Re-submitted:

Dear Lisa:

So very good to read from you again, thank you for posting and for the kindness in your post!

Choosing Love is the title of your thread. I happened to stumble this morning upon a post you submitted about Love back on May 23, 2018, it has a poetic feel to it, as I read it today, and the content is profound:

“In my world it exists, in my dreams it exists, in my soul it exists, I believe it exists…but in the real world love does not exist. You can not see love in 2018. It doesn’t exist for the majority of people. Money exists, sex exists, status exists, Real Estate exists…  How many people would marry if they received no monetary or physical pay off from it? It’s like selling yourself isn’t it? A product on a shelf for people to pick and choose from.

“Marriage should be rare and with no demands. No demanded gift on Valentine’s Day… It’s not love to demand gifts, yet men do it because they get some kind of pay off. I don’t like business. I don’t like money, I don’t like meaningless exchanges, I don’t like aggressive, ill mannered people. I don’t belong in this world and yet I’m here”-

– your post back then brings  Corinthians 13:4-8 to my mind this morning, as it also talks about Love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Interestingly, the sentence right before the famous quote above (Cor. 13:3) reads: “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”.

The title you chose for this thread back on Jan 15, 2019, Choosing Love, is more meaningful to me today (April 2024), as what the world as a whole needs to choose than it was in the relatively peaceful times of the pre-pandemic, pre-Ukraine war, pre-escalated Middle East wars of Jan 2019.

anita

Dear Kshitij:

“What I am not able to understand is that how the scholarship situation triggered the CSS inside me?…  I thought… not about my childhood struggles? Do you think there were thought patterns responsible (like low self-esteem, externalization of self-worth etc.) that I developed as a result of childhood trauma and they gave me problems during the scholarship issue?“-

* I don’t know what you mean by “externalization of self-worth“.

– I have no doubt that there are thought patterns that you developed as a result of your father emotionally abusing you (inaccurately projecting his father, an adult who probably abused him, into a little, innocent girl).

I wrote about your thought patterns in both situations in my April 11 post: “the scholarship application situation triggered the trauma in your childhood sermons situation (lets call it CSS). The thoughts you had as a child, during those sermons were “nothing ever gets better” no matter how hard I try, and this (his very harsh criticism) is so unfair“.

It doesn’t mean that during the scholarship application situation you had thoughts about your childhood sermons situation. It’s that the scholarship application situation awakened thoughts and feelings (about how unfair life is for you, and now nothing ever gets better), thoughts and feelings that were born, so to speak, during the childhood sermon situations.

anita

Dear Kshitij:

You are welcome! I am thinking that your father projected his father (with whom he was very angry for many years) into you- not because you deserved his anger (not at all!), and not because your behaviors (and maybe even your looks) were more like his father than your siblings’, but because you were first-born. He has been holding his anger inside him probably since he was a child. When you were born- his first child– it was his first opportunity to express his long-held anger, to let it out, at a child that belonged to him (an easy target).

This is what abuse is about. my mother did the same to me, as I was too first born.

“One reason he acts differently towards my younger brother is because he probably sees himself in his personality, he finds a similarity“- excellent insight. For one, he didn’t project his father into them (this was your  “job”, unfortunately for you). If he expressed affection for them over the years, it means that yes, he probably projected himself into them.

“Now, when I live abroad away from home, he tries to get close to me and acts very cordially; but the more he tries the more I get repelled“- I too felt repelled by my mother over the years, because she did to me, in principle, what your father did to you.

“Since childhood I would use to ruminate over incidents of his unkind treatment and that happens even now when I think about a past situation or hypothesize about a future confrontation. It leads me to rage fits at times… back when I was a kid/teenager, there used to be times when I would be filled with rage, despair and frustration and I would cry myself to sleep“-I ruminated too, I was anxious too about the next time she’d rage at me, so I would ruminate about what I might have said or done wrong to bring about her next rage.

And I felt rage myself, rage at her, which I held inside.

I’ll answer your questions in the last paragraph, best I can, tomorrow morning (in about  14 hours from now).

anita

Dear Eliza:

Isn’t it amazing, this thread is almost 10 years old, welcome to it, Eliza!

You shared that you’ve been “in an on and off… so turbulent, and very rarely stable” 2-year relationship with your ex-boyfriend because of anxiety, not because of anger and fighting.

