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anitaParticipant
Abde/ Anonymous:
“Anita – Nice attempt to draw out an attack against me, let me tell you. you were not successful… This was a sure attempt to attack me personally… Thank you for this perspective“- interesting that you thank me for this perspective that you perceive to be a personal attack on you.
“I am here to seek closure and thanks for all your feedback, really appreciate. The online messages will not portray the pain that I have gone through, at least doesn’t seem like you acknowledge“- interesting that you really appreciate feedback that you perceive to be unempathetic to your pain.
And right after the above messages of gratitude and real appreciation, you deleted your account.
From your original post: “I texted her to say sorry and asker her forgiveness… saying that she had every right to be upset and at the end wrote: ‘Enjoy your day’ She got upset and thought this was very insensitive from my side. And then this statement broke my heart (I don’t know if she was nicely insulting me: ‘Stay happy with your Corporate IQ – that’s all I can say’“- you apologized to Muns for lying to her- for approx.., 1.5 months- about being separated from your wife, and ended your apology with “enjoy your day”, because saying “enjoy your day” is something you habitually say to people on a call as an IT professional, even or particularly in calls that include conflict or disagreements, it’s a way to end a call pleasantly and facilitate/ encourage future calls.
So, you apologized to Mun and ended your apology the way you’d end a IT call, pleasantly but incongruently with the apology, because Muns was very hurt by your lie, and wishing her, in the same apology-message, to .. jump from deep hurt to joy is invalidating to her hurt.
I think I understand her comment now, about your Corporate IQ.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Mr. A:
You shared that for the last 3 years you tried to reduce your wife’s weight through “support, ultimatums, love, co-workouts, etc.“, but your efforts failed.
Your feelings about her weight and the repeated failed efforts: “a lot of anxiety, stress and resentment/ anger… My interest levels of physical intimacy are low“.
You thought about separating from her, but you “find it impossible to live alone (due to nature of work and life in Mumbai, India)“. You also “tried to let go off this weight issue saying that it is her control and not mine“, but you can’t, or won’t let it go.
Your goals: (1) to have a wife who looks and feels good, (2) to feel good yourself and to be more attracted to her sexually, (3) to have a healthy child, (4) to have a better social status, (5) to have a healthy wife: “I want her to look and feel good… I want to be more attracted towards her sexually… Help me become happier… I worry if she does get pregnant, then the child might not be healthy … not having a child, social status and her health issues (in future due to obesity) will affect me profoundly”.
You share that one of you is 33, the other 35, you work out 10-12 days a month, she does not like to exercise and does little of it. She tried Keto and IF (Intermittent Fasting), lost weight and gained it back. She says that “she isn’t able to lose weight due to lack of consistency and discipline“. All medical tests reveal that she is physically healthy, no abnormalities in test reports.
“I am asking you to take a look at this and suggest me what should I change or avoid or do differently to lead a life and achieve my life goals… Let me know your thoughts to deal with this!“-
I’ll start with feelings, with what you feel and with what your wife might be feeling: there is no such thing as good feeling (as in a morally correct/ acceptable feeling), and bad feelings (as in a morally incorrect/ unacceptable feeling). We don’t choose our feelings; therefore, there is no moral responsibility for what we feel. In yet other words: we are not good or bad people because of how we feel.
We are good or bad people because of what we choose to say and do (our spoken/ typed words and our actions). What we choose to focus on in life (our values) leads to our chosen words and actions.
Therefore, all that you are feeling on the topic of your wife’s weight is okay to feel. All that she is feeling is okay to feel.
Now, lets look at words and actions: first, the easy part- giving a person an Ultimatum when it comes to losing weight is the last thing that can be effective. If she loses weight because of an ultimatum, it will be a short-term loss, but her trust in you and in the marriage will be lost long-term. There need to be no ultimatums and no threats, no aggression at all.
Second, what may work is (more) Empathy: your empathy for her, and her empathy for you, since you are both suffering. I read about your suffering and (although I don’t know you irl), I feel badly that you are suffering and I wish that you will feel much better, and soon.
I imagine that she is suffering too: she tried may times, and tried hard, to lose weight, in a large part, I imagine, so to satisfy you, and she failed. She knows how you feel about her weight: how is it for her to go through life every day, for 3 years, knowing how you feel about her weight, feeling defined by her weight?
Mr. A, what if you shift your focus away from her weight, and redirect your focus to her core essence, to who she is: what she feels, what she needs, what she wants; her thoughts, her feelings, her perceptions, her struggles..?
