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  • in reply to: Mind troubles #273257
    GL
    Participant

    Dear grannyweatherwax,

    You’re one of those people who I like to call the ‘older sibling’ type. From the time that you were a child, it was in your nature to attempt to assist others who were struggling with something. You like to help people. Even now, it didn’t seemed to have changed much, just that your depression makes it harder to focus on other people. You also seem to the independent type, rarely relying on others for assistant in your problems. After all, you struggle with the image of being a strong person as ‘weak’ is such a terrible label to you. But the more you enforced that image of supportive, but independent friend/family member, the more people will feel its okay to rely on you, especially when you don’t say no.

    Also, you rarely ask for help. Case in point, you didn’t ask for the help of your professor whose job is it to help you find answers to your questions. But unless you ask people for help and tell them exactly how to help you, they won’t know how to actually do anything for you. They are not mind reader nor are you. What you assume you know about them and what they know about you might not entirely be on point. And as a person who rarely lets people see your vulnerability, they probably aren’t acquainted with the fact that you too need emotional support from time to time. Even if you have shouldered your friends’ emotional needs, you cannot expect that in return without actually telling them. You need to ask for things from people, you can’t expect them to just sense something is wrong and do something. Not all people are good at being supportive even when a friend is clearly going through a tough time. Even the ones who have emotional intelligence lack the correct directions to help others in their time of needs. Give them that direction and if they don’t think they can provide it, then ask for something that they can do.

    People are not mind reader so you have to start telling them that you have depression, that you are a human with a vulnerable side, that you need help and what they can do for you. It will be difficult since you rarely let yourself rely on others, but it’s time to learn how to let others help you. After all, relationships is about give and take so that one person does not have to shoulder all the emotional burden while the other is just relying on the other for emotional support. That is imbalance and will gradually sow resentment.

    Good luck.

    in reply to: Am i a lesbian? liking a girlfriend #272501
    GL
    Participant

    Dear Marissa,

    The stereotype regarding sexuality is that once you’ve identified as something, then that’s set in stone and that’s how you’ll be the rest of your life. But the logic is flawed in that people don’t choose other people because of their gender, but because of who they are as a person. While there are attraction to certain physical feature, that is not what decides whether people in any relationship will work together. What makes or break any relationship is all the parties involved deciding to work on their relationship because they value the person and the relationship. If you can love someone of the same biological sex platonically, whose to say that you can’t love someone of the same biological sex romantically down the road? Sexuality is quite fluid unless you’re a person who doesn’t care to change your preferences.

    Though I don’t know the depth of your affection, you certainly hold affection for your friend. You tell her important things about you and your past, you feel a certain intimacy with her that propel you into a physical pull. You trust her, for if you didn’t, you wouldn’t let her into your personal territory. Now, what you feel for her doesn’t necessarily mean that you find female romantically attractive, it simply means that you have affection for your friend who is biologically female. There was just some things about your friend that led you to develop trust and attraction then gradual affection. There’s nothing wrong with that, you simply have affection for your female friend.

    Now, the important thing is to accept your feelings for what they are then decide what to do after that.

    You can accept your feelings then decide to forget them and move on. You can try to have an illicit affair with your friend without informing your boyfriend or her husband, though I don’t recommend it since it lead to too much drama for everyone. Or, if your boyfriend and her husband is open-minded enough, you can enter into a polyamory relationship whereby you continue to explore your attraction to your friend while still dating your boyfriend. The first option is difficult, but it’s been only a few months so as long as you don’t keep too much contact, you might be able to move forward soon enough. The second option leads to a ending that will be full of guilt and distrust from everyone. The third option is difficult, but not impossible as long as you all keep open communications while being honest with your insecurities and doubts. There’s probably more options that I’m not mentioning, but the decision is yours and your friend to decide on. Go with your heart.

    Regardless of the opinions of every person who hear about it will express, don’t let them tell you that you’re in the wrong or that you’re strange for feeling the way you do. There’s no predicting who will enter your life at any given time and what sort of things you’ll experience. It’s easy to expect that life will continue on in the same old way it always had, but life also has a way of surprising you when you least expect it. Life is ephemeral and change is inevitable. Don’t beat yourself up for the things happening, you’re only walking the road that life seems to be nudging you towards to explore something new. It’s scary and you don’t know what might happen, so take a deep breath and make sure to take care of yourself.

    Good luck.

    in reply to: I need help working through this. #272355
    GL
    Participant

    Dear Andrea,

    The conditions for a stable relationship is mostly based on communications, acceptance, responsibility, commitment and openness. But whether a person will work toward it is entirely their choice. You can have expectation for your relationship since you want it to work out, but you can’t really have heavy expectations in the way of your partner. You can predict their actions and their thoughts, but until they have taken actions of some kind, then you won’t understand their stance in your relationship. You can voice your thoughts on the matter and ask to work on it with them, but in the end, their action is dependent on whether they are willing to commit.  After all, you cannot ask more than a person is willing to give.

