Dear Boris1010,

you’re welcome. I actually read about that same research about the injured prefrontal cortex which then results in the inability to make decisions. I’ve just looked it up again, it was discovered by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and it’s called somatic marker theory. He discovered that when the prefrontal cortex is injured, the information from our emotional centers in the brain (the limbic, aka mammalian brain – hypothalamus, amygdala etc) doesn’t reach the thinking part of the brain – the neocortex, and without this crucial info, we cannot make decisions. That would be like not having the gut feeling (or in case of injury, the gut feeling not being relayed to the thinking/decision making part of the brain).

It’s good to know you do have a gut feeling with mechanical systems. It’s probably because you know those systems so well, you’ve been working with them for decades, so you can almost “feel” them. If you knew people so well, and primarily, if you knew yourself well – on the emotional level – you would have the same ability to feel things, to read cues… to have emotional intelligence, I guess.

I don’t think I’m “cut out” to mesh well with others. STILL far too self-absorbed, bouncing around in my own little world, which I have to be yanked out of if she wants my attention, for the most part. It’s just how I am, not a deliberate choice. It’s my “default state,” to use a programming term (not a programmer, just familiar with what goes into it). I can haul myself out of it, but it’s an effort of will, and requires steady attention. It’s “work,” not something that comes naturally.

Well, you did manage to yank yourself out of your autistic little world for the sake of your lady friend. And she didn’t even need to do much, you were eager to reach out and open up… So yes, I think your experience with your lady friend was a “jump-start” on getting back in touch with your feelings. It’s good that it happened, and maybe it’s good that it ended too, because you wouldn’t have been ready, you still need to do work on yourself. But you’re moving in the right direction.

To help yourself, you can think of what is it that you felt when relating to her, what is it that made you eager to communicate and open up? You said there was a mutual understanding (“I’ve done that too!”), after which you didn’t feel so guilty any more. I guess you developed some compassion for yourself, when witnessed by another fellow traveler/sufferer?

You’ve never received compassion from your stepfather (as a side note, I don’t know about receiving compassion from your mother, and in general how your mother treated you after the divorce?), on the contrary he criticized and condemned you all the time. With your lady friend, and I guess in the entire AA community, you haven’t felt criticized – you felt understood and listened to, you received positive attention, you received compassion and understanding, you received support and encouragement. All those things you lacked in your childhood… I think the AA community allowed you to open up, it was a supportive, loving environment. And then your heart leapt to one particular woman there. But it was AA that enabled you to feel safe to open up.

So I guess that’s the precondition for you opening up to people and coming out of your shell: a loving, supportive environment. If your wife offers a hostile, criticizing environment, that’s something to consider. You’d need to be seen with new eyes, but before your wife can do it (if she’s able to do it at all), it’s you who’d need to see yourself with new eyes. See yourself as this loving and caring, enthusiastic person, who’s reaching out, helping others, sharing his story honestly, sharing his pain and struggles, and being his authentic self… See yourself as the new you, the real you, who’s been hiding in his shell for so long, but now his time has come… Do you think you can do that?

Dear Boris1010,

you’re welcome, and it’s Tee-Kay 🙂

I’ve been wanting to mention your marriage, because that’s what you’re left with and what you’re living every day… Your relationship with your wife is important and I wonder if you’d like to talk a bit more about it.

You’ve said you got married at the age of 19, that you were quite immature for marriage, and that in your 30s you stopped drinking. Which means that you’ve been drinking at the time you got married and in the first more than a decade of your marriage. But your wife tolerated it? Or you were in the navy and not so much at home in those first years? Was it your wife who forced you to quit drinking in your 30s?

