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March 19, 2024 at 11:22 am in reply to: My first love accepted my request, is it worth messaging her and what do I say? #428772
anitaParticipantDear Usyyy:
You shared that she was your first love when you were in your early 20s (now you are both in your mid-thirties, I figure). Following the breakup of the 3-year relationship ten years ago, she had a relationship with another guy for a few years, a relationship that ended 7 years ago, with him cheating on her. About 2 years later (early 2019), she got engaged, later, married the guy, and divorced him in early 2022, after he cheated on her and abused her in some other way or ways.
“As for me I have been single for a few years now, I have been evolving in my career and proud of how far I’ve come and have recently started a new chapter in my career… I noticed that she had cut off a lot of people from her social media… Last week I posted a quote that said ‘be the reason for someone’s pain to turn into a smile’, she liked that quote too. I’m tempted to send her a message… I want to tread very carefully with her as I don’t really know where her mind is given what she’s been through“-
– the quote you sent her, “be the reason for someone’s pain to turn into a smile”. A twist to this quote: don’t be the reason for someone’s smile to turn into pain. You are doing well, career wise, a new chapter, that’s a smile on your face. A relationship with a troubled woman can hurt your career, taking away your energy, and your feeling of having control over your life.
If she wasn’t troubled in her early 20s when you knew her, she is likely troubled now, after 2 failed relationships that included cheating and abuse. Not that she doesn’t deserve a new beginning, and healing, but you need to be careful, and indeed, like you stated, “tread very carefully“.
My advice: If you choose to contact her and the two of you begin a relationship of some kind, friendship or more, get to know her well, as she is now. And let this principle guide you: a healthy relationship is a Win- Win project, a Win for you, a Win for her. You are welcome to post again for more of my input, and hopefully for other members’ input as well.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Arctic07:
I am glad that my sincere praise made you positively smile!
(I am adding the boldface and italicized features to the quotes): “Yesterday , after almost more than a month of blocking him, I texted him… I asked him that why…did he give me hopes of a future. The reply that he gave was that first he was not strong enough back then… When I met him (he was dealing with the early expiring of his father), he was very much disturbed and emotionally messed up… I nurtured him, took him out of depression… I knew back then that he was a very weak man, had a very laid back attitude towards life in general , but I thought that with my affection and care we could transform into better grown individuals. But I was wrong it seems so.“-
– what I boldfaced is what he was before you met him, during the relationship and after: a very laid back person, not a fighter, not someone to stand up to people in authority (his mother) or to societal conventions. His mother (supported by societal conventions) tells him what to do, for how long, and he obeys. Standing up to her, going against her, would cause him more distress than he can handle. So, he doesn’t, and it is very unlikely that he will.
What I italicized is indeed your mistaken thinking at the time: he is who he is because of the influence of his mother (and his father, when he was alive) on his life when he was a child. There is a term for the childhood years, it’s called Formative Years, which means that a person’s attitudes, core beliefs, personality, etc., are formed during the years of childhood. This means that when you met him, he was already formed into a very laid back person who will obey authority and societal conventions, and no amount of care and affection from you, could change who he has become.
* It doesn’t mean that an adult person cannot make significant changes about himself (or herself); it means that an adult has to be very motivated to change, over a long period of time, to do the work required, and not give up, to be persistent and resilient, and to receive someone’s support in the process.
“Most people say that there home is there safe haven but for me it was not so. So the only comfort zone at that time was books. Then I met him (he was dealing with the early expiring of his father), he was very much disturbed and emotionally messed up… I nurtured him… I thought that with my affection and care we could transform (him)”-
– I think that you saw yourself in him and the thinking was (subconsciously): if I help him, he will help me; if I make him feel safe (if I am his safe haven), he will be my safe haven.
“Even after so much time has passed, I cannot stop thinking about him. On some days, I feel anger, on others I feel despair, on some days I feel humiliated, the list goes on an on. I am tired of thinking about him. I have tried so many things to heal myself… But every now and then my mind goes back to him. Please help me. I want to get out of this breakup purgatory“-
– breakup purgatory, another original term in my book (still impressed with you!)
I think that he was your hope for a safe haven, and that this hope is still there within you, keeping you in this breakup purgatory. You have put him up on a pedestal, so you shared, as if he was god (powerful enough to give you what you needed for so long, as a child). Here is what I suggest: when you are calm and alone, imagine him on that pedestal and reach up your hand to him, so that he (your image of him) can take your hand and graciously come down from that pedestal, a place where he does not belong. And as he is standing at your level, see him as a person, just another person, not one who is more powerful than you.
