Hi Sha

That’s good to hear. You’re more than welcome. Good luck with your exam! ❤️🙏

Hi Niki

I have a question, did your family invest in you to be able to live abroad? Or is this something that you did without help?

The way I see things everyone gets help from various sources. If you don’t own your own business, whoever you work for helps you. Perhaps your coworkers or your partner help more than the people you help? Your therapist is helping you and you are looking for a kind ear here.

We are expected to care for our parents as they get older as they cared for us when we were children. Physically, they aren’t able to support themselves in the same way.

Perhaps a good exercise might be to reflect on who has helped you over your lifetime?

It honestly depends on circumstances. Sometimes helping someone is helping them to help themselves. It is tempting to default to do something to immediately ease suffering when perhaps the ideal situation is to encourage the individual to develop strength. It is a delicate balance to offer the right amount of help. Too much and the person doesn’t take care of themselves. Too little and there is unnecessarily suffering.

No doubt you are a good person helping other people. But do you take the time to help yourself? You have to take care of yourself in order to help others.

You mentioned that you have fallen into patterns similar to your mother. Would you like to talk more about that?

Wishing you all the best! ❤️🙏

Hi Sha

I’ve also had anxiety around failing during my studies.

Where do you think this fear of failure is coming from? Is there a trigger?

Have you failed in your studies or anything else before? If so, how did it affect you?

Sometimes, I found that I needed to get used to a level of anxiety and try to study anyway. Sometimes the feeling went away while I was studying. Being in the best mood I could before trying to study was helpful for me as well as taking breaks.

Please show yourself some grace and compassion because ultimately, making mistakes is part of the learning process.

Wishing you all the best! ❤️🙏

Hi Seaturtle

I left a long message yesterday, but I believe I forgot something.

Does recognizing your false self help you to find your true self? Do you think that at the core, all of our true selves are morally/ and belief aligned?

Yes and yes. The goal is to learn to see situations as they are without the added pain of the past. This is easier said than done when trauma is involved. Healing the initial trauma and being able to address the past pain separately is important. Therapy is helpful with this.

There are times when people act against their true beliefs and it hurts them. It is said that everyone has buddha nature. In Buddhism there is a journey to Enlightenment that takes many lifetimes.

Hi Tommy

Are you lacking compassion? To me your intent was compassionate? It simply didn’t work out as intended. If only everyone could feel better with a quick shock.

A large part of this forum is not knowing how things are going to turn out. People come here in pain. You try and help as best you can and they leave.

I remember when I had therapy. The goal of therapy and even here is for people to learn to help themselves. In the moment, a person might not be ready. I know I wasn’t. But we have memories and if you share something that one day might be useful, that is a job well done.

You apologised. You live and you learn. You can stop beating yourself up now.

Wishing you all the best! ❤️🙏

Hi Seaturtle

Happy Birthday btw! 🎂🎈🎁🎉 I hope you have a really good party. It sounds amazing! 😊

I think sometimes upbringing and societal expectations can make people uncomfortable with relaxing. I know that it used to make me feel that way. Relaxing is really important though. Perhaps you could experiment with different things and see what you like best? I learned that usually whatever I choose to do, is usually what I want to do in that moment. I found it helpful to make peace with that. There is 100% nothing wrong with watching a movie.

But if you would like to do something productive to fill some time, reflect on your interests and core values. I’m sure that you will be able to come up with some ideas. I found it helpful to have a list of ideas of things to do for when I get bored.

How did your parents handle it when you or they were bored?

I think wanting negativity to leave your body is part of letting go. It’s important for grounding yourself, but I guess tempering that with patience and self compassion is important. If you were bullying yourself for not being able to move on quickly for example. That could be another example of false self because our inner critic picks up patterns from other people. It can be difficult to let go of things.

There can also be compulsions to ruminate on things that hurt us. In psychology there is an idea that people are drawn to what is normal for them. So for kids who are abused, their state of “normality” is abuse. These once children, now adults can go on to psychologically abuse themselves to maintain a state of “normality” once they have been removed from an abusive situation. I don’t know if that makes any sense? It is possible to change these patterns and it involves a lot of relaxation techniques, practising healthy boundaries, communication and self-compassion.

It is difficult to say because it varies from person to person, situation to situation. Any confrontation even polite, if the person isn’t receptive might not help. But it can be worth it if it involves setting a boundary that is healthy for ourselves. It really is down to you to decide what is best.

I will add that the person who I change the topic of conversation with isn’t receptive to discussing these things and has severe depression. I just repeatedly change the topic of conversation over and over otherwise we would be talking about what is depressing them the whole time.

When there are other people it’s easier because I can just talk to someone else when I’m mentally checked out.

Another good one when you are interrupted is, interrupting back and say “Sorry I was actually saying…” and continuing on with what I was talking about. In my culture, in groups people are often talking over each other, so it’s quite loud and tends to be lots of people talking over each other. No one says sorry at that point, but no harm is meant. 😂

Everyone has their personal choices. I think if you try and help someone and they don’t have good boundaries it can set the tone for that being the entire relationship. I prefer friendships to be two sided as opposed to one sided. It’s very difficult to change things once that has happened. It can be painful to not receive support from a friend. If someone has good boundaries it’s easier because you help each other and it’s not one sided.

Wishing you all the best! ❤️🙏