Dear anita,

I am sorry that all your hard work was lost 🙁 It happened to me before, that I had lost a post, but it must be worse after you had put in so much time and effort to look for the quotes and read my old threads. Still, thank you so much for your help and dedication!

Hopefully you were able to relax a bit afterwards and are feeling better now!

My experience with the dormitory man has hurt me very much. What makes me sad is that this was my first experience with a man. I had really waited for something better. But I had become impatient with myself and was really confused at the time.

His strange way of thinking had affected me too much. But I also want to correct myself. I was wrong in saying that this behaviour is normal in his culture. There, he wouldn’t even be allowed to have premarital sex… I think the problem was this individual. He was even more confused than me! For him, this kind of behaviour was seemingly normal. He had no empathy for me at all… I can get angry when thinking about him. The worst is the hypocrisy! How he expected a virgin bride, when he himself didn’t follow his own rules…

What is true is that I am feeling guilty easily and always. I am now also feeling guilty about K again. Maybe I shouldn’t have met him again. And for looking at his pictures online. And even for something that I didn’t really do: connecting in whatsapp contacts. These thoughts still worry me and cause me anxiety. The thought of hurting another person is so terrible for me, that I try to fix it in every way possible, with bad results for me and the other person.

When I was with the man from the dormitory, I hardly felt any empathy for myself, as I was so focused on not hurting him. It would have been better to help myself, preserve myself. The feeling I had was that I was so worthless, that it doesn’t matter if somebody hurts me, most important thing for me was to not hurt another person. Even if this person treated me like dirt. Once he even did something terrible to me and he even was shocked himself and said “god, what did I do?”. But for me the most important thing was to make him feel better, so I said to him: “it’s o.K., I forgive you.”, even though he had just completely humiliated me and crossed my boundaries.

But I think that I have made progress when it comes to this. I now value myself more.

When it comes to my parents, it is true that I felt like a burden to them during childhood… Even my sister said some time, that she felt like that. And the thought still comes up, when spending time with people. Am I getting on their nerves? Am I annoying them? Hurting them? The thought becomes so horrifying, that I often preferred to avoid social contacts and stuck to myself.

My relationship with my father is complicated. Now we get along better. I am thinking that he is a very lonely and insecure man, even when trying to appear tough to the outside world. I can empathise with him… He must have had it hard himself. I do think that he is a good person at his core, but he is also not the easiest person to deal with…

And during my childhood, he was not treating me so well… His words and actions towards me were often cruel and it has hurt me a lot. Sometimes I think that he saw his bad qualities in me, while he saw his good qualities in my sister? Then maybe this was the reason why he disliked me so much. Once he said to me: “You are a disgusting person that hates herself”. Now I think, that he probably said this to himself, but back then I did not understand and the words hurt me.

Maybe this was why he was so aggressive towards me? Wanting to destroy the bad parts in himself?

As for me, I do think that I often took on opposite positions to my fathers. Definitely when it came to religion, wanting to be open minded… Probably also in the points you listed. To be honest, it doesn’t quite sink in yet. What I can see is that I made my own needs invalid, that I overly focused on my faults, while forgiving everybody easily for theirs. And that this indeed made me sick and was very unhealthy for me.

At least I am becoming more aware of my problems now and am more connected to my own feelings.

During the last days I was also feeling a lot better and I think it is also thanks to communicating with you. It feels good that you are listening to me and that I am allowed to express my worries here.

Today I had quite a productive day. In the morning I baked some cookies while listening to classica music and by candlelight. It was so nice! Then I finally finished packing Christmas parcels for my familiy and wrote a letter to my grandmother. Later I deep cleaned my room while listening to an Agatha Christie audiobook. For today, I am quite content with myself. How was your day?

Take care!