And let me know how this imagery felt like, will you?
anita
anitaParticipantEdit: my answer: depends if you feel anxious/ distressed or calm at the moment you consider drinking followed by drinking (and being aware that you decided earlier not to drink). If you feel calm, it’s a choice; if you feel anxious, it’s an impulse, an act of desperate need to be calm.
anitaParticipantDear Danny:
“If I try to abstain from alcohol, yet fail to do so, is that a mistake or a choice?“- my answer: depends if you feel anxious/ distressed or calm at the moment you consider drinking (and being aware that you decided earlier not to drink). If you feel calm, it’s a choice; if you feel anxious, it’s an impulse, an act of desperate need to be calm.
In Law, impulsive illegal acts done when anxious/ distressed are considered choices and therefore punishable by law, but less punishable than illegal acts done when calm.
“Should I beat myself up?“- beating oneself up makes one more anxious/ distressed, and therefore more likely to act out of impulse, and go back on choices made when calm. So.. no.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Arctic07:
You shared that you are good in literature, well: it shows in your writing. I read with much interest, and wanted to read more and more, wanting to know what’s next. You write so well, like a good romance novelist, I imagine. (I imagine because I don’t remember ever reading a romance novel). And your writing is honest, intelligent and believable.. not flowery and or unintelligent.
At the end of your story/ original post, you wrote: “I know that my story screams upon itself that I should have left him long ago but here I am hellbent on self destruction through love“-
– what interesting, original combinations of words (in my experience): “my story screams upon itself“, “self destruction through love“, I am positively impressed!
Now, what does a young woman as intelligent, original and talented as you, and one who values marriage, doing begging a guy for anything, let alone for a situationship, as you have done… (I ask myself).
The answer may be in the only part of your story that you placed in parenthesis: “(I had some issues in my family like I had childhood trauma of an unhappy home because of fights quarrels amongst family members to an extent that to me there was nothing known as a happy home )“.
Perhaps within your quarrelsome family, you placed yourself in parenthesis, figuratively, taking on the role of someone less important, someone who is quiet, obedient, pleasing, assisting and accommodating to others, while your quarrelsome family members were loud, rebellious, forceful.
Maybe this habit carried on to your first romantic relationship (I am adding the boldface feature to the following quote): “I… obey him practically worship him like he is some sort of god… I put him on the highest pedestal I could find… I cared for him more than I ever cared for me. In my mind I was his dutiful wife who was meant to please him , assist him in whatever he wanted”.
I hope to read your thoughts about what I posted here, and would very much like to communicate with you. Maybe, just maybe, our communication can help you, so that you can “Move on“.
anita
anitaParticipant* Dear Tommy:
What a revolutionary idea (for me!): I never thought of controlling one’s fear by (1) Recognizing the conditions that scare me, (2) Planning to not feel the fear before those conditions happen. I never heard or read such an idea and I am going to put it into practice in the next day or so… she how it works. Thank you, Tommy!
* Dear Shanna: since the original didn’t reply to you, would you to address a question to other members (here or in your own thread, if you choose to start one?)
anita
anitaParticipantDear Kshiti:
You are welcome, and no problems as to you taking your time before replying.
“The values I came down to are- Success, Personal Development, Well-Being and Growth. But I feel this is not the complete thing and I need to do more work to develop better perspectives“- you can develop your thoughts about professional success in the context of relationships with people you interact with professionally. There are people who are okay with cheating and mistreating others so to get ahead professionally; what are your values in regard to how you would treat others and how you expect to be treated in the professional world?
You can develop well-being in the context of personal relationships, similar to the above: what are your values in regard to how you treat others in your personal life, and how do you expect them to treat you?
You listed very impressive goals. “How to develop a greater sense of purpose and develop a better approach towards the core component of my life?“- this reads to me like an academic-like, complicated question. Can you simplify this question for me?
“Also, I would like to ask you about mindfulness. How can one apply it for anxiety and intrusive thoughts as well as for overall wellbeing?“- re-read my Feb 21 post (page 2 of your thread) where you asked a similar question (only you didn’t mention Mindfulness) and I answered: the NPARR Strategy, which is a Mindfulness technique that works for me. Try it in regard to your obsessive (aka intrusive) thoughts, will you?
And please feel comfortable to post again whenever you choose, whenever it is convenient for you, no need to rush.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Kshiti: I will read and reply in the next 24 hours.
anita
anitaParticipantContinued, part 3:
I was a baby, under fed in her womb but force fed outside the womb. She told me that I refused to eat, and so, she’d close my nose with her fingers so that I’d open my mouth to breathe, an when I did, she pushed food into my mouth. One of my dominant tics these days, is to suddenly open my mouth and gasp for air.