    Now, there are several red flags for you to think about.

    1. When you asked your ex if he was willing to commit to a serious relationship, he had rejected it. So you weren’t going to get the serious and intimate relationship you were hoping for. He had made his stance early on, but you still chose to pursued a relationship. Whether you were thinking he might changed his mind later on, I don’t know, but he had made his stance and people rarely change their decision so easily. Especially when he made it obvious that he is not inclined to commit to a serious relationship that will turn co-dependent in the future.

    2. Your thought of “young people” using sex as a way of using people and not holding accountability is quite the prejudice against those younger than you. There are many sexual inclinations as much as there are people in the world and studies have shown that teens these days are actually having less sex these days. So is this thought a projection of what you might be thinking about yourself or your previous partners/crushes? Because projection is from personal experience.

    3. You seem to find unavailable men to be attractive. From the beginning it was your obsession with someone who had rejected your confession and after it’s someone who had declined to enter a serious relationship with you. But when that casual relationship seemed to be turning serious, you begin to feel irritated. After the person that was inattentive and distance begin to be more accountable for their share of the work in your relationship, you begin to find fault in their actions. You begin to feel that the relationship might be incompatible. You felt safe, though insecure, when your ex was absence, but felt strange and anger when he began to lessen that distance.

    4. It seem that you had a lot of intimacy through your bodies, but very little communications. You went to his house and slept, but didn’t really talk except through text. You want to share your interest with him, but he shows no interest. Everyone has different ways of showing support. Though I advocate that a partner should not have to attend any shows just because their partner has interest since emotional support is shown in encouragement, not attending any show to placate their partner. That just sow resentment. But I digress. Now, even before you broke off, you laid together in bliss because you thought he understood what you were trying to tell him. But the thing is, communication take time and effort. It takes a series of discussions with the parties involved willing to listen to every side and angle. It is vulnerable and messy, but it is open and honest. You can’t ever truly understand a person, but they can try to show you who they are. Even then, it is an ongoing work. So did he willingly listen to your insecurities and did you really understand what he was trying to tell you about himself?

    5. Rather than think that this is a good opportunity of growth for him, something that he decides for himself, decide for yourself what you’ve learn from it.

    6. You haven’t set good boundaries for yourself.

    You can’t fix a relationship that wasn’t there in the first place. You had began a casual fling with someone you found attractive, but who like the physical aspect more than the emotional part of your relationship. But deep in your heart, you wish for that share emotion between two people in a serious, romantic relationship. But you’re not going to get it from your ex. He had told you from the beginning that he does not desire emotional intimacy at this point in time. And now that he is, again, unavailable, you want to pursued a relationship again because you miss him. You want to fix what you think is broken even when your intuition is telling you otherwise.

    So what is it that he was filling inside of you that you want him back? Better yet, what is it that he represent that makes him so tempting that you willingly ignore your own intuition to pursue him? What kind of story are you telling yourself about your relationship and him that makes you want to go back? There’s a lot of question you need to ask yourself.

    in reply to: How can I accept love? #271951
    GL
    Participant

    Dear Jay,

    Though you understand the fact that accepting others’ affection is your choice, you’ve already realized that you are the one to draw back when people actually show you affection.

    Whenever a relationship is smooth sailing, there might be an alarm in your head that goes off which prompts you to sabotaged it. Why? Is it because deep inside, you believe that good things doesn’t last for long so it’s better to end it quickly less you are disappointed again or that you don’t deserve this relationship and the affection and the happiness.

    Love is not so much accepting affection from other people, but actually believing whether you even deserve affection in the first place. From your post, it doesn’t seem you even believe you can be loved, so does that mean you don’t love yourself? If you can’t love yourself, can you allow other people to love you? Because if you don’t love yourself, can you even believe you deserve love from yourself and other people?

    I do not know what occurred in your life that made you question the validity of affection from other people and most of all, from yourself, but it is something to ask yourself. You have to ask yourself why you are so keen on believing that you, the person you are now, do not deserve affection from other people. Why do you fear it? Where did such feelings come from? When did it begin? What is the void inside of your heart?

    Having hope for affection is one thing, but not able to believe that anyone can love you is another. But if you truly wish to understand love to give and to receive in return, then get ready to dive deep into your pool of fears and insecurities. It will be messy and it might dredge up old wounds, but to move forward to actually believing that loving yourself, though difficult, is not impossible will be a great dream come true. And there might be days where you regress into thinking that you really cannot be love, have compassion. Not everyone is their own best friend every second of the day and it will take courage to be kind to yourself, yet it will be worth it when you feel enough as the person you are currently.

