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anitaParticipantDear Shandrea:
33 years-old: seems so young from where I am, but I remember that when I turned 30, I thought I was old. If only I could be 33 now.
It was courageous of you to create a social media page so to hopefully connect with a high school friend. I understand you missing having a social life, and I hope you will soon have some (positive) social life: it makes a huge difference in the quality of life.
“I have trust issues“, you wrote. I used to have huge trust issues and because of it (and other factors) I was a very lonely teenager, young adult, older adult.. until recently. Finally connecting with people- online and irl- in positive ways: it’s a different kind of life, very different from loneliness.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Meg:
“For most of my life I’ve kept my mouth shut when people hurt me“- same here, except that much of the time, although I was hurting, I couldn’t tell if someone was hurting me, or if I was hurt because something was terribly wrong with me.
“no matter the way I word it, I get told that the way I express my hurt is too much and comes off mean“- I wish I could see/ hear you in such a circumstance and figure for myself if you sound mean (very angry, punishing).. or just hurt.
“me constantly feeling angry or mad about his words. They spin on repeat and I either sob or get really angry or both“- how can anyone not get really angry hearing one’s SO gossip about them, revealing medical secrets etc.?
“in the heat of arguments“- what do you say and do when really angry, in the heat of arguments?
anita
anitaParticipantDear Meg:
You are very welcome! I am running out of time and will reply further either tonight or Wed morning (it’s Tues afternoon here). but for now, The Serenity Prayer may help you, not in a religious sense but for the principle it’s about:
god, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,the courage to change the things I can,and the wisdom to know the difference.Look around you, your life circumstances, the people in your life: what can you change? What must you accept if you want some serenity?anitaAugust 20, 2024 at 11:25 am in reply to: Being a lonely young woman in a world obsessed with romance and sex #436404anitaParticipantDear Elais:
Thank you! About your family checking on you, you wrote: “they didn’t and they don’t. I know that they love me“- they don’t love you enough to check on you 🥹
“And by the way yeah, some part of me feels like I have to join others in suffering.. Some part of me is like afraid that my friends or family will do some extreme action in pain, like suicide, if I don’t keep track on them. It’s extreme I know.”- it amazes me how much we have in common. I was terribly afraid as a child, a teenager, and onward that my mother will commit suicide (she said she will). I used to pray to the stars in the night sky: please keep my mother alive!
I believed that I was one of the people causing her so much pain, so much pain that she wanted to kill herself (well, she said it), so I felt that I had to suffer because I was a bad person (and maybe if I suffer enough.. I’ll become a good person..?)
I was always focused on her, my life taken hostage by the fear that she will die any day, any time. What a waste of my life!
These days, whenever I find myself suffering because someone else is suffering, I say to myself: (1) my suffering is not helping the other person, there’s no benefit to anyone that I suffer, and (2) I want the other person to not suffer: why not wanting myself to not suffer? I mean, I matter too, I am as important as the other person, not less!
anita
anitaParticipantDear Meg:
“I never had a father and was abused growing up in all the ways“- I am sorry that you were abused growing up, and in all the ways that you were abused. I wish that growing up was a different, way better experience for you.
“He had many different examples in his life of healthy relationships; I do not“- from what you shared about him, if he had an example of a healthy relationship, the example didn’t make much of an impression on him.
“I found out when he (son) was 6 months that my body had gone into full blown menopause. Then my husband’s dad fell ill and passed. Then my son was diagnosed with autism and I had changed careers to go back to teaching… When Covid hit it made everything worse because we were stuck in the house together. It got so bad I checked myself into a hospital…When I got out I asked him to leave and he did. Then he got sick and almost died“- a rollercoaster of distressing events with no emotional support for you.
“Fast forward to this past Thanksgiving… I opened his Facebook and looked at his messages. He had not only been talking to her for years, he was bad mouthing me, telling her all about my female health issues, telling her he didn’t love me, etc… He has been saying less negative things about me to his friends and family, but I cannot stop thinking about everything I read or was told… I want to believe he wants to work on this but his actions say he doesn’t. I want to leave, but we are financially stuck for at least a year. He says he only says things because I make him mad… I am wondering if anyone has tips on how to stop myself from constantly living in the memories of what I’ve read and heard said about me. And how do I reconcile the fact that he says one thing to me but is still saying the opposite to his family and friends?“- you can’t unhear what you heard, unread what you read. To be hurt less by all that you read and heard/ to stop obsessing about it, it’ll help if you completely accept that he, your SO, is not a decent person. A decent person wouldn’t repeatedly gossip about people, especially not about the female health issues of the mother of his son, information that should be private!