If she feels seen, understood, cared for as a whole person (not as a part-person, or a project, such as a lose-weight-project), she is likely to be able to have the consistency and discipline required to succeed in her chosen objectives.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Lisa:
It is absolutely fine to quote from the bible. I quoted the same scripture you did in my past replies to other members. Love is patient and kind. It is not envious, not boastful, not arrogant. As I just typed these words I let them sink in. It’s good to start the day with these words, this scripture, so thank you, Lisa, for bringing it to my attention this Thurs morning.
I learned, when I went over my past replies to you (the June 6 reply on this page) that being patient and kind with you means, here on your thread, for me to say nothing to you that may sound like criticism, including any disagreeing with, or challenging what you say. Therefore, I promise you, that if and when you post again, there will be absolutely no disagreeing and no challenging of your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc., on my part!
“Thank you for your response also on the 17th Anita. I am glad to hear that you are not ‘alone.’“- you are welcome, and thank you!
anita
anitaParticipantDear SadSoul:
You are welcome, and you are very welcome to talk about anything you want: this is what your thread/ forum is about, whatever thought and feeling and memory crosses your mind (for as long as you feel safe sharing, of course, as online safety is a great concern of yours.. isn’t it).
anita
anitaParticipantThank you, SadSoul!
anita
anitaParticipantContinued:
Ice on my left shoulder, still hurting, and because it’s hurting, I’m automatically contracting the muscles there, raising my left shoulder, tensing it, twitching it, making it hurt more. Will the pain and pain-cycle ever stop? Will I ever be free from left-shoulder pain??? Or is it forever? I am trying to relax the shoulder, but it keeps going up. It’s the habits of the body, the habits of the brain that are not under the dominion of logic, of.. common sense, which is not at all common when it comes to instinctual responses of body and brain.
We can logic-think.. but we operate like instinctual, logic-less animals.
Ah, the quest of the animal to be god.
Here it is, rising, twitching yet again, while I don’t want it to!
Sh.. sh.. shoulder, calm down.
I posted yesterday while listening to some music. This evening, I will sing (yes), and I will sing in Hebrew just because I feel like it, so here it is: Avir harim tsalool kayayin, veraich oranim, naso nisa leyrooshalaim, bederech yericho. yerushalaim shel zahav, veshel nechoshet veshel or, halolechol sheeiraich, ani kinor.
Translation: the air of the mountains is as pure as wine, and the smell is of pine trees, we are traveling to Jerusalem by way of Jericho. Jerusalem of gold, and of copper and of light, for al of your songs, I am a fiddle. (I am translating my best, not relying on any online source).
anita
anitaParticipantDear Kshitij:
Better that you have a night time routine/ ritual where the same things happen every night, before and as you go to bed: nothing new/ nothing out of the routine, so fewer chances for triggers. I hope you are sleeping restfully right now, Thurs 2:20 am, and that if you wake up before morning, that you are calm, and go back to sleep.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Kshiti:
It’s 1:32 am now, 47 minutes after you posted. Are you still awake, how are you feeling now?
anita
anitaParticipantDear SadSoul:
Oh, I see: there’s been a misunderstanding: you thought that I thought that you are “nutty” and an “over sharing person who didn’t show interest in (me)”, so you tried to show me that you do have an interest in me by inviting me to tell you (more) about me.
Correcting the misunderstanding: (1) I never thought that you were nutty, I think that you are a delightfully funny, witty, unique soul underneath, (or above) the sad. (2) I never thought, not for a moment, that you are an oversharing person. I thought all along that you are an under sharing person, and I respected that, paying attention to not ask you questions about your personal life.
So, no need to invite me to share more (“Tell me about you!!!”)- I feel uncomfortable with such an open-ended invitation.
Can you tell me what topics you feel safe sharing about, and what topics you feel unsafe sharing about, here in the forums?
anita
June 19, 2024 at 12:47 pm in reply to: growing up – becoming adul / procrastination – in connection to childhood trauma #434019anitaParticipantDear Robi:
Good to read back from you! I hope that the spider bite heals, and wish you well on your new chapter! Please post again once you are back to Romania (or before)!
anita
anitaParticipantThank you, Helcat!
anita
anitaParticipantDear SadSoul:
“You are right though, that I am shy of saying much more than I have, but only because this is public and I’ve seen things go badly for someone else online. I don’t want a creeper to read everything I tell you, and work out who I am, and where I am… Tell me about you!!!“-
– you don’t want things to go badly for me if I tell you more about me in this public forum, do you?
anita
anitaParticipantDear Abde:
I didn’t thoroughly read, process and respond to your original post yesterday, so I will do so today. I will also read and respond to your following posts:
You shared (the boldfaced are your words) that you’ve been married for 21 years, since you were 28 (now 49) and have two children a 12-year-old and a 17-year-old, that your marriage has been a problem for many years and fights have been escalating lately. The two of you agreed that you are heading towards divorce, but still living in the same home, in the U.S.