    Good luck.

    in reply to: Anxiety, confusion, sexuality #271455
    GL
    Participant

    Excuse me for butting in, but I was wondering, did something happened in your childhood, afeels, that make unavailable men attractive to you? Or some kind of trauma that branded a strong impression on you? And is that where your trust issues in men stemmed from?

    I’m sorry about your friend JJ, but the thing is, he might be one of those people who flirt for fun, who sees flirting as a game more than a indication of romantic leaning. That, or he’s the sort of person whose gets his validation from people relying and depending on him, much of what you seemed to have done with him as a friend. But that’s only speculations because I don’t know him, but it doesn’t seem that you’ve put away that particular history of yours. What made you mention him in your post, as compare to the other men you’ve dated? And what was it about him that let you opened your eyes?

    Also, there’s a possibility that you’re demisexual or something along those lines. Someone who identifies as demisexual doesn’t see sex as a necessary thing in a relationship. Rather, they want an emotional connection with their potential partner before rolling in the sheets, well, if ever. Of course, a demisexual person can find people physically attractive, but they don’t really developed sexual attraction until they feel they are in a mutually comfortable relationship with respect and open communications with their partner. But the thing is, you don’t have to determine your sexuality, sexuality is actually quite fluid so what is attractive now might not be attractive in five years. Determine what you like as of now, but don’t set that as a rigid rule for the future. Also, it would be best to research some key points on sexuality and its explorations because going in blind isn’t always helpful.

    About the sex guilt, that’s something you should go over with your counselor. Your feeling of guilt of performing any sexual deeds stemmed from your family’s teachings that being sexual is bad, especially if you’re a female and you’ve been carrying that teachings into your adulthood. You haven’t cast away the guilt, but as long as the guilt is there, sex will always be something that you might desired, but also something bad to do. And that will make sex torture or boring or scary. That will induce anxiety about sex.

    Now, have you developed healthy boundaries for yourself? There are many kind of boundaries and they help you defined who you are as a person as you currently are. It also help you decide what you will hold yourself responsible for and what you will not. Without any form of boundaries, you tend to let other people dictate your actions regardless of your thoughts. There’s a book called Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend that can get you started. Your counselor can also give you suggestions.

    It seems you’re still dealing with your anxiety and that’s no walk in the park and it’s not something that goes away with time. But you haven’t given up hope for yourself and that’s encouraging. You are still searching for yourself, though that’s a journey until death, so take a deep breath and encourage yourself to walk at your own pace. You are probably pressured from those around you to what you see in the media that you need to have your whole self figured out by the time you reached 30, but that could not be further from the truth. If you had yourself drawn and laminated by the age of 30, then where’s the space to grow and learn by the age of 40, 50 and beyond? People change and there’s so much to do in today’s society so why limit yourself? But done at your own pace. After all, you only have this life, why not live on your own terms?

    Good luck.

    in reply to: I feel so distant to all my friends #270269
    GL
    Participant

    Dear Milly,

    It is a lonely circumstance, but your friends had found new interests to focus on that you can’t really relate to. Also, you guys are still in school and are still learning how to function as individuals yourself so when you find something new and interesting, that will usually take up most of your attention. So right now your friends are focus on their relationship and other things are background noises.

    So, it’s difficult, but it’s best you muster up courage to find new friends. Your friends are now choosing something that has little to do with you so even if you wish to stay friends, it won’t be the same as before. People change with time and your friends are doing so now. Try to accept that and move on. Use this time to understand yourself as you are now, from your interests to your favorite subject in school. Use that information to seek people who share similar interest. They are out there, you just have to search for them. There’s also the world wide web.

    Regarding your anxiety of not fitting in, right now, you are viewing yourself as an outsider along with the situation with your friend, it exacerbated your general anxiety. It’s not unusual for a person who is prone to anxiety to developed severe social anxiety due to their environment. It would be best for you to get professional help to deal with your anxiety since there are trained professionals who work with people who have anxiety. They can help you figure out techniques to calm your anxiety whenever it might flair up.

    Right now, it might feel as if you are in the middle of a storm. But even storms will eventually come to an end and you’ll be able to see the sky again.

    Good luck.

    in reply to: Issues with an ex or ex's (trust issues) #270267
    GL
    Participant

    Dear Victoria,

    Relationships are not easy due to the fact that not many people can read the human heart and not many people are willing to let themselves be vulnerable to anyone, even themselves.

