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Ed

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Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 61 total)
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  • #414383
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita and dear Helcat,

    Thank you for your input on the situation.

    Anita, i think you are right about the emotional connection between me now being triggered just like it happened in the past. I understand why you think that it would have been better for my girlfriend to tell hr, but i know that she is afraid of losing her job, as she only started working in the office a few months ago. Also im not angry towards her but the coworker who treats her like that. The things i suggested when i heard about her issues included her talking to hr, her boss or works council.

    Helcat, i thought about that too. If i were to do so, where/ to which person would i sent this anonymous complaint (without any names)?

    Helcat, i am also hoping that the harassment situation at your workplace will end and i thank you for your great suggestion.

    Ed

    #414378
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    Thank you for answering and thank you for welcoming me back!

    You are correct, i am talking about the same woman. After around a month of living together, she expressed feelings for me and we got together.

    Ed

    #412813
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    A late Merry Christmas to you as well!

    I hope you had some nice holidays and that your scatia issues are gone for good.

    My last few months were quite stressful (but managable) so i struggled to find some time to write to you.

    In case we dont write beforehand i want to wish you a happy new year and i hope that you will have a good time celebrating with friends and family!

    Ed

    #410035
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    Thank you so much for your kind words. I had trouble accepting your compliments as i still have some trouble from time to time about my self perception, but i am slowly coming to appreciate your words. And they are making me smile now.

    Life is starting to move forward again and my anger and confusion are slowly fading with each day.

    I hope your inflammation is calming down and that you are able to move freely again. I read that warmth (like hot patches) might also help in addition to the ibuprofen.

    Get well soon!

    Ed

    #409818
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    Thank you. The last 2 weeks were pretty stressful, as a friend of mine opened up to me about her boyfriend (a now former friend of mine) being physically and emotionally abusive with her. I was busy supporting her and managing my own topics, as she staying at my place for a while until she finds her own appartment.

    This whole situation made me think a lot about abuse and the things you wrote in your last massage, when you talked about the lack of support when exiting dangerous relationships.

    As i witnessed the behaviour of my female friend’s family and friends towards her situation, i was just as surprised by the lack of understanding by these people just as i was speechless by your therapists reaction concering the decision you made. I can only guess that if one has not experienced the damage you can suffer from such situations, there simply isnt a deep enough understanding. I now directed my friend towards crisis and counseling services for women.

    I myself am sad to lose another friend, even though i managed to reconnect to some other people. I am also struggling with intense anger and feelings of helplessnes, although i suspect that these feelings stem from me triggering because of the situations nature.

    I hope you are healthy and doing well. I guess apple season is over, so i hope you wont catch a cold during your walks when it gets colder.

    Ed

    #408970
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    I hope you are well and healthy.

    I am struggling these past days to find time and headspace to post something, as a lot is happening right now.

    I want to write something hopefully in the next few days.

    Ed

    #408740
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    I have been struggling these last few days to find the right words for my answer to you. I didnt want to give out overly used or cliché words, but whether or not i will manage to avoid these, i will now give you my thoughts.

    I thank you for sharing about your experiences. As i know myself, this takes a lot of courage, so that makes you very brave.

    I am also grateful for your kind, undestanding and thoughtful words concerning my accounts. It really means a lot to me.

    Reading about how your mother abused you made me feel angry, as you have been so very compassionate and patient with me and me telling you about my problems at length. I cant imagine for the life of me how this woman could call you “an absolute zero”, as how i see things you couldnt be farther from this description. Your mother was not the unlucky one to have you, you were the unlucky one to have her as your mother.

    I sincerly hope that my probably emotionally charged words do not hurt you or make light of your (probably still) complicated feelings.

    I also hope that you are proud of yourself for standing up for yourself by cutting her out of your life, being here to help others and also having the courage to talk about your past and feelings, because you earned every last bit of it.

    If anything i said went too far in any way or made you feel uncomfortable, please tell me.

    Ed

    #408635
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    Thank you for giving me and the other people on this forum the chance and space to talk about their struggles.

    And thank you for being part of the solution.

    I hope you are showing your apples who’s boss.

    Ed

    #408634
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    I am struggling to find a fitting “point of entry” into the topic and i dont know how much detail you need, so i will try to give some context while describing the “talks” with my father.

    I am also sorry if this post is somewhat messy or incoherent, this topic is difficult to write about. I think my choice of words might reflect that too.