To completely accept that he is not a decent person is to no longer hope that he will change and become decent. Hope is a bad thing when it keeps us anxiously waiting for something good to happen, something that doesn’t happen day after day, year after year.
Sometimes we wait for so long, we forget what it is we’re waiting for.
Accepting vs waiting for a positive change may lessen your anxiety and prevent future disappointments because you’d be prepared for him being more of who he is (future gossips, future irresponsibility, etc.)
* Maybe he will change one day, but it didn’t happen yet, it doesn’t seem like it’s happening, and it may never happen.
What do you think of my reply so far, do you think it make sense?
anita
August 20, 2024 at 9:22 am in reply to: Being a lonely young woman in a world obsessed with romance and sex #436400anitaParticipantDear Elais:
You are welcome! And yes, I am doing much better, thank you.
“When it comes to family, I think that over the years I’ve taken the implicit role of the family balancer. Unfortunately, my siblings and parents in their own ways are a bit emotionally immature and can’t communicate in a constructive way so it ends up with a lot of grudges and hurt“- a balancer is a person or thing that balances: distributing weight over something unsteady so it remains in place, so it doesn’t collapse.
The Family Balancer = your Family Role: keeping the family steady, preventing the family from collapsing. This means that, as a child, you were not free to be a child. You had an adult job to do while being (objectively) a child. This is too heavy of a burden for a child.
“My own avoidant tendencies may stem from this too: fearing that I’ll end up as some unwilling emotional caretaker… . I’ve made explicit in the past to people around me that I don’t want to be their ‘therapist’ and I don’t want them to spill to me their own grievances about other people I know“- your role as a child (and onward): the family balancer, the emotional caretaker, the therapist, the collector of family’s spills (grudges and hurt).
“but then I feel selfish. Because no one around me knows how to check for others“- this means that within your family, no one knew/ no one knows how to check on you..?
“and I’m afraid that by continuously putting my own walls and boundaries I’ll leave some people alone in their own suffering“- your family role has been to join their suffering so that they don’t suffer alone..?
“Maybe this will give some context to my avoidant tendencies.“- I think so. I will now re-read your original post, the info in your most recent post considered (I will spontaneously share my thoughts, as I did in the above):
“Hello. I’m a young woman in my late 20s and perhaps a bit uncommonly, my love and erotic life has been so far minimal“- no wonder that a child who didn’t get to be a care-free child (a child who didn’t get to be and play like other children) turns out to be a woman who.. does not get to be a care-free woman (a woman who gets to play/ engage in an erotic/ relationship-life, like other women).
“This comes with its intense own intense and negative feelings of frustration“- intense frustration of the woman-Elais who doesn’t get to play, intense frustration of the child-Elais who didn’t get to play.
“Where I live, in the west, is almost expected that if you aren’t already paired up at least you’re experimenting sexually and having fun… Society still agrees that romance and relationships should be my main object of interest“- society agrees that carefree playing should be a main interest of a child, but you didn’t get the opportunity to actualize this interest. You didn’t get to be a child. It is not fair to expect you to be a playful woman when you didn’t yet get to be a playful child!
“I see people from all walks of life loving and lusting and I never see it happen to me“- others are in the habit of playing: first as children, then as adults. But you (through no fault of your own) were not in the habit of playing then; you are not in the habit of playing now.
“Why something that comes to easy to others like breathing don’t come to me?“- humans (like other animals) are creatures of habits: it’s easy to do what we’re in the habit of doing. it is difficult to do what we’re not in the habit of doing.
“I recognize I am touch and love starved and I want it. I want it so bad, yet“- you want something that you are not in the habit of doing/ experiencing.
Your 2nd post: “My own shame over being unable to get a partner has contributed to a lot of my social distancing from others“- it’s not your fault at all that you have not been able to get a partner. If any person who now has a partner would have been born into your exact family, your exact circumstances, they too wouldn’t be able to get a partner as adults. If you explained this to others who are understanding and reasonable people, they wouldn’t shame you. Not at all.
