Dear Robbi:

Thank you, Robi 🙏.

A 2-hour walk is a long walk, I’m impressed 🙌. And congrats for finding a part-time online job!

* Oh, no, it’s not cold here. There were cold winters in the past, but his one has been the warmest.

I’m glad the coaching session went well and I’m curious about the lots that came up during the coaching session, particularly what these 2 sentences mean (if you care to explain, you don’t have to, of course 🙂):

“Me and my girlfriend are mirroring each other so perfectly. She’s triggering the f*ck out of me exactly where it hurts the most.”?

🤍 Anita

Good morning, Confused:

You wrote yesterday: “But it wasn’t like that in the beginning. It never got sexual, it was just deep and intellectual talks/bonding, the type I long for. The thing is, I pulled back when the meeting was about to happen, so I think that means something. Because I value her and I like her a lot as a person, her character is special and I wouldn’t like to lose her.”-

Maybe you’ve been afraid (since shortly before the first in real-life 3-days visit, and since then) to lose her as a non-sexual female person in your life, a deep and intellectual person, the type you long for. It could be that the sexual factor led to your emotional shutdown.

🤍 Anita

I figure for men, especially young men, sexting, or anything sexual is very powerful, even deeper than emotional.

Given that it was a LDR and that you spent IRL only 3 days, I’d say, yes, it could be infatuation, yes.

Why do you cry about the thought of losing her forever?

Could be, likely is (says I), 🤔 the re-awakening of real loss in childhood, before you ever met her (online).

🤔🤍📱 Anita

* I want to reread

* to bring on

Dear Alessa:

You are very welcome and thank you for your empathy and kindness 😊

Yesterday, on my walk with Bogart, after submitting the long message to you in this thread, I planned on writing more to you about a victim’s empathy for his/ her perpetrator of abuse, a topic you brought again today.

Imagine, Alessa, a court trial where a person is judged to have severely abused a child and then empathy is expressed in the courthouse- in the presence of the child- for both the perpetrator and the child.

That would be so wrong. In the context of abuse, it is the victim alone who deserves empathy. The perpetrator deserves none.

The perpetrator deserves empathy for the time before and separated from the abuse, a time when he or she was truly a victim.

And so, I do feel empathy for my mother in regard to the times she was a victim, before she abused me and others, but I don’t dwell on it because I have been her victim for many years.

In the context of me and her, I am the one who deserves empathy, not her.

I too feel the abuse in my body every hour of every day in the form of somatic tension, holding my breath and tics, both motor and vocal. So, you see, I am not free from her abuse. Freer than before, but not free.

I deserve my own empathy. The perpetrator does not deserve my empathy.

I hope that other people who have not been her victims 🙏 have empathy for her. I pray for her to experience as little physical and mental pain as possible.

I was focused on her most of my life, like you, I loved her and hated her at the same time. And I felt so much empathy for her, I often drowned in it. Empathy for her hindered my healing.

And so, whenever I feel empathy for her, I don’t fight it, on one hand, but I avoid drowning in it by redirecting my empathy from going her wat to going my way.

In the context of my mother and me, neither her nor me felt empathy for me. Time to change that 😌

🤍🙏✨️ Anita

Dear Robi:

I tend to send posts that are too long and have too much in them, and I think I did that with you many times.

I understand your girlfriend’s concern that you’ll move back to Warsaw only for a few months.

I wonder how your coaching session go?

I think that staying in one place for long makes you feel trapped like you did in the storage room and in your parents’ workplace and in that vacationing house 🏠

You need space, a place where you feel safe to be and become, express and explore.. to maximize the computer screen of your soul (referring to you minimizing it when in the storage room).

None of this is your fault, Robi, you were not offered the minimal a child needs.

🤍 Anita