Dear Caroline:

Here is a key sentence, relevant to this thread, from what you shared back in Nov 2022: “I am trying to learn how to have healthy relationships with people, but it always ends with me feeling used, or taken advantage of, or being angry, and them leaving me for some reason“-

– the Freeze Response prevents you from having healthy relationships because things happen=> you interpret those things as you having been used/ taken advantage of=> you get angry.

Key is in the interpretation of what happened: is it an accurate interpretation? When you are not sure if your interpretation is accurate because you don’t have enough information, you need to talk to the relevant person about what happened, to get needed information, and to clarify feelings and motivations, so to confidently know what happened and proceed from there.

For example, the title of your Sept-Dec 2022 thread is: “Is my friend abusing me?– at the time, you were not able to interpret the relationship with that co-worker one way or another: abusive or not?  When you can’t answer this question, you are lost in terms of how to proceed.

I am skipping to the current June 1- July 2, 2023 thread, to which you returned more than 6 months later, on Jan 21, 2024: “Today, there was again this situation.. I don’t know if I am overreacting” (Jan 21, 2024)- right here is the struggle with interpreting a situation correctly (a mental-emotional skill), not being confident in that ability.

(to be continued)

anita

Dear Seaturtle:

And now, to your most recent post from yesterday:

“If he sees himself as not valuable on the inside… then he must respect someone who does not want something invaluable, thereby lacking respect for anyone that thinks that he is valuable.. What do you think about this?“-

– I think that this may be true to you, and that’s why you had crushes on, and had your focus on (in middle and high school, and onward..?) guys who were not interested in you romantically, not respecting/ having crushes on guys who were interested in you…?

As far as N is concerned, my feel is that he is too removed from his internal experience via distractions and daily, heavy duty use of weed, to think as clearly as you do. Respect is too much of a human experience of cognition+ emotion, and I think of N operating like a spider: instinctually.

“I have another pondering question/ thought I’d like to hear your opinion on. I do not wish that he had contacted me in the past month and a half, since the breakup. However, I wonder why he hasn’t… If I would have been in tears walking away, he may have grabbed back, perhaps this is even explanatory of his comment to my sister of ‘I just can’t get over how coldly she ended it’“-

– in the past, when you walked away from him crying, or when you had a panic attack in the closet.. it was like a fly shaking his spider web, stimulating him into reaching out to the fly. A cold/ unmoving fly does not vibrate a spider’s web.. so he doesn’t reach out to it.

(I did not understand the last paragraph of your most recent post of yesterday, “what it would have ACTUALLY felt like”..?)

anita

Dear Seaturtle:

* I will be sending a series of shorter posts because my keyboard does not allow me to copy  (which I do before submitting a post so to not lose the text if the submission doesn’t work), and I don’t want to lose a long post.

“Last night I dreamt of him.. I was sad, feeling unseen, and he grabbed me, recognizing my sadness and genuinely asking me ‘what do you need?’, that is who I wanted him to be. I woke up.. didn’t miss him, in fact I recognized immediately that that was not him” (Jan 20)-

– this was/ is a pivotal moment in your healing, right there in that quote. If only F would have done what you needed him to do: to recognize your sadness and genuinely ask you what do you need?/ lf only my mother did that when I was growing up unseen, the loneliest girl in the world. Fast forward, we are both adults and there is no way to redo that unseen childhood. It’s too late.. we are not children anymore and our brains are already formed around the experiences we had.

When you woke up from that dream in which you tried to get from N what you didn’t get from F (projecting F into N), and recognized that “that was not him“, that’s the pivotal moment I am talking about: you recognized that N is not who you needed F to be, and neither was F.. who you needed him to be. A necessary part of healing is grieving what you never received as a child, and never will- because you are no longer a child.

anita

Dear Caroline: I would like to answer you in this thread and in the other later today, or as late as tomorrow morning.

anita

Dear Seaturtle:

“This is so confusing since he also encouraged me..“-it’d be easy to figure out if a person is for you or against you if a person always behaved one way or the other. I think that the evil stepmother in the story of Cinderella always behaved against Cinderella, but then she’s a cartoon character in a story that is of the fiction genre.

A real-life infamous evil character comes to mind, Adolf Hitler, who caused massive pain and death to many millions of people, including the death of 6 million Jews, placing him in the category of behaving against Jews, right? Yet, he arranged for a family of Jews, neighbors of his, to escape being taken away to a concentration camp.

How about a real-life famous good character, a saint, a Mother Teresa? Research it and here it is: “The Dark Side of mother Teresa“.

From my experience and understanding, a good person is a person whose behavior is guided not by the desire to please and satisfy a particular individual, but by values that promote everyone’s well-being. In the Hitler example, if he was a good person, he would have not sent any person to a concentration camp, not just his neighbors.

EVERYONE by the time we reach adolescence, got mixed in with evil to one extent or another, be it indirectly by purchasing an item in the supermarket, and by doing so, promoting the financial success of a company that pollutes the environment and therefore causes disease and death to plants, animals and people. We can’t live in a modern society anywhere on earth, and NOT contribute to death and destruction in one way or another: modern society is embedded in wrongdoing, and living in it makes us all wrongdoers.

It is painful for me to look within right now and think of all the ways I directly hurt other people, including here on the forums via judgmental, angry replies based on my issues, replies that people did not deserve. It makes me feel that painful shame-guilt combo. I struggled and was stuck in that combo for a long, long time until I figured, quite recently, that being a good person (who is born into a society that acts against itself), is about doing the best I can in the circumstances I am in, intent on doing good for everyone, and looking within, correct my wrongdoings best I can, for the benefit of everyone.

If you had N as your life partner and tried to benefit him by accommodating his preferences to not look within himself, it wouldn’t benefit everyone, including N.

To summarize what may be a digressing here, seeing via the 3rd eye, processing information with the crown chakra, the confusion you mentioned in the quote above can get resolved.

“So, why was N in pain?“- started in his childhood. Personally, I don’t know anyone who is not in pain. After all, we are embedded in a society that acts against itself.

“Was his pain all from his past, or were there things I did to hurt him…?“- what you did that hurt him  was to.. expect more than he could give you and express that expectation to him.

“I do not like small talk“- neither do I. We have this in common (see my above talk.. not small at all, is it).

“To get back with him permanently, he would have to be the opposite of who he is“- the tiniest chance of being with someone who is opposite to who he is, is being with him.

“.. and change who he is for me to feel like he could love me correctly with 0% intimidation and 100% adoration“- unrealistic expectations, not going to happen long-term with any man (past maybe a love bombing exhibition).

I feel like going a full circle here and back to our initial conversations of projecting F into N. Not that N is the right guy for you, but no man will be right for you when you hold on to the expectation you stated in this quote.

anita

Dear Seaturtle:

I’ll reply further later, in hours from now, maybe as late as tomorrow, but for now, regarding him encouraging you to do things that make you stronger: when he did not feel threatened, he did. When he felt threatened, it’s then that he wanted you weak. It’s not like he planned this or was even aware of it. It is more instinctual than a thinking thing.

What threatens him? That you will see through him, that you will see what he sees: a man beautiful or valuable on the outside, but not on the inside (as he sees himself).

anita

Good night, Seaturtle, I’ll read from you tomorrow and reply.

anita