    The first thing that comes to my mind is how he used to call me stupid, lazy and a loser. This happened most often when i failed to meet his expectations with my grades in school, doing chores or whenever he felt like it. (“You are wasting your potential”, “you will never accomplish anything in life”, “you have to put in more work”, “how can you be sometimes so smart yet sometimes so dumb and careless”, etc.)

    He criticised and mocked me for my appearance, my manners and social life. (“You will never find a girlfriend looking like this”, “you have to be more confident”, “you need more friends/ to go out more”, etc)

    Conversely, when i changed things about me concerning these topics i would be mocked and criticised for these changes as well.

    (“You have no right to be so proud of yourself”, “you are spending too much time away from home”, “you are not as good-looking as you think”, etc)

    Sometimes he would accuse me of lying, “conspiring” against him with my younger siblings or hiding some sort of act of wrong-doing from him. (“You think you are so clever, do you”, “when would you have told me about this”, “not so smart now”)

    The mentioned topics would then push him to talk himself into a rage, most often if i opposed his statements or opinions. Calling me things like “ungrateful/ insolent/ disrespectful” towards him, while explaining the many things he was doing for me, while also listing all of my shortcomings and wrongdoings towards him and all the things he wanted me to do better. This could take between 1 and 2 hours, except when he decided to fetch my younger siblings to give them hell too, while he was already at it.

    I would be glad to share more about the contents of his monologues, but at around 15 minutes of his hatred i would start dissociating, “waking up” when he was finished and starting to tell me that he was “only concerned for me” and “wanted the best for me”, often expecting some thankful and/or remorseful words. Doing as he wanted would most often end the “session”. Otherwise he would conclude with thinly veiled threats of violence.

    My mother stayed mostly “hidden” during my fathers outbursts, in the kitchen for example. She seldom entered the situation, mostly when the “session” entered its 3rd hour. She then tried to somewhat appease my father (“i think they understand your point now”) or asked/begged him to end his speech for the day (“dont you think its enough for today?”). I can only remember around 3 or 4 times in about 3 years when she stepped in to get me and my siblings out of the line of fire, making her the target of his rage. Other than that, she mostly looked away and had a guilty/ashamed expression on her face when i saw her during or after the “talks”.

    Ed

    #408608
    Ed
    Participant

    Ps: the text at the end of my post is not a link or virus, its a remnant of me pre-typing my message on my phone.

    #408607
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    Thank you so much for working through my long text and using so much of your own time for your elaborate answer. I will react to it at a later time as i am currently very confused again.

    I have been thinking about the topic and i am so horribly afraid of me getting it wrong from the start.

    What if these people were right. What if i was and still am indeed living “in my own little world.” What if me trying to understand things and talking to people about it is just about me trying to justify things i did wrong but dont understand. What if me not understanding is the issue my ex-gf and former friends were trying to tell me. What if me even posting this is just some way of me keeping up my own delusions. What if i was the one “gaslighting” my ex and everything was actually alright, things just seemed bad to me and only me because of my fucked up self-perception. What if i told my other friends and family and my last therapist things that would support my version of the truth. What if i am doing the same here with you and not even knowing that i do.

    I dont even know if i should post this or if there is any use to me posting this but i am pretty desperate right now for anything as my anxiety is killing me. I just dont know how i will ever know what is true. I am sorry if this text is inappropriate.

    Ed

    #408347
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    Thank you for reading and for your answer.

    You were right to oppose my view at that time because i myself was too unstable to understand my own emotions. Whatever happened hurt me deeply, but with the state of “acute” confusion i was in the only thing i felt was anger.

    Your opposition -although somewhat hurtful at the time- gave me the motivation to collect my thoughts and recollections of the events to find out why i felt the way i did.

    I also did not want to hurl around big words like “gaslighting” without having “proof”, although i originally was not the first person to use that term regarding my experiences.

    Ed

    #408330
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    Picking apples sounds fun! I hope the temperatures where you live are not too chilly at this time of the year.

    Ed

     

    #408329
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    I took my time posting so i could sort my thoughts into a (i hope) coherent form.

    During our first discussion i talked about my confusion about my last relationship and about me feeling gaslit, which you strongly (and rightfully so) opposed. As i myself had nothing more than diffuse impressions of a supposed gaslighting happening and a lot of intense feelings to work through, i was wrong to make any sort of claim of that kind then. I also dont want to claim that now.

    After i now managed to get through the anger i had then, i could find the things that led me to this conclusion. This post is not asking you to decide whether or not some sort of gaslighting happened, instead i am asking for your opinion on the matter again. I am sorry if this post is getting too long, if you want to answer take all the time you need.

