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anitaParticipantDear Mimia:
When I reread your story this Tuesday morning, I don’t see a “bad” past or a “shameful” girl. I see a young woman who was alone, unprotected, and trying to survive in the only ways she knew at the time. A girl who had no father’s love, no male guidance, no sense of being wanted or valued. A girl who left home at 19 with no money, no support, no safety net — and still tried to build a life. That girl didn’t need judgment then, and she doesn’t need it now. She needed protection, tenderness, and someone to tell her she mattered.
Right now, the part of you that is hurting is that younger self — the one who still believes she must be punished before she can be loved. Shame freezes us in old identities like that. It makes us believe, “I am still the girl who did those things,” instead of, “I was a girl who did those things because she had no one.”
Shame tells you that if you don’t confess everything, you’re being dishonest. But that’s not honesty — that’s fear. Fear of being abandoned. Fear of being unworthy. Fear that if someone sees the old you, they will leave.
Your past self is not a threat. She is not dangerous. She is not someone who will ruin your life. She is someone who needs your empathy.
You unfreeze that old identity by looking at her with understanding instead of fear. By saying, “You were overwhelmed, not bad. You were trying to survive. You didn’t have what you needed.” When you speak to her like that, she softens. She stops being something you must hide or confess. She becomes a chapter — not a definition.
And this is where your adult self comes in. Your adult self is the one who can respond from values, not fear. Fear says, “I must confess everything or I’ll lose him.” Values say, “I want a relationship built on kindness, honesty, and presence — not on punishing myself for who I used to be.”
When you stop treating your younger self like a criminal and starts treating her like a girl who needed protection, the old identity unfreezes. Because the “punishment” was never needed. You deserve love, honesty, and compassion — including from yourself.
You don’t owe him a confession in order to be worthy of love. You don’t owe him your old pain in order to be honest. You don’t owe him the girl you were — only the woman you are now.
If you ever choose to tell him anything, let it be because you feel safe and whole, not because you feel guilty. But you are not being unfair by keeping your past private. You are allowed to protect the younger you. You are allowed to let her rest. You are allowed to move forward without dragging her behind you.
I’m here, and I’d be glad to talk with you more.
✨️🌿✨️ Anita
anitaParticipantHey 👋 Confused:
I figure the Numbness is the other extreme of Constant-alert-scanning-obsessing-for-months.
The Buddhist principle of The Middle Way is about moving from extremes to the middle.
Yes, Copilot and I have a meeting of the minds when it comes to understanding what you’re going through: it’s very common for people who lived through a traumatic childhood to minimize it, to think it wasn’t a big deal, and that it’s not relevant to current struggles.
It’s an emotional- mental distance a person takes from one’s own experience of childhood.. only it (traumatic childhood) doesn’t distant itself from us, so there has to be a time to truly integrate and process that past childhood.
You are welcome, Confused!
Co nfused and Co pilot start with the same 2 letters.
Co Co nscientious Anita 🙂
anitaParticipantHello 🙂 Mimia:
How kind and gracious you are 🙏- I can tell by the way you opened and closed your original post on this thread.
Coming to think about it, I don’t care to know how you started and ended past original posts in other websites, other platforms.
And I want my reply to you to be attuned and kind and gracious,and not be judged for how I responded ( not so well 😔) to previous members in these forums, (beginning in May 2015.. 11 years ago).
We can own our past and yet start a new page, a new chapter, with the old closed and put away.
If you “confess” to your boyfriend about things in your past, will he feel that he owes you his own confessions?
It may be better for him to not have to open his old chapters that he may be ashamed of.
It can be an act of grace on your part to let go of your shame so that the two of you continue to connect where the two of you are N.O.W.
I had to forgive myself for things I did that I was very ashamed of. I switched from Shame to Empathy- for myself.
I regret things, but I can’t go back in time and undo them (I would if I could).
Life is difficult and so very complex, so much trouble in our world- within families, and communities. Is it a wonder that we didn’t turn out 😇?
Are there angels in real life?
Please let me know what you think of this reply. I really want to talk to you further.
✨️🌿✨️ Anita
anitaParticipantDear Nar:
It’s been so long, almost 4 years and 3 months since you posted last. What a fascinating thread this is. I want to get back to it later.
Anita
anitaParticipant* let me try spelling this word correctly this time: conscientious (did I get it right?)
anitaParticipantJust thinking this Sunday Eve, exactly 2 weeks since I started thinking in this thread on a Sun Eve:
Because it’s been so very sssslow, ssslow, sssssslow here, in the forums- I’ve been looking at old threads and learning.
I have been learning how often my trauma was triggerred when reading posts by people who either resembled my mother in some ways (volatile, angry, etc.) or had people in their lives who resembled my mother in some way (didn’t have to be by a lot)-
And my replies were corrective, directive, and fiercely protective of whomever the person I projected myself into was (the perceived victim of the person I projected my mother into)
I was not an objective reader and responder- not when triggerred.
More this Sun Eve or on another Eve.
🌙🌿✨️ Anita
anitaParticipantHey 👋 Confused:
I think that you’re a decent person, caring, consciountious, “not the one to abandon”-
Even when your feelings abandon you, you’re not the 1 2 abandon.
I suppose character stays, feeling or not. And it something you don’t lose. Something to relax into, something that defines you, something you can trust 🙂
How was shutdown for me? I’ll answer with whatever comes to mind:
It wasn’t peaceful. Lots of stress in it, lots of disquiet, unrest following the moment of NOTHING.
Not a successful long term strategy.
The brain sort of dancing, but not a pleasant dance, more like freaking out.
Afraid of feeling, yet feeling too much of the ” wrong” kind of feelings: that angst, that distress, that.. oh boy, can I have a new 🧠 please, a brand new brain, please 🙏🙏🙏
This is my reply. How does it compare to Copilt’s, Confused?