(I am adding the boldface feature selectively to the following):”I have had really horrible anxiety the entire relationship… so nervous to hurt him… so scared that I’ve ruined his life and am the reason he’ll never be happy… I seem to crave freedom… at times claustrophobic, even though I love hanging out with him… would have moments of intense panic… In the end I couldn’t tell whether my gut was saying it wasn’t a match or it was my anxiety…. What’s wrong with me? I really do love him…. will I ever have clarity over how I feel? Why can’t I be content with him? and will I ever get over this!!!!”-

– clearly, The Problem is fear, persistent, ongoing fear, aka anxiety.

I relate to your anxiety just as you described it. I will summarize what it was about in my case: as a child, I was very hurt, a whole lot of hurt, and for a long, long time, all of my childhood, really. But as it happens, very hurt/ scared children instinctively repress their distressing emotions (hurt, fear), so that they can survive, because feeling too scared, too hurt, for too long literally destroys the body.

Fast forward, I am an adult, my hurt and fear still repressed (felt, but way less intensely than in early childhood). The moment I felt love/ empathy for a person, I saw myself in that person, more precisely, I project my child-self (the child that I was) into the other person, and imagined that he/ she was about to get hurt as badly as I was hurt (pre-repression). I was afraid to hurt the person, and I was afraid to witness the person hurting, so I wanted to be with the person and away, all at the same time, very anxious, uncomfortable.

The interesting thing is that what I was afraid of, as an adult, was to feel my own hurt at the pre-repression level, at the intensity back then.

Do you relate to any part of what I am saying?

anita

Dear gresshoppe:

I am sending good vibes your way and thank you for the good vibes! We can talk about autophobia sometime, if you would like that. I experienced it since I was a child and only recently found out the term.

I hope to read how the conversation with him goes.

anita

Dear Blueman:

“Then you must understand how much self-blame and beating up I am doing“- yes, I believe I do understand and I know how it feels. Self-blame and beating myself up was almost a constant in my life. Sometimes I’d get a break, but not often, not for long (my longest breaks were when I was daydreaming, as in playing movies in my mind, pleasant love-story movies where I was.. everything I was not in real-life).

It is only recently that I don’t feel the self-blame and beating myself up.. what a difference! I remember how it felt, it literally felt like some kind of a whip hitting me hard, a brain whip, if you will. It felt intensely painful.

I remember long ago, I was a teenager or maybe early 20s, I said to myself: if I could have one day free of this Guilt (this is how I called it), then my life would be worthwhile. Fast forward, Finally, the brain whip is gone. I can still hardly believe it!

I didn’t know how life can be, or feel, without the self-whipping. Nowadays, when I think of a mistake I just made, I remind myself that I don’t need to suffer for it, I can correct the mistake, or make a mental note on how to do better in the future, without the suffering (the whipping). I understand that the suffering itself is of no positive value and I am able to.. not suffer for my mistakes and faults. At the same time, I am improving myself, becoming a better and better person.

It is interesting how ineffective that self-abuse has been all these years, it’s done the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do (in the mind of the self-abuser, that is): it kept me from becoming a better person.

Also, self- whipping when done regularly, is a mental- emotional habit. Like any habit, it’s difficult (but possible) to change.

Back to your post: “The break up has had so much toll on me… It feels like all the Self-improvement I had done since coming to college has been ruined and gone down the drain. Like I am back to square one with my social anxiety and introverted nature and especially my self-esteem“- amazingly, this too is what I experienced so many times, over and over again. I’d type out what I called Rules 4 Life, as in guidelines of how to behave from now on, then start a New Life, a new page.. only to mess up, again, and again.. and again. The frustration was huge.

“She is on a pedestal to me“- it’d be a good day when she is off the pedestal, and you can look anyone in the eye and say: I am not less than you, I am not inferior to you.. We are equals!

“I have just 3 friends now and my girlfriend has left me“- at your age, in college, I had zero friends and no boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. You are a step ahead of me at your age (lol, if I may be funny, or try to be..?)

“Everything in future years (3rd and 4th) seems very bleak and lonely, I feel like my alone sad childhood self again“- isn’t it interesting, how we expect to re-experience childhood misery in the future (and we often do)?

But I don’t want that for you, and you don’t have to. It is very possible for you to experience something different. But it takes time and the right kind of work. If you’d like me to, I’ll try to help you best I can, based on my experience.

anita