Dear Lily:

I just submitted and lost the post I worked on for hours this morning. This is very difficult for me- it was an almost perfect post. This is frustrating to me beyond words. I used quotes from your shares since 2016, now they are all lost and I am too tired to go through your threads once again.

I will post to you now based on my memory alone, not going through the quotes that are now lost to me.

I started that now lost post telling you how delightful it was for me to read your recent post, how your intelligent, insightful, organized and thorough post is evidence of your emotional healing and progress. I added that it is okay with me if you do not respond to every item I bring to you in any of my posts, and that whenever I do not respond to a particular item in any of your posts, you are welcome to let me know what it is that you would like me to respond to, and  I will attend to that particular item in a following post.

I clarified what I meant by my aim to not criticize you: I did not mean that I will not point to you being “on the completely wrong path… making the same mistakes over and over again”, when I believe it is the case- but that I will do so without anger, irritation, impatience, etc.

As to the body of the post, summarized: the dormitory man was clearly and consistently rude, crude, extremely disrespectful and abusive to you. It is common in some cartoons and movies to depict a character as 100% bad,  while in real-life it is not this black and white. But in the context of the dormitory man’s interactions with you, he was as close to 100% bad as can be. And yet, you felt empathy for him, not for yourself (stating that he was not a bad person because in his culture that’s how people normally behave, and that it must be difficult for him to be far away from his family, etc.). You stated that you were the terrible person and the abusive one, not him. When you asserted yourself against his harassing you at one point, you felt guilty for having done so, fearing that you hurt his feelings. And following that one assertion, you allowed him to harass you yet again.

I then proceeded to quote from Wikipedia’s entry on self preservation: “Self-preservation is a behavior or set of behaviors that ensures the survival of an organism. It is universal among all living organisms”- I then proceeded to say than at first look, your behaviors with the dormitory man show a lack of a self-preservation instinct: you allowed him to abuse you, feeling bad not for you.. but for him. I compared it to the following imaginary situation: a deer notices a mountain lion approaching it and it thinks: if I run, the mountain lion’s feelings will be hurt, poor lion.. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. So the deer stands there, anxious, becoming the lion’s dinner.

I then quoted more from that entry in Wikipedia: “An interesting phenomenon sometimes occurs in social animals. Animals in a social group (a kin) often work cooperatively in order to survive, but when one member perceives itself as a burden for an extended period of time, it may commit self-destructive behavior. This allows its relatives to have a better chance at surviving”-

I then went on to explain that as a young child,  you did not have a perception of yourself as a separate person from your parent. In your child’s mind you were part of a Unit of two: your parent and you. (For simplicity, I referred to your interactions with one parent only: your father).

The Unit-of-two consisted of a strong, guiding part (your father) and a weak part that needed guidance (a dependent child). The naturally weak part needed the guidance of the strong part so to gradually develop a strong, separate perception of self. But when your father turned against you aggressively (being rude, cruel to you, expressing that he disliked you, hitting you, telling you terrible things, etc.), he guided you to view yourself as bad, something deserving his aggression, something that needs to be destroyed.

Connecting this to what I quoted from Wikipedia: to promote the survival of the Unit-of-two, you had to destroy one part of the Unit (you stated that you were in the habit of directing your anger toward yourself, physically hitting yourself at times, as well as considering suicide as a child- the ultimate self destructive act).

Your empathy therefore was not with the weak part of you, but with the strong part of you, aiming instinctively at promoting the survival of the Unit. Fast forward, your empathy was with the abusive dormitory man, not with the one he abused (you).

I then added another point: you disliked your father for his closed mindedness, for his attitude of “his way or the highway”, for his focusing on other people’s faults, but not on his own faults. What you did next, perhaps more so in your second decade of life than in your first, was to take the extreme position opposite to your father’s:

– it was his way or the highway—> in the context of interactions with others, you made your way invalid, and it was about his (a man’s) way, not yours.

– your father  focused on other people’s faults—> you became blind to other people’s faults while they abuse you, excusing others’ bad behaviors.

– he did not focus on his faults—> you overly focused on your faults to the point of making yourself sick.

anita