Sometime in the first year of my life, I suffered dysentery and very high fever, taken to a hospital dying, and placed there is an isolation ward to which my mother had no access. After weeks or months there, she was allowed to take me back. When she arrived to retrieve me, (she told me), that In turned away from her and held the nurse tightly.
Continued on another day.
anita
anitaParticipantContinued, part 2:
When my mother was pregnant with me (and for years after), she suffered from an eating disorder, bulimia nervosa (she didn’t know the name for it, never diagnosed, of course, given the under-developed state of the area and most of the country as a whole). I remember her purposefully throwing up by inserting her hand into her throat.
While pregnant with me, she gained very little weight, so little, that on delivery day (she told me about it), the hospital staff mistook her for a visitor. She didn’t look pregnant. What followed was a breech delivery of a small baby. Throughout primary and junior high school, I remained significantly smaller and developed later than all but one of my female peers.
med. net. ca/ impact of maternal nutrition on fetal development: “Both nutrition and environment affect the ability and performance of the central nervous system. Maturation of the central nervous system is not linear. A decisive period of development represents a once-only window of opportunity that can neither be repeated nor reversed. The entire developmental period of the brain has subcritical periods, each of which may be disrupted and thereby affect the maturation and organization of the brain. Nutritional deprivation seems associated with varying degrees of intellectual disturbance such as cognitive impairments and attention deficit disorders“-
-and indeed I suffered early on and still, to this very day, I suffer from significant degrees of intellectual disturbances, such as cognitive impairments and attention deficit disorders. One reason why I’ve enjoyed so much being an active, daily participant in these forums on tiny buddha, for so many years (since May 2015, with a 6-month pause of Feb- Aug 2023), is that because of the format here, I have all the time in the world to read and re-read, copy and paste, organize and re-organize the information on the computer screen, to look up definitions of words that I keep forgetting, and in so doing, I am able to learn/ to form connections in my brain that otherwise- in other formats (such as in having a conversation with a person in real-life)- I am not able to make.
Here, in the context of these forums, I get to be.. smart, to feel the delight of being able to use my brain. But when sitting with people, hearing them talk- to me or to other people- so much is lost to me. I simply stop listening because I get lost. People say words that although I heard many times, the meaning of the words are lost to me. People connect two things that to me, are not connected.
Words people say stay in isolation… words they say do not get connected in my brain, to other words they say, nor do the connect to memories of things I heard or read before.
All through school, the way I’d study for a test (pre-computer) was to write and re-write for many, many hours. I’d then take the test, do okay (not great), and soon after the test, I’d forget the material. I remember in college, a certain professor, from the moment she started her lectures, to the moment she ended them, not a single word she said registered. The way I passed her class was to.. write and re-write and organize material from a book, then pass the test and.. forget the material.
At different jobs that required attention, such as clerical work, I failed.
I can spend hours and years in a room and not remember the color of the walls, or that there is a huge light fixture on the wall.. and once I pay attention, it’s like I see the room for the first time.. and then, I forget yet again.
Figurative language is lost on me, can’t connect words people say to figurative meaning, and often, in regard to many words, I forget the literal meaning and have to look those words up.. again and again.
If someone tries to show me how to do a task, I get very anxious, it’s so difficult for me to pay attention. I so prefer mindless, simple tasks. All this means that from the very beginning of my adulthood, and still, I am not qualified to do many, many jobs, and none that includes managing people and projects.
Part 3 of my story will be next.
anita
anitaParticipantContinued, my story the way I never told it before, part 1:
I was born into (at the time) an underdeveloped country, an area occupied by new, unsettled, and uneducated immigrants. The general attitude and understanding was that a child’s mental constitution was determined at birth, and/ or was a matter of the child’s independent choices, that is, choices independent of how the child was treated.
How parents treated their children was considered a matter of no relevance to the child’s mental-emotional health. If a child was mentally unhealthy then it meant (according to this attitude) that the child was born that way. If the child (at any age) acted in generally dis-approvable ways, it meant that the child was bad (not sick), and needed to be punished (not helped).
The dominant attitude was that a child was his/ her parents’ property to do with as they pleased- as long as bones weren’t broken and blood was not shed. People who witness any lesser forms of child abuse (forms that do not include visible, severe physical injury or death) did not interfere. Those who cared did not interfere because they didn’t want to get hurt in the crossfire; be attacked by the angry parent. The mentality was that it is a parent’s Right to do with their child as they pleased, that it was no one’s business how they treated their child, as in saying: my child is for me to do with as I please; your child is for you to do with as you please!