    Now, you are trying to work things out with your ex, but before that, have you both sat down and talk heart to heart about the issues that cropped during your relationship together? You talked about your trust issues and his lack of patience for it yet it is only mentioned about how he gave an ultimatum of being friends with his exes, but relationships can’t function on either or neither. You need compromise in an intimate relationship because if one person get their way all the time, it will only brewed resentment in the other party.

    So have you talked? Have you sat down with each other and let out all your thoughts without judgement, without assumptions or presumptions? And it can’t only be just once, such talk require multiple meetings before anything can be digested and each perspectives put into view. You can’t assumed that just knowing that there are issues will mean that both parties will work toward the issues silently. You might have told him your feelings and he told you his feelings, but that was just speaking, not listening. It didn’t seem like you both tried to understand where the other might be coming from and so you wonder if he understood your feelings yet here you are wondering what his actions are suggesting.

    Communications is not only speaking, but also listening. He might not be a good communicator, but if he really wants your relationship to work, then he will try. But you also have to try. No judgement, no assumptions about each other’s intentions. You cannot fathom another’s intention because you are not them. Unless you say anything or he say anything and you both try to understand without needing to be the one in the right, you both are leaving a wide area of uncertainty between you.

    Talk with your ex, communication is an essential tool in any relationship. If you both don’t let each know about your thoughts and feelings, then only assumptions are there.

    Good luck.

    GL
    Participant

    Dear RoseQ,

    From infancy to adulthood, “parents” are the first point of touch for children. To children, they are our role models, sometimes heroes, but most importantly, our nurturer. From “parents”, children learn how to act, how to speak and their roles in the family and society. How a parent might view their children is completely up for debate, but it is a certain fact that parents have certain expectations of their children and since children are quite perceptive, they unconsciously would try to meet those expectations, even if they don’t know why.

    Your grief seem to lie in your father’s teachings. Since young, you’ve been told a version of ‘children are to be seen, but not heard.’ Even when all you’ve wanted to do was share good news, your father was dismissive, though understandable, but still isolating all the same. And it seem that your love languages lean toward words of affirmation and quality time so it was all the more cutting for the young you. At the same time, you were taught that ‘traditional’ women had a place at home, but not really anywhere else and that didn’t really sit well with you later on. But that was what you were exposed to and that scene of the the traditional man and the traditional woman was ‘normal’ in your eyes as a child.

    Your first contact with men began with your father and your father passed on the image of a man who had little time for his family, only smiling and laughing during the holidays, but even then. He passed on the image of a man who worked outside the house, but took little responsibility for household work for man and woman had different roles. He passed on the image of a man who was emotionally distant from his family. That was your first image of men and that was your ‘normal’, but it didn’t sit well with you. Yet it was also an expectation from your father.

    Many children try very hard to please their nurturer by trying to meet their expectations, but if the expectations clash with the child’s expectations for themselves, there will be tension on how the child look at the world and their place in it. And that tension usually act up in their relationships in some way.

    Your anger seem to begin with your father’s expectations for you, as a girl, to your expectations for yourselves. As your father’s daughter, you wish to fulfilled his expectation for you because you wish for his approval, but to do so would go against who you are as a person. You want to be enough, but you also question whether you are enough. So you get angry at men because, according to your father’s teachings, men have authority and power while women should be supporting them without complaining of equal standing in an intimate relationship. So maybe you feel hopeless, or that you have little say in who or what you are. You don’t feel in control.

    But here’s the thing, when you feel angry at men for simply being men, you are giving them the agency to dictate your feelings about them. You are giving them the power to tell you that you should be angry at them for being men, for their existence means that you have little value outside of the house, especially in an intimate setting. That anger will show itself in some way and your partners will feel it. Even if on the surface everything might seem fine, the undercurrent of tension is real and they will feel it in the minuscule way you interact with them. Humans have very good instinct, pity not many trust themselves enough to trust their instinct. But anger is very tiring to feel from someone you have affection for. If you can’t handle anger from your partner, could they handle yours at them? Though whether your partner is mature enough to actually work with you on your anger issue is another matter.

    If you are angry, it’s fine to be angry at your father, after all, he was the one to teach you that you matter more in the house doing housework than outside, but when you get angry at every other men, you give them the agency to decide what you feel about them rather than you choosing for yourselves how you feel about every individual men you might meet in your lifetime. You haven’t met them nor do you know much about them yet you have already decided you don’t really like them because they are men. And because you don’t want to be disappointed, but also have not release your bleak expectations of men, you might choose partners that will fulfilled your expectations because it’s easier to be disappointed in something you know well, that you know will happen, then expect something better from your partner. It’s a bleak cycle.

    So be angry at your father. It might have been his father teaching him such expectations that he pushed such expectations on you, but whether he considered such expectations were for your sake or his, is up for debate. Of course, he’s human, but so are you. And if your human self is angry at him, then be angry at him.

