Dear Gaia:

I re-read your posts on this thread and a bit of your words in previous threads. I did this so to refresh my memory and also to get a new understanding of what has been happening with you, so to offer you something new.

You titled your first thread July 2016 (you were 18 at the time), “Feeling like something is wrong with me”. Having re-read your posts, as well as the posts of hundreds of members on this site over the last 4.5 years, I believe that there is nothing wrong with you: your thinking is logical, consistent, you make sense and you are quite insightful. You are not the abnormal, weird, unusual alien specimen that you have thought you are (“Why can’t I be normal” is the title of your May 2018 thread). Really, you are very much human, no less than any other human, and not different in an unusual way, an outside-of human experience kind of way.

It has hurt you, no doubt, to have an “extra-sensitive, easily offended.. touchy.. easily moved to tears… crying and making it about her… parading how she works hard for us… make drama queen scenes.. yelling.. prone to pessimistic, heavy or theatrical on stuff.. crying or getting anxious instead of being soothing or more objective.. too sentimental and dramatic” mother. She robbed you of a carefree, light hearted life experience (“I resent her for making me less carefree in my young years”).

Having had bad social experiences at school, including bullying, especially in high school, hurt you further. A “full blown OCD at 16” made things a lot worse for you, increasing your feelings of being abnormal, bizarre, unacceptable.

What resulted from your social experiences at home and with your peers, is “taken by intense overwhelming uncomfortableness, cringeness, discomfort” in social situations. You wrote: “what caused a huge part of this cringeness is that I did a lot of embarrassing things and SAID embarrassing things” that “turned people off”. You wrote: “being in social situations trigger my self loathing, I simply can’t like myself when I’m around others”.

So much discomfort in interpersonal relationships and social situations (and when alone doing OCD things), that you found great comfort in fantasy and daydreaming: “fantasy worlds felt so good to me, like my soul was at peace.. I called it ‘home'”.

“Living in real life always made me feel that I’m dull, my life is dull”, but in your fantasy world you lived “adventurously and magically”, “sailing with pirates, or up with aliens.. a lost princess.. going back to fight the evil and take my place again”. You lived “behind close doors.. sleep late.. daydream on music”.

And so, other than your fantasy life, you spent your “teen years in a state of non life.. a zombie” “never dating or having intimacy with someone, crushing hard on strangers and not going out or having enough fun”, but you “saw peers with cool  groups, cool likes, cool social skills, cool boyfriends”, and felt that in comparison to them, you “had nothing”, missing “experiences and proper real crushes.. Youth.. feeling alive, joyous and fresh”.

Having spent so much time in fantasy, feeling home there, that when you enter real life social situations, it is “like I just entered another dimension that don’t belong to me”, a non-home. In fantasy you feel comfortable and life is effortless. In real life social situations, you feel dizzy, “subtly uncoordinated.. distant, somewhere else.. zone out every 5 minutes”, you “don’t know what to do with my hands and with my eyes, how to interact with all the things happening around.. my mind just can’t comprehend what happens around”

September 30 you started living Mon-Fri with other students, away from home. Yesterday, December 12, almost 2.5 months later, you wrote to me: “As you suggested, I’m trying to be more social and spend less time alone”, daydream less, and you are tying “not to stalk this guy who doesn’t reciprocate me on social networks”. You are still afraid to “be shamed or ridiculed”.

My input today- I see your greatest challenges as the following:

1. Overcoming the anger and jealousy at your peers.

2. Easing into social situations, learning how to present yourself and how to perform in social situations:

-noticing your posture, your body language.

-choosing your words (so to not regret what you say later).

-being patient with yourself when zoning out/ sort of disappearing, for not understanding what happened, what was said and done when you were zoned out, someone just said and so forth. Wake up again and again when you noticed that you zoned out and return to the here-and-now, to the social situation.

It will take patience and time to  practice these things, and it will take enduring your anger and jealousy, and intense frustration for having missed so much living in your lifetime. But if you practice, you will get more and more comfortable in social situations, until it finally feels .. like home,  until eventually you will be quite care free in those situations.

Post again anytime, good to read from you again!

anita

Dear  Gaia:

Your thinking is excellent, really. You are making great, gradual progress with the following social skills:

-“paying more attention to what is being said”.

-“understand when exactly telling a personal input”.

-“not to talk over others”.

-“matching (others’) voice tones”.

-“if someone says something I.. ask them to repeat”.

You wrote: “I feel so incredibly stupid in social settings sometimes”, but you are learning, and learning undoes stupid! After all, stupid (better words are: ignorant, unskilled) is not a permanent condition if we are able to learn. I am ignorant and unskilled in the area of farming, but if I learn farming in class and in the field, I will no longer be ignorant or unskilled. I will be knowledgeable and skilled!

You wrote: “I was very talkative as a child so I used to bond with him”- you were sociable as a child, no doubt. It was because “both (your) parents were somewhat distant in (your) early life”, that you became “a detaching child”.

