Dear Zenith: it often happens that a post goes automatically to “awaiting moderation” when adding a link. I noticed it happening many times before, over the years.

anita

Dear Zenith:

“I felt better when I read the article. But…“- But OCD took that feeling-better away from you, telling you that your case is different from the article-author’s case, therefore her solutions (“1. Accept the relationship as it is…2. Challenge your faulty beliefs…3. Practice a new way and let go of expectations”) don’t apply to you.

But the author’s solutions do apply to you, Zenith, regardless of this or that difference (no 2 stories are identical).

The author wrote: “I became aware of this mantra that I had been repeating in my head: ‘I don’t belong.’ This belief was like an infection, poisoning my mind and tainting how I saw our friendship”-

– her mantra/ core belief was “I don’t belong”.  How would you word your mantra in regard to this friendship, the mantra  that keeps adding fuel to your OCD and making you suffer?

anita

Dear Zenith:

Aug 10: “I feel like I am good enough. I feel like my friend is not good enough. She is the one who caused the distance by mingling with other group of people“, Aug 6: “This has been happening since childhood. When I look at my past or since I started schooling. There were so many friends who were so close with me in the beginning and they would leave me when they found new friends“- it is your painful childhood experience, since you started schooling, that is awakening in your life now, as an adult.

It feels like what you feel is unique to what is happening now, but the intensity of your hurt and anger is about what happened 20-30 years ago. I know that you wrote in regard to the above (Aug 6): “I never left angry or obsessed about it. I would just let it go. I am unable to let go of this friend“- when we experience deep hurt and anger as children, we instinctually push it down to below our awareness (feeling numb to it), but then what is pushed down rises up and enters our awareness- in a new, adult context.

The article you sent me a link to ends with: “Have the courage to seek the truth within yourself and acknowledge the effect of your thoughts, beliefs, and actions with compassion and without judgment. Only then can you choose a different way, a freer way. Sitting across from her that day, there was freedom. I could feel it. And I think she could feel it too.”-

– (1) have the courage, Zenith, to seek the truth within you: the truth about how you really felt growing up when your close friends left you to be with new friends (at least how you felt initially, before pushing down your feelings), (2) practice compassion for yourself as you remember the truth (and later on, find compassion for those you currently judge, whenever possible and appropriate), and (3) experience a measure of much needed freedom from the parts of your past that have been so painful.

anita

Dear Zenith:

“I wish had a NORMAL childhood so that I don’t have to go through this.“- I understand your sentiment. I used to wish the same, but stopped wishing this,  knowing that it-is-what-it-is. I don’t personally know anyone who had a normal childhood. The term “normal childhood” may be wishful thinking in itself.

anita