    But you will have to release the expectation that your father will change, he will only change when he feels that he should. He is who he is and it is his decision as it is your decision right now to be who you are. Certainly, your father has his expectations of you, but in the end, he is not you and unless you decide to give him control over your life, you will be the one to decide how your life will go. Don’t expect him to think himself wrong in the matter of raising you, he did what he was taught from your grandfather and that’s that. You can’t expect more than he is willing to give. You’ll have to accept that he is how he is right now and go from there.

    Also, go find someone whom you can talk about all this. Find someone who will listen and objectively list all the things you’ve said, but it’s not about giving advice. It’s about you looking at the matter at the heart of it and to start from there. You are angry and disappointed and hurt. Find someplace safe to let it all out, to let yourself feel and acknowledge those emotions. Don’t rationalized your feelings and don’t let the fact that he’s your father or he’s your ex to keep you from feeling anger or disappointment or something along those lines. Emotions will suck when it suck, but there’s the hope of feeling the other side once your emotions stop sucking.

    Every children inherit something from their childhood environments, the good and bad, though it would seem that the bad is more memorable. You have yours and you have your thoughts and feelings about it, but in the end, you have the choice of agency over your actions.

    Have hope. With every search, it will be a long journey so let yourself be human and accept that others are human and you’ll find people out there who will choose to be human with you.

    Good luck.

    in reply to: I still have hope that he will come back #269393
    GL
    Participant

    Dear Reina,

    You’re having the big case of ‘what-ifs’ plus your instinctual reaction of wanting to fix something broken, it’s no wonder you’re hung up on your ex boyfriend.

    You have not given yourself the space to let go of this relationship that you have placed a lot of hope in, hoping that he is the one. You have not let go of your hope. Though I wonder if that ‘hope’ came from the need to prove something to yourself seeing as there were many “red flags” you arbitrarily chosen to ignore during the your term together and even now, you wish to ‘fix it’.

    So it is delusional to think that your ex boyfriend would be happy to try to ‘fix’ this broken relationship? Yes, it is. He had already made his stance, it is you who is not letting go.

    You might not want to give up on ‘people’ you love, but if those people don’t respect nor have any affections for you, are you then being kind to yourself or making a desperate attempt for something else? After all, your relationship can be ‘fixed’ or so you hope, but if your ex boyfriend did not make the attempt the first time, then it’s not likely he will make the attempt the second time when he does not have a reason to.

    You’ve shown that you love yourself and that you have respect for yourself by breaking up with your ex boyfriend so why would you want to go back on your decision now? What makes him so special when there were so many red flags during your relationship? Red flags you are willing to overlook to fix this broken relationship.

    What stories are you telling yourself about this breakup? Take a step back and look at it without reacting to it. Look at it then ask yourself why are you telling the stories in this particular way?

    So rather than focus on the fact that you can’t forget him, you should be focusing on why you can’t forget him. That’s probably what you should be focusing on. This is not about how you can ‘fix’ him to ‘fix’ your broken relationship, it’s about what you’re choosing to ignore in favor of regretting over your breakup. Because you are making your ex boyfriend the subject rather than the object in your stories about your break up and its aftermath, you are not addressing your fears nor are you addressing your disappointment, your anger, your hurt about your relationship; none of which is mentioned in your post. If there were many red flags, what were they and what is your real feelings about them? You need to address that and more about your previous relationship and you need to be honest to yourself about each of them. You don’t need to paint your ex boyfriend as the worse human being on earth, but you need to be honest about his actions and your reactions; also, your actions and his reactions. Most importantly, don’t rationalized your feelings, let them be what they will be.

    Take it slowly, one thing at a time. It’s not impossible to move forward, but you must allow yourself the time and space, the compassionate and kindness from you to your heart.

    Take care of yourself.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by GL.
    • This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by GL.
    in reply to: I need help with an Imoral relationship #269341
    GL
    Participant

    Dear Lucius,

    With any relationship, the deeper you dive in, the harder it is to let go.

    Now, at some point in your life, it seems that you were taught that if anyone had a problem, then you should try to help. So when an woman began to shower attention on you, not really the good kind, to discuss some issues she is facing, you tried to help her during your communications. Only, it seemed that you were also craving human connection since you ‘weren’t used to the attention’. So one and one together equal two, the relationship turned from casual to serious on your part until you confessed and she ‘accepted’. Only, the woman in question was also trying to work on her marriage that she had tried to leave before for the sake of her son.