I have this particular memory that left a big impression on me: I was maybe a preteen, maybe a teenager, visiting a neighbors’ house, also visited by the neighbors’ relatives from the U.S. The American relative, a mother, felt the need to .. discipline her son. She did it inside the house while her sister and others (including me) sat or stood close to the door outside the house. What followed were blood churning screams of her preteen son. All you could hear were his screams and the sound of whatever it was that she used to hit him with, and that went on for a long time. At the end of it, the mother was done with the deed, everyone was quiet and no mention of it ever followed.
Here is another scene: I was an older teenager (high school) and failed to be at home in the afternoon for the meal my mother prepared for me. Angry, she walked the 5-10 minutes to where I was, and walked me back home while calling me names, hitting, kicking and shoving me with her arms and legs. It was done on then street in broad daylight with people watching. No one interfered.
I remember being inside the apartment where we lived, after dark, a thin wall shared with the next door neighbors, she was screaming and yelling at me (and hitting my face with her open hand, right to left, left to right), and I remember wondering: can’t the neighbors hear this?.. They heard and were silent, never a mention of it.
But my mother went beyond what other adults in the neighborhood did: I remember the day she got angry with a music teacher in the primary school I attended (not following something that happened between her and the teacher, but following what someone said the teacher said). She walked up to the school- while it was in session- finding the correct classroom, and standing outside of it, she demanded that the teacher steps outside. She proceeded, for a long time, to scream and yell at the teacher, calling her names, threatening to beat her up (maybe she did, I don’t remember). All of the pupils including me (I was mortified), and school personnel stood there watching. No police was called. (I have no memory of there being a police force where I lived). When my mother was done, she walked back home.. and of all the children, I got to go home with… the crazy woman.
Following the above, nothing happened. There was no follow up: no psychological counseling offered for me, or for my mother, or for anyone present in school that day. There was no mention of it, that I know of.
Part 2 of my story will be next.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Worldofthewaterwheels:
Before you can find answers for your personal “study in loneliness and rejection” (title of your thread), you have to find an effective way to calm down.
You cannot conduct a study on anything when you are as angry, stressed out and unable to focus as you are (“I’m still feeling very angry all the time… I’m angry all the time. And when I’m angry, other things go wrong.. Basically, I’m totally unable to focus… I’m too stressed out“).
“I go out and buy little things that add up to a lot, drink too much“- these are two ways to calm down that haven’t been effective for you.
Can you address what I brought up here, in this post, with your therapist/ doctor?
anita
anitaParticipantDear Worldofthewaterwheels: I am looking forward to read and reply to you Sat morning (in about 11 hours from now).
anita
anitaParticipantDear Worldofthewaterwheels:
You wrote yesterday (I am adding the boldface feature selectively for emphasis): “It’s been a while and I’ve been seeing a therapist… The therapist is talking about the emotional child state and the rational adult state… I think she feels I’m trapped still in my early adolescent child state… often find myself feeling attacked by others, I guess I come across as too soft with others but it’s not in fact how I am“-
-Like your therapist, I also think that you are trapped in an emotional child state, that of the child and adolescent that you were, when being too soft was your way to.. get along with your mother. It was not that you were born to be too soft/ weak; it was an adjustment to living with your mother.
Your father made the same adjustment as a child, and was already adjusted in this way when he married your mother: “my mom was always at the top and my dad often seems incredibly weak… being very apologetic“-
– your mother was at the top, strong/ dominant; your father took the bottom position: too soft, submissive, incredibly weak.
You wrote in regard to your family of origin: “We basically learnt…that bullies always win“- the bully, as I see it, is your mother. Your father adjusted to her before meeting her (he had practice). You adjusted to her after entering the world through her..
“My sister… has achieved a lot by steering her partner where she wants to go. I do not possess this skill“- are you referring to the skill of bullying.. of being at the top?
The key to healthy, successful relationships is it being a Win-Win dynamic, both sides win, no one is at the bottom (the loser) while the other is at the top (the winner).
Back to your yesterday’s post: “Therapist and family both saying just take your time and be kind to yourself. I just find that really hard… I cant let go of the need, the feeling I need, to achieve things.. to compete and do well compared to others“-
– maybe you think that the only way for you to get up from under, to be at the top, to win, is to achieve things professionally and financially, to compete with others in these areas, and be at the top compared to them. But no: there are plenty of people who achieved professionally/ financially (your father is an example, isn’t he?) who remain at the bottom.
You can come up to the top today, a bit, and tomorrow some more- but not in comparison to others (that’s not the real top). It is a matter of attitude and everyday practice. Something you can discuss with your therapist?
anita
anitaParticipantDear Worldofthewaterwheels: Good to read back from you! I will read and reply Thurs morning (it is Wed evening here).
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. 