“I always observe the world around me and see how you’re supposed to have been able to do x, y, z steps right by the time you are a certain age if you want to be considered a well adjusted adult. It’s a bit like ‘if you want to get this degree, you need to have finished this course and achieved this certificate first’. It feels a bit like this“- yes, it’s a lot like this: to be a playful woman (y), one has to be a playful child first (x). To be an adjusted adult (y), one has to be an adjusted child first (x).
“I tend to feel easily overwhelmed and want to maintain distances“- following decades-long adjustment to not playing, deadening the instinct to play, a moment of real-life playing feels like too much.
3rd post: “I definitely do feel touch and love starved sometimes“- a person who has been starving for food for too long, has very little tolerance for food. Starving people in concentration camps died when they finally got to eat. This is why a starving person should be re-introduced to food gradually: be given clear soup first (easier for the inactive, weak digestive system to tolerate), later: given solid food in small amounts, and so on.
So, starved for touch and love for too long, even a bit of touch and love in real-life is overwhelming. You’d need to be introduced to love and touch gradually, gently, patiently.
“I would rather fantasize about having sex or being in love… rather than engage in real life“- it’s not overwhelming in fantasy, similar to a starving person not getting sick or dying no matter how much food he/ she fantasizes about.
“None of my friends can relate to that so it feels very alienating“- I can very much relate. I am an older adult now, but it is only recently (and still ongoing) that I often feel and act like a happy, well-adjusted child (x). I am in the process of becoming a well adjusted, happy adult (y).
Before, my whole life, not having had the opportunity to be a care-free child, I didn’t feel like an adult. I felt like a very sad, deprived, ashamed and guilty, lonely child, and I acted in maladjusted ways. Now, I feel care-free at times, like a care-free child, what a feeling!!!
anita
anitaParticipantDear Clara:
“it seems to me that I am anxious attachment, and she is avoidance“- yes, it seems like this to me too. I think that she avoids emotional closeness with a partner, and she avoids emotional honesty within herself. It is now my impression that she avoids confronting the truth in regard to how she feels, and therefore, she shares little or nothing about what she truly feels.
“She is trying all her ways to break away from me, ‘I don’t like you anymore’, ‘I have no feelings for you’, while we stayed under the same roof for 4 good years, and dated for 5 years. This is cruel, not to say she choose not to work on it but walk away“- like a kid in the playground, angry: I don’t like you anymore! I don’t want to play with you anymore! And walks away (or in her case, she told you to walk away: to stay elsewhere while she stays in your flat post-breakup).
“She is engulfed in her own wants, that she forgets that I have spent a good 5 years taking care of her needs, may not be perfect all the time, but I truly tried my best“- a touch of selfishness.
“I also feel she has taken my care for granted, which made her think she could just stay in the flat, for an unknown period of time, without thinking to leave in the first place. She assumed I would give her the space, thus no backup plan whatsoever… she was hurt by the words that I said, but not thinking about why she got those words (I still think I shouldn’t call her idiot so that’s on me)“- self-centered with a touch of selfishness.
“Sigh, it suddenly occurred to me that I really did not see this person so well, may be I was blinded by the closeness as well.“- let’s look at what you shared almost 6 years ago.
Oct 7, 2018: “recently got quite close with a person, we have been talking mainly on texts for a few months, and we have gone out a few times until she disclosed at some point (I would say with ambiguity at first) that she had girlfriend… I was quite shocked with that just because with our everyday conversation, she had never disclosed that she had a girlfriend… She, accordingly to her, was in a pretty distanced relationship with her partner… Anyways after hearing what she explained, I find myself baffled. It seems to make sense but not making much sense“- ambiguity, emotional dishonesty (within herself) and interpersonal dishonesty (with you). I think that you were baffled by her explanation following the disclosure because it was not a completely honest explanation.
On the next day, Oct 8, 2018, I wrote to you: “In my mind, her behavior is not a deal breaker… I understand people are afraid, uncomfortable, at times selfish and unaware, and her misleading you was not well thought of and therefore it was not devious. I would say, get to know her more as a friend… Is this friendship worth it, worth enduring your distress? Maybe yes, maybe not. I think that you will soon find out. I hope to read more from you about this friendship“- as you can see, I brought up the word selfish in regard to her almost 6 years ago. I wrote that her misleading you was not devious: I guess not, but it was selfish nonetheless. She should have told you early on, and clearly, in a straight-forward way (not with ambiguity) that she had a girlfriend. She wasn’t fair to you back then, in the beginning.
