Dear Kiersten:

I took in all the information that you provided, and considering it all, there is no doubt in my mind that it is indeed the right thing for you to not contact your mother no matter what, just like doctors and therapist advised you: “My doctors advised me not to speak to her until further notice… my therapist doesn’t want me contacting my mom because it’s not good for me mentally“.

“I’m paying installments to stay in a residential mental health program later this year“-

– Please do take care of your mental health. A cornerstone of mental health is to have no contact whatsoever with people who are toxic and abusive to you, and with people with active narcissistic and borderline personality disorders (“my toxic mother. She is a narcissist and borderline. She is very emotionally abusive towards me“).

About green tea, from health line. com: “A 2017 research paper found that drinking green tea may benefit cognition, mood, and brain function… A 2020 study also suggested that green tea is linked with 64% lower chance of cognitive impairment in middle aged and older adults… Summary: Green tea has functional ingredients that may combine to improve brain function and cognitive health”.

Isn’t it amazing, Kiersten that green tea has the opposite effects on you that your mother does: it benefits cognition; she harms your cognition, it benefits mood; she harms it… green tea benefits brain function (and therefore, it improves mental health) and your mother harms your brain function and therefore, your mental health.

Keep the green tea, place it perhaps as a decoration in your room/ home, as a symbol of what you should be focusing on: your mental health and doing what takes to promote it and maintain it.

anita

Dear Seaturtle:

Good early afternoon- a week at the most to being NTF. Likely, you already are, given that your skin cells probably grow faster than most people’s, given your high vibrations!

Less icky and higher spirits reads good to me! No reason then to bring back the ick topic. I’ll leave it for now with that green cringing emoji of yesterday.

“To be part of the fear, deceiving and hiding, I wonder what this lead to inside my body and outside in my expression/ personality“- a girl in a cage, blocked chakras, deteriorating mental health.

“To stay in fear you have to ignore your gut?“- when we are afraid for too long, cowering, submitting to fear.. we become gutless (gutless= lacking courage).

So then by listening to your gut your annihilate FEAR?“- ahh.. if only fear could be annihilated! it can be weakened or managed with courage, but not annihilated, not for as long as we’re alive.

“I craved him shining light on me“- it’s dark in the cage, and a relationship with him necessitated you being in a cage, in a dark cage.

“Last night my roommate admitted, ‘I did notice while you were together that you didn’t seem like the girl I once knew in high school, and now away from him it seems like she is back.'”- maybe she meant the light/ higher vibrations are is back to your eyes, face, voice, the words you use.

“I don’t remember my high school self a whole lot…not necessary events but of feelings.. Is there a way for me to get more familiar with myself in that time?“- sometime when you are relaxed, maybe listening to music you liked back in high school, or looking at photos of yourself back then, sit in front of the computer, imagine that you are the girl in the photos and type away whatever comes to mind. You can start with competing the sentence: “I feel_______”.

“the little girl I nanny (my new job right now)“- congratulations on your new job, Seaturtle the Nanny.

“I want to shine more light on me!… I struggle to enjoy ‘light and fun’ when there is something that needs to be exposed, whether it is me needing to bring light to something… I got the vibe that he was bored… I once tried to explain to him that talking about deeper topics energized me, and he said they drained him..”- 3rd eye and crown chakras incompatibility

“Smoking started to make me have negative thoughts about him, so I stopped smoking, then drinking did it too and so I had to stop drinking most of the time with him“- the weed and alcohol did not shut your 3rd eye. It kept vibrating and seeing through the smoke and the alcohol.

“He very very rarely gave me physical compliments, I got more compliments from random people on the street then I did from my partner… The compliments never came… I said ‘babe why don’t you compliment me? I know you think I am beautiful but do you realize how much if would mean to me to hear it from your lips?’ his response ‘But If I tell you how beautiful you are, you will leave me’“- bingo! He wanted you to stay in the cage..! The spider wanted you in his web, alive but not strong enough to fly away and leave him.

“When I was first telling him about moving out he did not want me to and told me ‘I could just seem myself pulling away if you move out.’ I feel like this was a manipulation tactic to try to get me to stay, making me fear losing him and deciding to stay”- I agree.

“My roommate… pointed out how strange it was that he would act like nothing happened, even the few times she witnessed this. She said I remember you saying you guys had an argument on the phone and an hour later he was at the apartment behaving as if nothing had happened… not saying anything can be just as manipulative as saying something“- I agree. His behavior suggested that.. nothing happened. But something did happen.