    Apologies to be the bearer of bad news, but I have a strong suspicion that woman friend of yours, while possible she might have some affection for you, was probably using you as an excuse to not really work on her marriage. To decide to stay in a marriage for the sake of a child is usually not because of the child, but because both parties have certain fears of leaving what they both know to be a fruitless endeavor, but sometimes, it’s just easier to continue the bad than welcome in the unknown. So when you showed interest, your woman friend grabbed the chance to not have to think about her failing marriage that she chose to stayed in.

    So my advice? Cut off your friendship, completely. The longer you stayed in this friendship, the longer you are giving your friend time and excuses to continue to focus on something that is not her marriage. Certainly, she now blames you for it, but really, she just wants an excuse to guilt you into staying with her, to listen to her, to let her play the victim, to let her wallow, this and that but NOT DO ANYTHING to change her situation. And the longer YOU stay, the harder it will be to let go.

    After all, you want to help her, to be there for her as her friend, but that’s not helping either of you at this moment. She’s still leaning on you and you’re letting her. Even now, you are letting her blame you for her failing marriage when she should have broke off contact before it escalated to this. Though you weren’t so innocent either. But you can’t fix this. Her marriage is something she has to work out with her husband. It is your relationship with her the one you have to make a decision on. But know that you can’t go back to being friends until you give yourself the space and time to be a friend and her the space and time to decide things about her marriage. Things might not changed on her side later and you might not ever be friends again, but at least you did what you could.

    There’s a reason people who’ve broken up should never go back to being friends right away. With all the energy and time anyone invested into a relationship, no one wants let go after all the memories made, even if it’s the better choice. After all, no one wants to give up the hope of that person being the one, in whatever sense they needed that person to be. So once a relationship is broken, the best course of action would be to cut off contact since seeing them will only bring up negative thoughts and ‘what ifs’. So best to grieved in peace the ending of a chapter in life.

    So let go of this friendship, it has run its course. If there is one lesson in life you learn, it’s that you are constantly saying hellos and goodbyes, it just a matter of when.

    Good luck.

    in reply to: I'm lost, feel hopeless #269339
    GL
    Participant

    Dear sparkle00,

    The story you’re telling yourself is flawed, though you aren’t alone in that.

    Before your current relationship, you carried the thoughts that you didn’t have anything to offer anyone, that you weren’t enough as a person. Now that you’re dating someone, you constantly compare yourself with other women you meet on the street. You tried to tell your partner your thoughts and maybe he meant well when he told you that it was all in your head, but in the end, no matter how much he may reassured you that your relationship is doing well, it won’t be enough. Because you will constantly fear the future, with whirling thoughts of your soon-to-be-over relationship, constantly worried then constantly needing the reassurance from your partner that “it’s all in your head”. So yeah, what you’re doing is a self fulfilling prophecy.

    And it sucks, doesn’t it? It’s not like you want to constantly compared yourself to others; you want your own confidence, yet lack the heart for it. But that never ending loop of self-deprecating will never go away until you face yourself. I don’t know what happened to you that you lost your confidence and self-esteem as a person, but I can tell you that it will take a lot of work to build it again.

    Many people who loses their confidence tend to begin telling stories about themselves that ripped apart their self-esteem over and over and over again. Others might not see clearly, but you who spent your entire life with yourself is the one who received all your self criticism and your self praise. You are the one to spend your whole life with you, so regardless of what others might tell you, the stories you’re telling yourself will always be the most powerful and the most believable.

    So those stories that you’re telling yourself: the ones where you’re no good, where you don’t amount to anything, the ones of you being ugly or not enough, that’s all you. And that ‘you’ will project your rejection of yourself on other people because you can’t believe that you are enough as a person so others will think so too. Even when you meet someone who genuinely wants to get to know you, you will reject their intention as something fleeting because you don’t trust yourself.

    The stories you are telling yourself is flawed because you don’t believe you are enough as you are. And those stories are the truth to you because you are the one telling them to yourself. I can direct you to have self-love for yourself but that is one of the hardest thing for you right now seeing as you can’t look at yourself kindly. If you wish to break the cycle, you need to seek help in rewriting those stories. So go look for someone who is compassionate, but has no qualm telling you what you don’t want to hear because the objective truth is not meant to be kind. It’s meant to punch you in the gut because it might take that much for you to face the ‘you’ that keeps telling you you aren’t enough. Because it takes a lot of courage to look for the core reason of that ‘you’.

    Have hope as you dive into your heart, it’s not all murky water.

    Good luck.

    in reply to: Feelings I thought were reciprocated #269187
    GL
    Participant

    Z,

    It is definitely easier to love someone who is unavailable because you can keep telling yourself that if you just put in the effort, then maybe, just maybe it’ll work out somehow. That maybe they’ll be able to see you for the great person that you are, the things you’d do for them, the way you would cherish and treasure them, of how great a couple you two would make. But they don’t and then you end up doing a lot of things for them only to realize that they didn’t even see you; you who was there with them, you who went through the good and bad together with them.