After you quit drinking, you became clinically depressed and numb, a little like a robot. Is it then that your wife started having affairs with other men? How come she never wanted to leave you? What do you think you provided for her? Security? She must also have a feeling of superiority, always mentioning your past transgressions, as if she herself didn’t have any. And you have a sense of inferiority, believing you’re hollow, cannot think straight, cannot trust your judgment etc etc… So the two of you are a match in that sense. As long as you feel inferior, she’ll be bringing it up and reminding you how flawed you are indeed…

If you’d like to talk a bit more about how your marriage got to be the way it is, please do so, it might turn out helpful.

Dear Kibou,

it’s okay to respond whenever you feel like it, without feeling obliged. I do like it when people respond, but the relationships here are not the same as relationships with one’s friends and relatives, so no need to feel obliged. It’s okay to write only if you feel like expressing yourself and sharing.

From what you’ve said, it appears one of your core wounds is your unmet emotional needs, and feeling that you’re a burden if you express those needs at all. You were there for others and didn’t expect, or didn’t dare to expect, that others would be there for you.

When you comforted your mother when you were just 2 years old, the child doesn’t do it because they have developed empathy at that age, but primarily because they fear that their own existential needs won’t be met. If something happens to your mother, you as a small, helpless child wouldn’t be able to survive on your own. That’s why a child tries to do everything in their power to comfort the parent, to make the parent happy, so the parent could continue to take care of them. It’s a coping mechanism, a survival mechanism for the child. If you help your mother the best you can and don’t represent a burden to her, there’s a greater chance that she’d take care of you, and that your own survival would be ensured. That’s how the child’s mind works, unconsciously.

So I believe you became an empath, i.e. attuned to other people’s needs, out of necessity. You too had needs but you suppressed them, basically to survive. When you got a little older and when the thinking brain started developing, you probably started rationalizing why those other people (your parents and siblings, later your friends) can’t really be there for you when you need them – because they are hurt people, you told yourself.

This continued for many years, where you’ve tried to help various hurt people whom you met on your journey. You would involve in “deep conversations” with them and offered to be their shoulder to cry on. This was your way of bonding. You didn’t ask for much in return, just that they keep in touch. When they wouldn’t, when they would ghost you, that’s when you finally felt hurt and abandoned.

I also understand now that some of those people might really be wounded (suffering from social anxiety, as you said), that’s why they would often ghost you. But also, many of your relationships seem to be long-distance, with people whom you didn’t spend much time with in the first place, since you do move a lot, so that’s also something to consider. It’s good that you’re now better able to set boundaries and not feel the pressure to reply immediately, but to honor your own needs and timing.

It’s also great that during your group healing sessions in 2020, you could allow yourself to change the dynamic from always being a helper to asking for help yourself too. At first you were sharing your painful experiences with a smile on your face, not wanting to be a burden, but then the group members made you realize it’s okay to be needy. They encouraged you to ask for help. That’s a great progress.

You said you’ve done most of your healing with the theta healing modality. I don’t know much about it, I’ve just checked it now a little, and it seems it works on uncovering one’s false beliefs. Does it work with emotions too, and how?

When you do feel an emotion, it’s good that you can name it, but it might be good to also stay with it for a while, without immediately rationalizing it and trying to get rid of it. Try to see where it’s coming from and which need of yours hasn’t been met. Try not to immediately explain it away, telling yourself that yes, you’re hurt but the person who’s hurt you is hurt too. Because by doing the latter, you immediately overwrite your own pain with empathy for the other person, while your own pain and your own need remain unaddressed.

Dear Elie,

how are you? I’d like to address something which might be stopping you from continuing the conversation here. In your previous thread, you wrote:

Eventually ends up making me feel like I’m not capable of being understood due to my own complications inside. And always have deeper feelings beyond what people try to comfort me by.

On this thread, you reached out for help again, expressed your pain, but you didn’t describe the reasons for your pain. It took several rounds for me to understand roughly what the problem is, to sort of pinpoint what the dynamic is that’s causing you pain. You were thrilled that I “figured it out” (Yes that is very spot on as I’d say, I love how you could figure it out). Perhaps for you it meant that finally, someone understands what you’re trying to say. Because in the past you had the experience of people not understanding you “due to your own complications inside”.