From psychology today/ the cost and benefits of emotional honesty (having her in mind): “The process requires not only a desire to be aware of and in touch with our emotions and perceptions, but a willingness to reveal and share what we are experiencing with others whom we trust to accept and honor our inner truth without judgment… Connecting to ourselves on a feeling level is, for many of us, much easier said than done, but with practice, we can learn the language of emotions…
“Living an inauthentic life also denies us the possibility of ever feeling truly loved for who we are, and consequently we inevitably find ourselves caught in a relentless quest for love that can never be satisfied or sustained. How can I trust that anyone really loves me when I haven’t shown them who I really am? So, when my partner tells me that he or she loves me, that little voice in the back of my mind says, ‘you love who you THINK I am. But if you really knew who I was, you wouldn’t love me,’…
“It’s only when we both reveal ourselves fully that the deepest, purest, most soul-nourishing love can be exchanged. The remedy for coming back to engage more fully is to first be in touch with what we are feeling and then to express, rather than repress, connect rather than protect, and reveal rather than conceal”.
Does this fit?
anita
anitaParticipantDear Clara: I simply didn’t think of it before, but telling a person who loved you for years: I have no feelings for you, is cruel, no matter how true it may be. No need to say it, it creates too much pain. Just don’t say it, it’s not required, it does not provide any benefit for the person who still has feelings for you.
And then saying it, and expecting you to stay out of your own home, so to accommodate the person who has NO FEELINGS for you- is preposterous!
A person who has NO FEELINGS for you does not deserve your empathy or consideration beyond giving her the opportunity to get her things back, closing all financial considerations fairly, justly, and leaving her behind to feel or not feel what she will, or not, for the people in her life.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Clara:
“Hope you are having a good kind of busy“- thank you, I think that my Busy is becoming a Good-kind of busy!
“Before she left for the trip, I was angry at her and I said she was an idiot.. she cried and said the day she left, she was very hurt by what I said. I apologized for using the harsh words“- she said she has no feelings for you: that’s not calling you an idiot, or any kind on insulting name, but it is harsh and insulting nonetheless.
I am sorry, Clara. I wish you do heal and move on and away from her: you deserve better, you deserve love.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Laven:
I wish your foster mother healing and recovery, physically and emotionally. I wish you strength and courage!
anita
anitaParticipantI am glad, Shandrea!!!
anita
anitaParticipantDear Shandrea:
You are welcome, and thank you for being here! You will not (!) be judged or belittled by me. Your eyes looking serious (from my perspective, in this one photo)- that’s not a negative thing, or a judgment. It’s my observation of a precious part of who you are.
anita
August 19, 2024 at 12:26 pm in reply to: Surrender, Accessing Shakti by clearing samskaras, eliminating false selves #436376anitaParticipantDear Seaturtle:
“I want to understand and see myself so badly… I wanna learn and hear about the awakenings you’ve had in this lifetime?“- a recent awakening for me has been to see myself in a positive, empathetic light: something I needed to see so badly and for too long.
“How have/do you set yourself up for spiritual growth?“- I set myself for emotional-spiritual growth by communicating with people like you, here in the forums, and in real-life, and seeing myself, you and others positively and empathetically whenever it is possible and appropriate.
“I have had a busy summer, and find myself missing talking with you guys but not liking the part where I have to come to my computer and type“- I understand that it’s been a long time since you liked going to your computer and typing away your thoughts and feelings and events in your life, and I accept this change. I wish the rest of your summer to be a summer of Surrender, Accessing Shakti, clearing samskaras, and eliminating false selves 🙂!
anita
August 19, 2024 at 11:48 am in reply to: Being a lonely young woman in a world obsessed with romance and sex #436374anitaParticipant* Dear Elais: I just noticed that I misspelled your screen name. I am sorry.
August 19, 2024 at 11:45 am in reply to: My boyfriend is traveling & I had surgery. I feel abandoned #436373anitaParticipantDear StormMako:
You are welcome, and thank you (!) for responding positively and with gratitude to my post of 2 days ago, even though I brought up childhood trauma, which is painful.
“I am always feeling guilty about stuff that I shouldn’t and changing my way of thinking is difficult especially when I’m always so worried about inconveniencing someone“- if it helps (if it does), you are welcome to type away your feelings in regard to inconveniencing people: does it feel like walking on eggshells, hardly being able to relax and .. just be yourself?
anita
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Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 