Hi anita!

Thank you for your support and congratulations 🙂 I am excited too!

“I truly thought they were solved but maybe I was just ignoring hatchling and the real solution is to actually unlearn my body’s learned response to love and learn to see how others do care about me? I often feel my friends don’t care about me and do things without considering me .. and this is all being directed at N! what do you think about this?“- I am not clear about what you are asking here. Can you rephrase it clearly?

-I read something on a different forum platform (Reddit), someone started a topic about not being able to receive love from her boyfriend, to help sort the two people in the discussion I will call the girl “Red” and the boy “Blue”.

I am summarizing the parts of Red’s post that really resonated with me:  Red says “I was treated pretty badly throughout my school years and bullied in high school. I find myself having pretty low sense of self worth and I feel unlovable sometimes.” Red says “I don’t know how to accept his compliments; I say thank you, but on the inside I feel he is lying .. but I know rationally that isn’t true. I feel guilty and I feel like I need to pay him back in some way. I know people do nice things and I should just let them but I feel so guilt because I feel like I don’t deserve it.”  “These patterns kind of spill over into my platonic relationships as well. I find myself wanting to love others, but never wanting to be loved. I love spoiling my friends with small gifts and favors .. I feel like I can’t depend on people how they depend on me.” “People say I am not a bad person, but I can’t help but feel like I am a bad person on the inside and I just masquerade as a good friend, and eventually someone is going to rip off this mask that I have and discover the truth.”

Red then receives a response that I found very helpful, Blue (the responder) was bullied as well and says ever since “I was playing a game of emotional catchup with self worth because everyone hated me.” For me, Seaturtle, it is not hate, instead it is people thinking I am awkward or too quiet, weird. Blue continues “So I thought I was just prone to receiving hatred because of who I was. I tried to get people to like me. It worked, but I kept them at an arms distance for sure and I never got better. I had to start letting people get closer and get to know me and not the smiley cardboard cutout of me. Many years later, I began to realize that I was not unlovable, it was that those kids couldn’t love others properly.” Blue continues “Understand that the guilt, anxieties of being a bad person, and secret lying are all a response to stressors and not the same as reality. It’s just your brain trying to defend you from people loving you.” “your brain currently thinks love and kindness is danger. Like whenever someone shows you love and you get that response of “wtf why are you doing this? I don’t deserve this” that’s a response to what your mind perceives as danger. Another tip is to remind yourself that when you’re receiving love, you’re not gonna die. It’ll retrain your brain and over time it’ll put love in the not danger category and you’ll get different reactions.”

-This point hit me hard, when I said “my body’s learned response to love” this is where I got that idea. when I said “the real solution is to actually unlearn my body’s learned response to love and learn to see how others do care about me?” I was referring to this idea of training my brain to put receiving love into a non-danger category.

-When Red talks about ripping off a mask I feel the same way. In new social situations I feel like I have this false sense of confidence and someone will see beyond the mask and see how insecure/awkward/odd I am and that I am faking the confidence to fit in. I fear that if I allow people closer than an arms distance, they will see behind my mask and be disgusted and reject me.

-My question is this, Is my brain defending me from love? Because if I am not able to see/receive love from others then I will be so thirsty for it that I demand it from my love partner.

-I hope this clarified what I am getting at, as opposed to making it more confusing adding Red and Blue…

“- part of maturing is taming (effectively and kindly parenting) the inner child, so to not act impulsively when thoughtful action is the right thing to do, etc.. It’s the over-taming/ the imprisoning of the inner-child that is the problem.”

This is another question that I thought of last night, the difference between taming and over-taming hatchling. I suppose I will have to get to know hatchling more and what makes her feel ignored versus relaxed/tame?

I wonder what hatchling is like when tame, it feels like she has been in a state of irritation this whole year and over-tamed before that.

Thank you again Anita 💜

Seaturtles