But when I mentioned it wasn’t easy to figure it out because you were mysterious, and Anita mentioned that you express yourself in a vague manner, perhaps you got the impression again that you’re not understood, or that you’re criticized for being you, for expressing yourself the way you do. So this might have felt like another rejection for you, similar to what you’ve already experience in the past, with your parents or other people.

I’d like to apologize if I’d hurt you with my remark. I realize now it might have not been on purpose that you express yourself vaguely, and that you talk more about your feelings and impressions and less about the “facts” of what’s going on. It does make it harder for others to understand – specially people who don’t know you – but it’s your style. So I’d like to invite you to keep sharing here, even if you can’t express it super clearly and factually.

So far you’ve shared that your parents are rather materialistically oriented and have trouble understanding that you don’t have the same ideas about what an ideal job or career means. They put pressure on you and your brother, and it causes both of you stress and harms your well-being. It appears your brother is trying to please them, but he’s breaking down. With your choice of studies, are you too trying to please them? Is it something they think is best for your future career, or it’s something closer to your heart? Please share more if you feel like.

Dear Boris1010,

you’re welcome. I’m glad you’ve decided to sit with the difficult emotions, instead of shutting down and going into that grey void again. It’s human to love and lose, and then love some more…

No, no anger at her loss – – I blame myself entirely for it. Nothing there but sadness and regret. Not her fault if I wasn’t ‘the one,’ or even anyone.

Not her fault if you weren’t “anyone”. These words show that you have a pretty low self-esteem, Boris. And it showed in what you’ve shared about yourself before:

I also have a personal history of not knowing what I want… discovering something, becoming interested, immersing/learning, gearing up to do… and then just losing interest altogether right when it comes time to actually start DOING the thing I got interested in… so I absolutely do NOT trust what comes out of my head, either.

Head = untrustworthy, Heart= unknown territory… I simply do not know what to do, where to turn. 

I’ve long felt myself ’empty’ or ‘hollow,’ like there’s nothing *but* the facade I project in public… like there is no ‘wearer’ of the many masks.

I think I’d enjoy writing… but I find I have nothing to say. 

Music is another means of expression, as are art, and dance, and poetry… and in each case, I find that there’s simply nothing inside that wants out.  Nothing to say. 

Managed to land on my feet (strictly through the efforts of my wife, who of the two of us is the only one that possesses a working brain and the drive to put it to use).

So, according to yourself, you are: hollow, have nothing to say, wearer of masks, don’t trust either your heart or your head, don’t possess a working brain or the drive to put it to use.

I think that before you can have a quality relationship – be it romantic or friendship – you would need to work on your self-esteem. It’s been damaged. I don’t know if the damage started happening when you were 10, or even earlier. How were your parents treating you before they divorced? Were they mostly loving or they criticized you (or one of them was mostly loving, while the other criticized you)?

With the divorce and you losing your secure base and your stepfather coming into the picture, things definitely took a turn for the worse. Your self-esteem took a plunge, and it never recovered, it seems. Have you worked on your self-esteem in therapy?

Dear Dandan,

I want to say something about addiction, because I suffered from an eating disorder, and I know how it can destroy your self-confidence even further. The main cause of addiction is not that you have weak willpower, but that some emotional needs weren’t met in your childhood. The addiction is there to sooth the pain of that loss. For me, it was the pain of being criticized, of never being good enough for my mother. For you, the pain may be something else, perhaps the pain of never being able to make your mother happy, which resulted in your self-esteem issues?

My self-esteem issues were caused by my mother directly criticizing me and having no compassion for me. Your mother might have not criticized you, but she was often sad and depressed for various reasons. A child cannot bear when the mother is sad, he wants to make her happy, so he’s trying everything in his power. If he fails, he will feel bad about himself, not good enough, not worthy enough. He will blame himself, even if it’s not conscious. The result is lack of self-esteem, even though your mother might have never spoken badly of you.