     

    My impression of being gaslit started generally during october of last year, when first my ex and later some friends we both knew started telling me that the state of my mental health would be getting worse and that i should at least find a new therapist, while my ex tried to persuade me to get an ect-treatment (Electro convulsion therapy).

    But:

    – the idea of getting an ect i had myself some months prior, but my therapist at the time was strongly against this, as she called this step “completely unnecessary”. I then decided against the treatment.

    – The friends spent around 90% of their time with my ex, i saw them seldom. 3 months after the breakup one these friends told me that my ex used to talk very harshly about how i managed my mental health state, he called it “frequent complaining” he himself was not comfortable listening to.

    – my therapy ended just at the end of september. Not even two weeks later first my ex, then the friends started pressuring me to find a new therapist or to get ect-treatment.

    My ex started to get overly concerned about my mental state shortly after an argument we had, during which i made it clear that i wasnt going to continue the relationship much longer due to the issues i had with her behaviour towards me (distanced, desinterested, dismissive of my feelings, telling me that my issues with the relationship were not real, etc). She then also started saying things like that “nobody would be there for me/ i would be all alone if we would break up”.

    Thing is, that i was actually feeling quite well and proud of myself during and after finishing the therapy. I got a lot of positive feedback from my therapist concerning my coping behaviour and techniques and a lot of suggestions for further improvement which i wanted to take my time with understanding.

    By the end of october the constant pressure from these people pushing me to do things i did not want or need to do started to make me feel suffocated and unstable, which in turn made me withdraw from the group of friends and i spent less time with my ex because i needed room to understand what was even happening around me. I also started to severly doubt my self-perception regarding the state of my mental health.

    Around the mid of november two friends (at that point solely) of hers approached me after meeting under some pretext to tell me that in each of their own opinions i should break up with my ex. None of these two had asked me about my mental wellbeing since i finished the therapy or about my perspective regarding the relationship they were intervening in. At this point i had lost all orientation regarding the situation. My self-doubts were growing more intense after i asked my ex then if she had any idea why her friends would tell me to break up with her, to which she replied that she would not know.

    By now i understood that something was going horribly wrong, even though i could not determine why or what. My last-ditch attempt to clear things up was a talk with my ex around mid december during which i asked her to explain her hurtful behaviour towards me during the last year and to explain what was even happening during the last 3 months. She then gave me her handwritten list i already vented so much about and told me that “these were the reasons why she had acted that way towards me.” The contents of the list mostly being about problematic behaviour on my part, made me feel like everything that happened so far was my fault, because of me not being able to see how things really were, even if my ex and her friends were telling me the truth about me the whole time.

    I knew at that point that things were broken beyond repair for me. Before finally breaking up one week later i tried one last time to raise the topic of my supposedly concerning mental state (which was true at that point), but was immediatly shut down by her angrily demanding that i undergo ect-treatment.

    Around two weeks ago i decided to finally make moving on from this mess the priority for the next months and decided to try and ask one of the former friends to ask my ex if she would be interested in talking one last time with me, to maybe clear things up, say a last few important things etc. The friend replied calling me “insolent for even writing him after the things i had done” and that “the things i would want to talk about were only important in my own little world”. At this point i decided to withdraw my request and wished him well.

    I am struggling to this day to understand what i did to these people. If you have any idea of what happened, please tell me.

     

    Thank you very much for reading all of this.

    Ed

    #408273
    Ed
    Participant

    Dear anita,

    Thank you for welcoming me back.

    My compliments and appreciation for you were in no way insincere. I was just worried that i might have been too ,,clingy” or that by frequently giving compliments, i might have appeared insincere about the things i wrote to you.

    This topic is in no way related to how you responded to me or treated me, its just something i worry about a lot. My experiences with how other people perceived me in the past just makes it difficult for me to perceive myself.

    And to make it clear: i have been and will continue to be honest and sincere with you.

    I would also like to give a short update on my situation: i managed to get therapy with a therapist i like by now. I started eating more healthy food, started doing workouts and am working on quitting smoking.

    I have also been thinking a lot about what input you gave me about the situation i approached you with, my ex-girlfriend. While i was honestly confused by how different you saw the situation compared to me, i am now able to see things more neutral and less angry and so im able to understand your perspective. I also came to understand your input on abuse and abusive relationships, especially with ones parents to a deeper degree.

    These would also be the 2 topics i would like to talk about.

    How are you doing? Are you still doing your daily walks?

    Ed

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 61 total)