have lasted too long). You can change your exposure to her abuse (to have no contact with her for as long as she is not able or willing to control her anger).

Here is an idea: what if you list (not describe, just list: 1, 2, 3..) all the things that you are struggling with. For each item, decide if i’s something that you cannot change, or it’s something that you can change (and if so, how?)

Do you think that this exercise may help you?

anita