“When this sort of thing happened, and I did bring it up, he would basically say to get over it. So then I would come to this thread and try to see how to get over it, by seeing how I could be projecting F onto N…”-

– please do get over him, Seaturtle, over him and his manipulative, low-vibrational techniques!

anita

Re-submitted (because there’s an error in the first submission):

Dear Kiersten:

A few comments before I answer your question best I can:

1) I looked up the costs of a bag of green tea and although many cost under $10, some as low as a few dollars, there are expensive bags of tea such as the Jasmine Pearls Full-Leaf Green Tea bag which steeps 200 cups and costs $134.50. So, I understand that a bag of green tea can be an expensive item.

2) It is sad that your mother is generous with you as far as material gifts go (“packed up all the gifts she had given me“), but will not give you the gift of a calm, respectful mother who promotes her daughter’s mental health (“She is very emotionally abusive towards me… I blocked her because she was taking a toll on my mental health“).

And now, my answer: because you believe in karma (“I don’t want to be karmically responsible for keeping something that is not mine“), and because you promised to return it (“I apologized to her and promised to return it”), you better return it to her.

Because you say that you don’t have the money to mail it, that you don’t have anyone to take it and drop it off at your mother’s. and you don’t want to drop it off yourself because you are afraid that she will verbally abuse you, I suggest that you put the bag of tea in a box or in a plastic bag, go to your mother’s place, quickly put the bag outside her door, and immediately walk away and back to the street. Once you are in a safe distance from her home, text her with the message that the bag of tea is right outside her door. If you can’t text her, call her and hang up right after delivering the message.

Then go back to your home, karma cleared and promise fulfilled.

anita

Dear Seaturtle:

It takes 40-56 days for ALL of your skin cells to be replaces. You can calculate then, on what date, none of your skin cells was touched by him, not a single one, being N-Touch-Free (NTF). Maybe it will help with the ick feeling, and maybe this is my wishful thinking with a scientific touch.

As I read your 2nd post, I felt a relief that you are no longer with him. I understand that you are lonely, yet… he’s so wrong for you because you are so much MORE than what he can satisfy.. he just can’t! I’ll reply further tomorrow morning, good night soon to be NTF Seaturtle!

anita

Dear Chloe:

First, congratulations for all your amazing healing mindset and continuous work through the years: “I am a really growth centered individual… I went through a good bout of therapy a while ago… generally feel a whole lot healthier as a person…I continue to work hard on healing myself as a person.  I’ve noticed a lot of positive change… I am assessing for appropriateness for what I keep internal and what I share, and I’m communicating fairly compassionately and clearly…I am proud of the internal work I’ve done“-

– I am proud of you too, if I may say so!

I re-read what you shared here and in your previous thread like a detective of sorts, looking for the answer of your question, which partly paraphrased is: with all he healing work I’ve done, why is it that none of my friendship last and “if I had a really sad day I’d have nobody to call“?

I’ll be quoting you, then typing as I think, thinking as I type: “My family of origin is not close with me… there is no closeness or belonging there… I’ve grown up with this experience of love and belonging as only a factor of what I can give/provide/achieve/ reflect, and I’m still and likely always seeking a different, more whole kind of love”-

– there is no closeness or belonging now with your parents/ family-of-origin (you’re at around 40 years-old), but growing up you felt some closeness and belonging, only it was dependent on you GIVING and NOT RECEIVING, and on being invisible because the attention you received, when you received it, was negative: “in my youth invisibility was better. Attention meant you were in trouble, you did something wrong, or someone was mad at you”, Dec 2016)

Fast forward, in friendships you GIVE, but when you try to receive, the friendships end (I am stating this in a simplified way). This reminds me of a scripture from the bible: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (Matthew 7:7). At first, a moment ago, I thought to myself that maybe you don’t do the asking right, but then, there was nothing in your posts that indicate that there is something wrong with the way you ask.

Next, I am thinking that the problem may not  be with you asking for what you need, or with the ways you ask for what you need, but with the receiving part: “ask, and it shall be given to you”-

– being given attention when you were growing up was a negative experience (“Attention meant you were in trouble..”). Fast forward, let’s say you ask a friend for what you need, but when you receive it, the attention to what you requested scares you, and you reject the attention, the help…  and the friend for having her well-meaning attention being rejected.

Or maybe before you ask, a friend has been trying to give you what she imagines that you need, but you rejected it over and over again.. before ever asking. The consequence: the friend rejects you back and the friendship ends.

“A good friend just ended our friendship in the fall.  I had asked for more consistent communication…  and she determined I was passively aggressively saying she wasn’t ever going to be good enough and she stopped talking to me altogether”- was she saying that her efforts to help you were never going to be good enough…?

It is a human need to feel useful and helpful. When a person is deprived from being able to help/ when a person’s efforts to help are rejected again and again, the person himself- or herself- feel rejected.  It may be that the problem is not that people end friendships with you because they are not willing to give, but because you are not willing to receive.