So I think I have grown up weak with insecurities partly by genes and also the way we were brought up.

Yes, it depends both on our character and temperament (on genes, as you say), and on the way we were brought up. You are a sensitive and compassionate person, that’s why you couldn’t bear to see your mother suffer, so you tried to help her. But I’ve explained how you still might have ended up hurt and with low self-esteem.

As I said I will focus the workouts and what I can do to imrove my confidence and satisfaction of accomplishment. So I will probably be busy setting up the equipments and getting started with the workouts for this transformation challenge now.

It’s worthwhile that you’re now trying to do the workout challenge and do something that will lift you up from lethargy and feeling bad about yourself. However, I know from experience that it can only boost your self-confidence temporarily. The wound is deeper and it won’t go away with any outer accomplishment. It will only go away if you actually deal with your wounded inner child. Until you heal that core wound, you won’t have lasting success.

Dear Dandan,

perhaps there was a misunderstanding. It’s clear that you love your mother very much and believe she was loving and caring towards you and your siblings. Perhaps she intended to, but as you said, she had many issues, like inferiority complex, and feeling sad a lot of of the times, and this affects a child a lot.

My mother e.g. believed she was a martyr, and she criticized me a lot and was strict with me. But she did everything for me, she took care of me physically very well, got up at 4am in the morning to cook lunch for me before she went to work, etc. She was a martyr mother, provided for all of my material needs, but not my emotional needs. And that caused a lot of psychological problems for me as I grew up.

What I am trying to say that our parents might have good intentions and might care for us physically, but due to their own limitations, they fail to meet our emotional needs, which are as important as our physical needs. So e.g. if your mother had low self-esteem, she would allow her children and her husband to yell at her:

Every single day in the morning before leaving to school, they used to shout at mom for every single thing like if they don’t like the breakfast, if the uniform was not ironed well and for various reasons.

She has faced a lot of abuse from my sisters as well as dad.

Perhaps that weakened her further, and she was suffering a lot, always being a little sad and depressed. She believed she cannot help herself, or even that she deserves it (you said she had inferiority complex, being born in a village, having no college education). So if your dad and sisters were abusive to her, perhaps you were the only one who understood her and had pity for her. You didn’t treat her like that, you only shouted at her a few times. You were kind to her most of the times and tried to console her and make her happy. She could talk to you, perhaps complain about your father and sisters, and you would listen. Was that what was going on?

It doesn’t make your mother a bad person,  it’s just that she didn’t have the capacity to take care of herself, or stand up for herself. She was weak and had low self-esteem, and as a result, she didn’t have the capacity to give you proper emotional care either. I can say with certainty that when a parent has emotional/psychological deficiencies, it always reflects on the children.

My mother was also encouraging me to study well and go abroad to places like Germany, but at the same time she was critical of me and didn’t have trust in me. Your mother seems like she didn’t criticize you, but she was emotionally dependent on you, and it was a burden for you, whether you’re aware of it or not. A child cannot give emotional support to a parent. Rather, a child needs emotional support from the parent. If the roles are reversed, a child cannot grow up to be a healthy, independent individual with needs and wants of their own. They will always remain attached to the parent, trying to make them happy, and making their happiness depend on their parent’s happiness.

So I believe you should be looking at your role as emotional care-taker to your mother, not in the sense of emotional incest, but simply as you seeing your mother suffer and be sad, and trying to make her happy and comfort her, when she couldn’t do that on her own.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Tee.

Dear Elie,

I love how you could figure it out.

well, to be honest, it did need some figuring out, since you were a bit mysterious about it at first 🙂

But jokes aside, it does seem to be a heavy burden for you that your parents have those expectations from you. How are you going about it? Are you trying to please them, or you have an idea of what you’d love to do in your life, even if it brings less money? You said you’re studying at the moment – is it a field you yourself chose, or rather something your parents thought would be best for you?