    You put on rose-tinted glasses as you pine after someone, excusing their actions while justifying them taking over your time, you days and your months because they’re ‘special’ to you, even when they clearly weren’t thinking of you in their thoughts. You project your hope and wishes on them, asking for their affections even when it was clear that their affection lies elsewhere.

    Seeing as this isn’t the first time you’re attracted to unavailable men, what are you afraid of? What makes you fear showing someone else your vulnerability? What makes men who treat you as an after thought so attractive? What makes being invisible an okay thing? Seeing as you are fine with them putting their own needs first and yours somewhere over there.

    Yet you want someone to love and treasure you. But do you love and treasure yourself, your heart, your soul and everything that make up you?

    The old adage of “to love someone, you have to love yourself first” is used for a very good reason. When you genuinely have compassion and care for yourself, you generate good will towards your thoughts and actions. Even when you’ve failed at something, even when you feel low, you treasure yourself enough to be enough in that moment to know that it will passed in due time. You learn to have healthy boundaries so that you know when someone isn’t treating you right.

    But right now, you are putting the needs of others first. You fear stepping on their toes so you put the legwork in your relationship while waiting for a hint of something. You keep waiting. You keep hoping until you know that you weren’t the one they were yearning after. But it’s really tiring isn’t it? The waiting and the hoping and the pining. Because you know deep in your heart you knew that you weren’t going to be the one, but you still wished for something special, even if only for a few minutes.

    Now, if you really want to end that cycle of going after unavailable men, you will have to put in a lot of work into yourself. It’s going to really messy because you have to dive deep into your heart and ask a lot of questions that will leave you raw and vulnerable, as anything with the heart is. You don’t ask ‘why’ of others, you have to ask your heart ‘why’ until you get to the core of it. And you do it for yourself. You do it so that you understand what love for yourself is, wholly and truly.

    You don’t put yourself as second best, as the backup for someone else. You have to be enough for yourself first.

    Take care of yourself.

    GL
    Participant

    Dear Claire,

    You know, society has an ironic sense of humor as it passes down certain expectation to women from their adolescent to their adulthood. From your parents to your peers to the toxic marketing constantly flashing in front of your face. From a young age, girls are told that a good ‘girl’ are sweet, kind, polite, and do not get fussy over petty issues. As a young adult, girls are told to be a certain kind of pretty, smart, but not too smart while holding a degree and a boyfriend in both hands. Then as adults, they should be aware of their biological clock so should be married sooner than later then give birth to tiny, little devils. They should nurture the little devils until they can survive on their own to which they can retired at old age. Why should they do all this? Because for women, it is a responsibility that society has create for them since time innumerable. And since society is all knowing, every woman should follow the path it had laid down for them because if they do, then they will certainly obtained immense happiness from fulfilling their duty. Yes, immense happiness. So GOD FORBID that all your planning goes out the window because life sucks, but the clock is still ticking so better get to it again.

    So Claire, you almost got the man, the ring, the wedding, maybe the house and maybe the kid. But now it’s all put on the back burner because life happened so now you have to plan all over again. Yet…yet you know you don’t have that much time left so to do it all over again while expecting any results? Not possible. But you been following the plan so why did it turn out so badly? WHY exactly do you have to start from scratch again? So of course you’re pissed, of course you feel lost. You have put in so much effort only to get nothing in the end, only for the plans to fall apart. Now you don’t any steps to follow so what do you do?

    But you need to take a step back and examined whose goal, whose plans you are really following. Because for you to worry about your biological clock when a person is dying means either you haven’t come to grasp with your mortality and so fear the inevitable so you need to do something to distract yourself or that you feel like you’re failing someone or something out there because you haven’t met the goal of get married and start a family. So which is it? Or is there something more to it? An expectation engraved from your childhood? The need to show the world that you’re living the life somehow? The need to compete with your friends or relatives as they start their own family?

    Before, you expected to be happy from following the plans of move in, get engaged then marriage then have children and so on, but as you’ve noticed, life sucks and nothing ever really goes the way you expect. So what do you want to do? And I don’t mean what society is telling you which is get hitch, start a family then retired, but what would you actually do if all of that wasn’t a priority? Of course, being a mother is a great goal too, but you don’t really need a man to do that anymore. There are many options out there for single women to have children without the man and the ring. But if that isn’t what you really want, then what do you want?

    Sit down with yourself and ask these questions and more. You’re unhappy and you’re lost. Explore these feelings, stew over them. Look for them, look at them. They’re trying to tell you something.