“One thing I’ve noticed is that if I have a time of need or if I ask for something in the relationship, like more consistent communication, that’s damaging to the relationship”- it may be that after many times that you rejected a friend’s efforts to help (offered without you asking for it), then when you ask for something, the friend gives up on trying yet again to give you something that you will receive.

It may be that you don’t even register a friend’s efforts to help, and reject those without being aware of doing so.

“People identify me as fun, so supportive, a good communicator, a good friend.   A good friend often says one thing she loves about me is that I’m ‘low maintenance‘ and I don’t put obligations on people”-

– so supportive ..but not willing to be supported? Low maintenance to the extreme, as in refusing any support vs moderation?

I’ll stop here. Is it possible that my theory is true to you and your experience?

anita

In regard to this paragraph of the above post “I just asked myself, would I have been in the closet, anxious, if I had an authentic and open third eye chakra, in the first place?“- this is AMAZING, I had the same thought- in a vague form- just a moment ago but I didn’t develop it. I will now: a twist on the spider imagery- the spider wants to feast on a living/ fresh fly, so he feeds the fly with just enough dung to keep it alive, but not strong enough to escape the web”-

– there was a cross over in my brain as I first read the boldfaced part, a thought from earlier invaded the boldfaced, so I didn’t really register the boldfaced. As far as the boldfaced: no, you wouldn’t have been in the closet, anxious if you had an open, highly vibrating 3rd eye chakra (in balance with the other chakras).

anita

Dear Seaturtle:

I wrote to you about people like N: “they have TOO MUCH FEAR that their authentic self is unacceptable. No matter how much you love them, they figure that if you knew them, you’d hate them. So, they hide and deceive.”, and you replied: “Again this has N written all of it, and he will use me leaving as proof that I didn’t accept his authentic self, when really he hadn’t even showed that to me“- brilliantly said.

So, to get along with a person who hides and deceives, you have to be part of the FEAR and the hiding and deceiving, aka unbalanced and blocked chakras.  I wrote fear with capital letters because it’s the kind of fear that annihilates the gut (referring to the title of your thread). And by getting along, I mean on a very superficial level because the depths are not allowed to be known.

“Rejecting the gift of light.. a gift I want to be given“- creatures of the light should shine their light into the darkness, but not get mixed in with the darkness because then.. your light is gone.

“He may not of wanted light shed on him on a conscious level, but some level of him chose someone who’s nature is to do this, bring light… If he thought he was so hate-able, so unlovable, then why did he allow himself to choose someone with a huge heart”- I don’t think that he chose you because you bring the self-examination/ introspection kind of light. A cheery light, joking around, being fun.. yes, light around him, not light into him.

“I feel like he knew on some level, that I could help him“- this may be wishful thinking/ feeling on your part.

“He cared for me in his own ways, for example my car. He always check on it before I drove off, checking the oil, steering fluid, coolant (my car was overheating)… He cared for me, this I believe was him loving me, in the small doses he was able to. He once paid for me to go to my improv class… A spider does not want the fly to have any strength to leave, or knowledge (like the car) to leave or live without him. When I was sad, he put his head on my shoulder, not knowing what to say, but when I felt panicked I would sit in the closet with the lights off and he would come in, shut the door, and sit with me. Ugh this is making me miss him a little, darn ha. He loved me, I believe”-

– You make a good point: he is not always a spider, only sometimes, only when you shed light on what he doesn’t want to see, or when you dare open your throat chakra and say what you see through your 3rd eye.

“But, to remind myself now, in this moment I need to open my third eye to other aspects of the relationship” – I wrote the above before reading this part!

“He wasn’t willing to take responsibility for his lies, even after giving him so many opportunities… he rejected my gift of light on hidden places… Ugh this back and forth is exhausting and I am calling on my third eye right now to remain open and strong today“- later on I will drink for an open and strong Seaturtle’s 3rd eye!

“I just asked myself, would I have been in the closet, anxious, if I had an authentic and open third eye chakra, in the first place?“- this is AMAZING, I had the same thought- in a vague form- just a moment ago but I didn’t develop it. I will now: a twist on the spider imagery- the spider wants to feast on a living/ fresh fly, so he feeds the fly with just enough dung to keep it alive, but not strong enough to escape the web.

You wrote in regard to sending him good wishes: “I wonder how this will bring me some peace“- if you tried it, and it didn’t bring you peace, then don’t try it again. I learned about the sending of good wishes from listening to loving-kindness of meditations, “an ancient Buddhist practice that cultivates goodwill and universal friendliness toward oneself and others” (online). It works at times, in this or that context.

anita