In this situation, you signed in to an Indian matrimonial website as Awaiting divorce. Online, you started communicating with a divorcee living in India, you call her Muns. Muns asked you about your marital status, and you lied and mentioned: ‘separated from my wife, she is not staying with me anymore.
By 3 weeks of communicating with you, Muns shared everything with you, everything about her kids’ sport activities and more. She messaged you Good morning, Good evening lovely messages and seemed like she got attached to you. She even introduced you to her kids, and her kids to you (online). On the 4th week of communicating with you, she was confessing her love for you, and she shared more with you, about her health background and everything.
A week or so later, 1.5 months into the online romantic relationship, Muns started avoiding you and her fewer messages turned cold. She then told you that currently she does not feel the love connection and most of the times she feels judged when she speaks to you. Some time later, you figured that Mun’s mother inquired about you in a community app and found out that you were living with your wife. Next, Muns, seeming very hurt, posted some weird messages like: ‘Would you like to share with me about something? Are you missing something that you must or should d have shared with me?’
You then loosely mentioned to her that your wife “is with me and she will go away in July“. Later, she told you that she has known for some time that you were living with your wife. You told her that your intent was not deceit. She got very angry with you and hung up on you.
Later, she shared that she felt that she opened up so much with you and shared every detail (while you didn’t share that you were living with your wife). She started questioning all stuff that you told her, and pulling up photos you shared with her, she asked if your wife was also present in that location, or in that location. Later, you texted her to say sorry and asker her forgiveness and at the end you wrote: ‘Enjoy your day’. She got upset that you ended your text that way, saying it was insensitive of you.
At the Indian matrimonial website, you cancelled the invitation of hers and that led to further escalation, and she blocked you on what’s app. Next, you confronted her on text and she was very mean: ‘I don’t know if you deserved to even speak to me, forget about friendship.” That was 9 days ago.
You ended your original post with: “Couple of questions that come to my mind is that she really loved me or she was trying to mold herself so that she can get married, she was looking at this as an opportunity? During my final conversation when she blasted me, she never cared to ask me : ‘Why did you do this Abde’? Can you help me understand?… I feel devastated as I truly connected with her… I feel that God has punished me severely for lying to her…”
Your 2nd post: “For the last 9 days I have been dying of guilt. I am not a person with these values, I have never lied or cheated ever… Yes I did a mistake, I apologized sincerely to Muns and to my wife… I don’t know if my real intent was to fool Muns, our conversations weren’t utterly romantic… Yes, I should have been transparent to Muns that my wife is staying with me… then she could have opted to just keep in touch and not pulled into building future with me… I am here to seek closure because deep down I am kind, honest and my values are different...”.
Your 3rd post, in regard to a suggestion that you manipulated Muns: “Manipulating Muns is a mean thing to say, I really respect her and feel for her. I understand that she is hurt and I have let her go. I have also apologized to her… you guys seem to have misread the whole situation a bit. I have learned from this experience, I have apologized to Muns and my wife. I will move on from this, especially after this encounter. Good luck everybody.”
My reply today: imagine, Abde, that you were a divorced man, lonely and looking for a spouse in a matrimonial dating site. You get to know a woman online, you like her very much, you get very excited about her being.. The One. You share everything with her, being honest and upfront about everything because you want her to make informed decisions regarding you. You daydream about her, imagining meeting her in-person and having romantic dates and asking her to marry you, and then.. you find out that.. she is living with another man, and that she is married to him.
How would you feel?
Imagine this happens to your 17-year-old, or your 12-year-old when they grow up.. how would you feel as their father?
Empathy is the ability to place yourself in someone’s else’s shoes and imagine what they may be feeling, and then to care about how they are feeling, not wanting them hurt. It’s about considering the likely emotional consequences of your words and actions on others, before you speak and act.
When you lied to Muns about your wife not staying with you anymore, your motivation was to keep Mun interested in you, to not lose her interest. You knew that the consequence of telling her the truth, would likely be that she’d withdraw from you. You didn’t want that consequence, so you lied to her. It may have crossed your mind that if she finds out that you lied, that the consequence- to her- would be that her feelings will be hurt. If that crossed your mind, you lied anyway because, for the moment, it served your interest: she showed real interest in you, lovely, warm messages, confessed her love, introduced her kids to you.
You told her that your intent was not deceit, and I agree that your primary motivation was not to deceive her. Deceit was just a.. means to an end.
You texted her to say sorry and asker her forgiveness and at the end you wrote: ‘Enjoy your day’. She got upset that you ended your text that way, saying it was insensitive of you- it was indeed insensitive. If you really felt regret for having hurt her feelings so badly, you wouldn’t think of ending your apology with wishing her joy.