    Good luck.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by GL.
    • This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by GL.
    GL
    Participant

    Well, Sophie, your ex boyfriend was your first serious relationship at the tender age of 16 so by the rights of ‘firsts’, he would be considered to special to you. And then you spent 6 years together as girlfriend and boyfriend, getting to know each other’s way of life, learning each other’s like and dislikes, giving each other time, attention and energy. You made space in your life and your universe for a person whom you deem to be dear to your heart. Is it any wonder that you would be heart broken to have that person leave after 6 years of memories together, the good and the bad?

    But you have to understand that while you have a space for him in your heart, he is still his own person and you are your own individual. You both have a life to live on your terms, and no one else. Your ex probably realized that and so went looking for his terms. Though he cared about you, he wanted to search for himself in a way that is his, and not what other might tell him. If you went with him, he would have to be mindful of you and your wants. But that’s not worthwhile when searching for something so personal, it’s would actually hinder him instead.

    Though it’s not that you can’t include each other in your own separate life, but not at the expense that one person would be giving up their life, their dreams, their goals, to cater to the other person. When you give up your dreams for another person, you are giving that person the agency to dictate which way your life will flow, and you would eventually grow dependent on him for directions or grow resentful because you had to give up your life to follow him. Neither scenario is good for you in the long run and it seems that your ex boyfriend wouldn’t want that either.

    Now that you’ve broken up, let yourself mourned the 6 years together of good and bad. Let yourself have the space to grieve until you feel you can move forward, but do not wait for him. Waiting is useless in the sense that you can’t foretell the future so you don’t know if he really will come back, if ever. Remember, he doesn’t know and you don’t know, so waiting is fruitless when you yourself have an open future before you that you’ve yet to explore. So look to yourself, look at what you are and what you can be.

    What do you want to do? What is it you hope to accomplish? Who are you? Don’t wait for another person to tell you, find yourself. You only have the now, that’s why it’s called the present. So present yourself with a lot of hugs and compassion.

    Good luck.

    GL
    Participant

    With every relationship a person enter, there is always the fervent hope that it will work out somehow and you want that person to be the one because he is such a great person who fits with you, who is also a great person. But in the end, you don’t really know that person until they do something that opened your eye.

    In the case of your ex, he was your first love so you probably excused some of his behaviors since you don’t have any past relationships to look back to understand his behavior and because you wanted your first relationship to work out. But that he had sex with you after three months of breaking it off with you before and with his history with his previous girlfriend, that really set off alarm/warning bells. Also, the fact that you’ve chosen to be friends just like that even after breaking it off. Those factors together makes it really hard to break it off completely with someone who didn’t really respect you because you’ve invested time and energy into that person. With so much investment, you’ll feel a huge lost if you do nothing so you try to make it work again then his girlfriend came along again so he broke it off ‘again’, key word ‘again’, but you can’t let go because he’s your first love and all the time you’ve spend together.

    You’ve wrote that you didn’t know who he was in the end, so that probably meant that he didn’t show you everything that was him so you can be sure that he wouldn’t have done so should you have stayed together. If he wanted to hide himself, he would do so. And it’s not because of you, but rather, it is something he chose to do for his own convenience.

    So, he did you a favor by disappearing from your life because if this relationship continued, it probably would have looked like the one with his girlfriend, breaking up then getting back together, again and again and again. Why? Because that’s the way he is, and also he couldn’t forget his ex yet still got together with you. You might not have met many people who treated you so discourteously like that, but you have to understand that there are people who are incredibly indecisive by nature and they do not care about you as much as they care about themselves. So they’ll go whichever way flows with them at the moment, even if that meant hooking up then breaking up then getting back together again in the spans of a few months. That’s the kind of person that they are and no matter how much you want them to be different or change, they will never be anything but themselves. That kind of person is not a good person, especially for someone like you who has yet to understand the conditions of a healthy relationship.

    And let it be a lesson to always ignore the other person, the girlfriend in this case, should they contact you for anything less than savory. The girlfriend only contacted you to show her superiority in this messy relationship which means she is capable to do much more, which can lead to danger on your side, should the occasion call for it. So next time, just block it should it happen again. Hopefully, it won’t happen again.

    Now, with every ending there will always be grief and sorrow. Since he chose to left, you should choose to respect his choice of not wanting to be in your life, though it’s better for you. So let yourself have the space to grieve a relationship that ended. Give yourself the time to adjust so that you can move forward. There is no closure from him because that must come from you. Closure means the acceptance that a relationship had ended so it’ll come to you once you have completely accepted that your relationship is done. If you need, write an angry letter to him, throw away everything related to him, delete all your photos, go out and dance your frustration away; anything that help you feel better. And once you feel better, know that this experience is something that will help you be a stronger person if you let it.

    Take care of yourself.

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