Excellent thinking and insight, a pleasure to read!

anita

Dear Gaia:

You are welcome. Fearful avoidant- we do avoid what we fear, naturally. Gradual introduction to situations we fear is key, isn’t it? When you fear social situations, you courageously get into one but for a short time, to start with, so it’s less scary, and then over time increase time. Makes sense?

anita

Dear Gaia:

I will read your recent post (and anything you may add to it) and reply when I am back to the computer, in about 14 hours from now.

anita

Dear Gaia:

I agree, that what I wrote to you doesn’t contradict what you wrote to me. I am less of a believer in predispositions than I used to be though. Therefore when I read: “I was prone to anger since I can remember”, I think.. you were hurt and scared long ago, and anger resulted. This is how animals get angry: first they get scared, or hurt (and scared of that hurt feeling), then they get angry. Emotionally, we operate like other animals.

I fit several mental diagnoses myself, and I was officially diagnosed with several, I suppose you can call them mental-illnesses. The diagnoses themselves did nothing to help me, none whatsoever. You get a diagnosis and you think it gets you somewhere.. but no. At best it is a starting point to therapy, as in: what do we- the therapist and patient- tackle first. Healing itself has to do with basic elements, raw emotions and the basic principles of the workings of our brains, not with the many, many categories of collections of symptoms aka diagnoses decided on in psychiatric conventions, people sorting out symptoms, basically.

Tell me more about your anger, if you want, express it here verbally, with some self discipline of course, such as using *** for profanities, and avoiding descriptions of most terrible violence imaginable. Still, expressing some of it here, can be a lot of expressing, and it can help. I will read attentively and respectfully, and reply to you.

anita

Dear Gaia:

It takes a lot of self discipline to not act on anger when it is not called for or when the situation does not call for this much anger. It is a form of suffering to experience this much anger and to not act on it. This is something I still suffer from, anger when the situation doesn’t call for it.

I want to look more into your anger by reading your previous posts over time, looking for that anger.

Here is a question you can answer if you want, based on your recent post: what kinds of mean things do you say to people when provoked?

anita

Dear Gaia:

I just accidently deleted the study I did this morning, collecting quotes from your threads since summer 2016, which I re-read, copied and pasted, and then the collection disappeared. What I am going to do now is write to you my understanding from memory, without adding the quotes which are very revealing of what I am about to express. The good part of this disappearance is that this post will be much shorter than otherwise.

First my premise, my belief: there was nothing wrong with you when you were born, no predisposition to anything more than any human is born with. All humans are predisposed to anger, for example. So nothing inherently wrong with you.

Second, I see mental problems like this: it is like a ball  of wet mud at the top of a hill, that small ball of mud is the original problem that you experienced in your life, the beginning-of-trouble. Then over time, this ball of mud rolls down the hill, and as it does, more and more mud is added to it, and the ball grows bigger and bigger. For example, what you referred to as having been mildly bullied in school, that was mud added to the Original Ball of Mud (I’ll call it OBoM, for simplicity). Every rejection or perceived rejection in school was added to that OBoM. OCD- that was a huge addition to that OBoM, a very unfortunate addition. And then, your very intelligent abstract thinking didn’t help you, and instead it added more and more mud to OBoM.

Third, I will jump to defining that OBoM: having re-read this morning, once again, your posts since you were 18, 3.5 years ago, this is the OBoM to the best of my understanding at this point (warning: I don’t think you will like it, because it has to do  with your mother):

OBoM: we can’t see ourselves,  our faces that is, we have to look in a mirror to see our faces. A child can’t see her nature, can’t see who  she is, her identity, unless she looks in the mirror. A child’s mirror is her parent (or a combination of parents, depending on their roles in her life. But because you shared only about your mother, I will refer to her only).

Your mother was your mirror, your self identity was your reflection in her, the image staring back at you from her. What did you see in that mirror: someone very wrong, something that had something very wrong with her.

This is the image of yourself that she projected out to you. This is why you felt, as a young adult, so repulsed to be in her company, fearing she will ask you questions. No one likes to see an image of themselves that is so faulty and wrong and unacceptable.

Your mother saw the dark side in everyone, including you.

This is why you wanted to be someone else, to come with a different identity- someone who is not wrong. Also, your fantasy about being watched by a crush while you have light hearted fun and being seen that way, light hearted, that is in contradiction to how your mother saw you: dark and heavy, like her.

This is it, this is the original ball of mud- being seen by your mother as a dark, heavy, something-is-very-wrong-with-me kind of person. All the other mud was added later. As a result of that growing ball  of mud, you suffer a lot, and when we suffer, feeling stuck in that suffering, seeing no hope, we get angry. Anyone who is stuck in an unpleasant situation, suffering a lot, gets angry.

Let me know what you think, if you want to, of course.

anita