You confronted her on text and “she was very mean“- if you had empathy for her, you would know that her anger was valid, not mean. You’d know that you owned the mean.
You ended your original post with: “Couple of questions that come to my mind is that she really loved me or she was trying to mold herself so that she can get married, she was looking at this as an opportunity?“- you are suspecting her of wrong intention, of being selfish, while there is no evidence- from what you shared- that she’s been selfish, while there is plenty of evidence that you own selfish.
2ndpost: “For the last 9 days I have been dying of guilt. I am not a person with these values, I have never lied or cheated ever… deep down I am kind, honest and my values are different“- this is how you presented yourself in your 2nd post, after being criticized by responders. No mention of dealing with guilt, let alone dying of guilt for the 1.5 months or so, following the lie (original post).
3rd post: “Manipulating Muns is a mean thing to say, I really respect her and feel for her”– manipulating Muns is not a mean thing to say to you. It’s a mean thing to do to Mun.
Mun told you (original post): ”Stay happy with your Corporate IQ – that’s all I can say“- she was referring to you being an IT Professional, I imagine, and she was suggesting that (big) corporations are.. heartless, and so are you.. Was that her message?
A bit about myself: I too suffered and made others suffer because of empathy-deficiency on my part. My empathy was specific to a few others, but lacking for most. I was too troubled, feeling too guilty inside to .. avail myself to everyday empathy. As a result, I lived a very lonely life. Decades later, now that I feel and express empathy for others, what a difference it is making in my life. My emotional experience of life has greatly improved. I highly recommend that like me, you too will adopt empathy as a way of life, one day at a time, in small ways and in big ways.
anita
anitaParticipantDear Kshitij:
You are welcome!
“I had a nightmare/intrusive spiral while I was half-sleepy around 6:00 am, and it had some of the most disturbing thoughts I have experienced till now… I am feeling better now and back on track.“- see, this is proof that intrusive, disturbing thinking- even the most intrusive and disturbing you ever had- is not dangerous: you were not injured, or killed, and you are back on track less than 7 hours after the spiral.
This reminds me of a movie I saw long ago where (I remember very little of it) the main character was terrified of a monster that visited her in dreams. What it took to overcome her fear was to face the monster, look it in the eye, and say: you don’t exist! And the monster (that was never real, as in flesh-and-blood real), defeated, disappeared forevermore.
Like in the movie where the monster intruded on the main character in dreams, intrusive thoughts (also not real, as in flesh-and-blood real) intrude on you in waking hours and when you were half-sleepy this morning. Confront the intrusive thinking, look it in the eye, so to speak, and say: you don’t have the power to harm me!
Really, scientifically, objectively: it’s not the thoughts that is the problem, but the fear of the thoughts. Confronting this fear in regard to my OCD is just what I did many years ago, and that monster in my life disappeared: I am no longer afraid of my thoughts, and I no longer fit the OCD diagnosis
anita
anitaParticipantContinued a bit tonight:
I just double checked, asking someone who just had a meeting with other people, very locally: “what do they say about me being a hard worker?” and the person said: they say you are the hardest working person around here! I was told this in person too, and I am so pleased, so proud, because my mother used to say (again and again and again and again.. and again.. and f**** again) that I am LAZY.. But these wild-west, hard working farmers and others around here say that I am the hardest working person in this wild-west world, so she was/ is WRONG. Always have been wrong: I was NEVER the bad, lazy person she said I was.
I will still hear HER words, especially when I am tired, like earlier today, the recording will re-play, such is the nature of the brain. But I want to remember that.. I am the HARDEST WORKING PERSON around here, around this wild-west, cowboy-hat-beard, wild, wild-west.
She was wrong all along, she WRONGED me all along, it still boggles my mind: why/ how did she have to be so mean to .. the hardest working girl. I mean, really, I can see how she DISTORTED who I was, who I am, COMPLETELY! I am not, not who she kept saying that I was. And she was wrong out of CRUELTY: she hated me and she wanted to inflict pain on me.
It’s a lifetime process to really UNDERSTAND that your OWN MOTHER was/ is your ENEMY. HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY BE TRUE???
I can’t believe it, still, it’s bamboozling my mind! Oh.. I just need to fully confront the difficult, horrible, bamboozling reality that my mother, MY MOTHER, was/is my Enemy. It is (I have no word) difficult to take in. I mean: my own mother wanted me to be in pain. My OWN MOTHER whose love I needed more than anything, her motivation was to see me hurt.
It’s just so difficult to take in, it’s just that one expects one’s mother to be on one’s side, and definitely not against… Okay, it’s Tues late night here. Good night/ good morning, 1-3 readers, thank you for being here with me, reading.
Let us be guided by the Truth, however difficult it is to take in and absorb.
anita
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