✨️🌿✨️ Anita
anitaParticipantHey Dear Confused:
First (since I am on the computer right now), Copilot’s response to your recent post:
What you’re feeling right now — the flatness, the lack of sadness, the difficulty crying, the sense that emotions are “missing” — isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you or that your feelings for her disappeared. It’s a sign that your system is tired and overloaded.
When someone spends a long time being alert, anxious, or afraid something will go wrong, the body eventually hits a point where it says: “I can’t keep running at this level. I need to shut things down for a while.”
That shutdown looks like not feeling sadness, not crying even when something is meaningful, not feeling excitement, not feeling the same energy as before, feeling like emotions are far away or muted.
This isn’t because you don’t care. It’s because you’ve been running on high alert for so long that your system is protecting you by going into a kind of energy‑saving mode. It’s the same thing that happened to you in November — your body got overwhelmed and went flat.
Numbness is not the opposite of caring. Numbness is the opposite of capacity.
Your feelings are still there. They’re just covered by exhaustion, stress, and fear. When your system gets a chance to rest and feel safe again, the emotions come back on their own — you don’t have to force them.
And the fact that you want to feel like before, that you remember how good it was, that you’re staying steady for her — all of that shows that your emotional connection is still alive. It’s just quiet right now because you’re overwhelmed.
🤖 Copilot
My response- when I get to the phone.
Anita
anitaParticipantHey 🙂 Confused,
What you’re describing makes complete sense. You’re noticing the constant alertness, the fear that something good will suddenly collapse, the way you brace yourself even when nothing is wrong. That kind of hypervigilance doesn’t come out of nowhere, and the fact that you can observe it in yourself now is actually a sign of progress. You’re not delusional — you’re becoming more aware of patterns that were running in the background for a long time.
What’s happening with your girlfriend sounds very real too. When someone reaches that level of exhaustion and emotional shutdown, it doesn’t mean they don’t care. It means their system is overwhelmed. The way you responded — giving her space, taking pressure off her, reminding her of what you appreciate — was steady and kind. You didn’t panic, you didn’t push, and you didn’t disappear. That matters.
It’s also natural that seeing her struggle brings up feelings in you. When someone we love goes numb or scared, it touches something deep. But the way you’re handling it shows that you’re trying to stay present instead of running or shutting down. That’s not nothing. That’s growth.
You don’t need to force yourself to “understand everything emotionally” right now. Emotional understanding comes slowly, in pieces, and usually long after the rational part. What you can do is keep noticing what happens inside you, the way you did in this message. That’s how patterns start to loosen.
And the way you teared up remembering the good moments — that tells me those feelings are still there. They didn’t disappear. They’re just covered by fear and stress right now, on both sides.
One step at a time. You’re not stuck. You’re learning yourself in real time.
🌼✨🤍 Anita
anitaParticipantJust thinking this Sat night:
I may be catastrophizing, but this may be the ending of these forums, simply because it’s deathly slow and getting even slower.
This, here, is a place where I’ve been at since May 2015, every day (including during the 6- months during 2023 when I deleted my account).
Seems like tiny buddha’s forums, like any other website forums, are dying because social media platforms have taken over. (and I am not a part of it).
So, in my personal life, the irl taproom experience 2017-April 2026 has ended, and so did the Winery (2021- Dec 2025), and now, I realize, the tiny buddha forums I was SO involved with 2015-2026 are dying as well.
Anita
May 23, 2026 at 10:09 pm in reply to: Who’s Here—Really? A Gentle Roll Call for Our Tiny Community #458124anitaParticipantR U still here, EvFran?
Anyone else???
anitaParticipantThank you, Thomas, for wishing me well and for saying I’m not doing anything to disrupt the forums.
I too hope that Laven is okay 🙏
I too wish more people participated in the forums. I think that what has been happening is that although millions (!) of people are coming across the tiny buddha’s blogs, advertisements, etc. (what you see on the “home page”), hardly ANYONE knows that the forums even exist-
Because the millions read what you see on the home page- not here, on the tb website- but on Facebook, Instagram and other social media outlets (as feeds, pieces of what you see on the home page). These forums don’t appear on the social media feeds.
I think that in the beginning lots of people posted in the forums because they logged into the website like you and I do, but over the years, hardly anyone does.
So the forums are in reality, tiny buddha’s tiny secret 😔
So, old participants in the forums stop posting over time (that’s normal), but unlike in the past, new people don’t join us because they don’t even know about the forums, and they’re busy communicating with each other- not on any particular website’s forums, but on social media.
Websites’ forum participation is a thing of the past 😔
At this point, I am bringing up really old threads so to learn from them, to see how I used to reply to members and why, it’s about my desire to learn about how I changed and am changing since I first participated here in May 2015.
I thought of sharing all the above because it may interest you, or explain things. Does it?
✨️🌿✨️ Anita
anitaParticipant* Edit: Good Saturday afternoon, East Coast; Saturday morning, West coast.
Well, now it’s 9:21 pm your time 🙂
anitaParticipantGood Saturday East Coast Saturday morning, Thomas 👋
As you know, it’s been very slow in the forums, and like you, I wish more people would visit and interact here 🙏
I wanted to bring up your thread to the top of Page 1 of list of topics.
✨️🌿✨️ Anita
anitaParticipantWhat a fun exchange, exactly 10 years and 4 months ago, between Seaisisland and myself. Nice to see that I wasn’t always analytical, clinical, directive and corrective!
I suppose nothing that was shared in this thread
(nor my communication elsewhere with Seaisisland or with Jock) reminded me of my mother so my trauma responses were not activated.It’d definitely be a miracle if either Seaisisland or jock ( previously Jack) will be reading this.
🌿 Anita
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