Dear flyby:

Welcome back!

As to your suggestion: “stop trying to isolate yourself in a world of positivity and only positive people”- one would be alone, not even in one own company. Who is positive all the time? (And it is an unreasonable pressure to put on oneself, to say and act positive at all times)

You wrote: ” If someone is ‘toxic’, maybe really think about what that means”- I agree: define what is “toxic”. It is okay and reasonable that any person will be negative at times, pessimistic, sad. No emotions should be rejected as bad or negative and a person should not pretend to not have these feelings. All feelings have valid messages, all are needed, all therefore are positive.

“Toxic” means poisonous, harmful. If a friend is sad and that makes me feel sad too, that wouldn’t be a reason for me to leave that person, to cut contact. It would be a reason for me to comfort the person, to spend more time with the person. But if the person is sad and abusive (aka toxic) and yells at me, blaming me for what I am not responsible for, letting off steam that way, then that is a different story.

Loyalty to a person who harms you is self defeating, and a disloyalty to yourself. Loyalty to a person who is loving and respectful of you and yet sad, depressed, anxious is admirable. In the latter case, I would be compassionate to the person best I can and at the same time take the breaks I need so to not exhaust myself. Always care for yourself first.

anita

Dear flyby:

Glad the first is out of your life and the second has improved and is a joy to have around.

Your last line: “Negativity doesn’t mean intentionally hurtful”- not what I said and I want to explain why I wouldn’t say this: let’s say a person calls you horrible names, even hits you and then says: I didn’t intend to hurt you. I was just so distressed. I have a bi polar diagnosis. Etc. Just an example.

This person in my example is abusive regardless of intention and shouldn’t be in your life.

But there is more to it: when a person acts abusively toward another, unless the person is totally unaware of reality, that is the person is in full fledged psychotic episode, then the person does intend to hurt. It is the hurting act itself, the calling names, the hitting, that relieves the abuser’s distress, making him or her feel better.

So the “I didn’t mean to hurt you…” or “It was not my intention to hurt you..” following abusive behavior is really a lie. It makes the person saying it feel better, but it is not true.

anita

Dear flyby:

Interesting you lived the reality of my example.

By a totally unaware, in the midst of a psychotic episode I mean someone who will commit a crime in front of a police officer standing right there, not being aware of one’s actions and consequences. Not being able to remember the episode later. This is uncommon.

What you are writing about is the common version of not being aware. There is some awareness though. In my example of committing a criminal act in front of a police officer, it would be a person committing a crime near a police station because of being impulsive and “having to” do it but hoping to get away, hoping no one is watching. There is a memory of the incident later.

Other than criminality, limited awareness is the norm. Who is completely aware? One in a billion people, perhaps. I am becoming more and more aware and there is always, so far, more for me to become aware of. And we are often aware of the unawareness of others in their personal lives while remaining limited in our awareness of our own personal lives.

People see what they want to see; they don’t see what they don’t want to see. This is business as usual and it is so when seeing what-is brings about anxiety. And we will do anything to avoid the awareness of fear. So we close our eyes and pretend the monster is not there.

Awareness is a wonderful thing, amazing, invigorating, if one can handle the fear involved.

More of your thoughts? Anytime. I like this correspondence.

anita

Dear flyby:

What stands between a person and awareness of one own life is anxiety. When a person desperately needs to feel love, so to comfort the anxiety (excess, ongoing fear), then a person will make believe anything that remotely resembles an appearance of love, is indeed love and ignore all the evidence otherwise. This unawareness is usually (if not always) not complete so the person is often distressed anyway, maybe a lower grade distress than the distress of overwhelming anxiety.

So when I see another person unaware of their situation, I now understand: it is not a person’s lack of intelligence, it is what we all automatically do: move our awareness away from anxiety, from fear. This is why when dealing with others and with ourselves we have to apply a lot of gentleness and patience.

As to shame and guilt- this is why people mistreat themselves. And often, people with that accusatory, abusive Inner Critic take a break from their own Inner Critic and accuse and abuse others. The abusive Inner Critic who points shame and guilt at oneself has its other side of the coin companion, the abusive Outer Critic, accusing and shaming others.

People who abuse themselves take breaks and abuse others. Then back to abusing themselves, the distress intensifies, the need a relief and the relief is in abusing another. Maybe some people skip all together the Inner Critic cycle and … specialize in the Outer Critic dynamic exclusively.

Shame is very painful. I think it is the most painful emotion while fear is the most powerful. People will endure shame but fear, this is what people will do ANYTHING to avoid.

anita

Dear flyby:

I define anxiety as excessive, ongoing fear. It is clear to me that anxiety is in the core of most clusters of symptoms, that is diagnoses of mental disorders. It is the root cause. It often happens in childhood that the child is overwhelmed by fear, repeatedly, not comforted and so the brain shuts down to various degrees, dissociation takes place and that excess energy of fear releases itself in forms of tics (Tourette Syndrome for one), compulsions (OCD)

It is only these days that I am having memories of childhood that I didn’t have before. Things like the look of a notebook in school, the feel of going to school on the first day, short flashes of such. I was very dissociated my whole life.

anita

* Dear XenopusTex: since the original poster on this thread is flyby, I respond only to the posts by the original poster, so not to start a multi-member discussion on any thread. If you’d like to discuss fear with someone other than the original poster here, you can bring up the last thread you started (it was about fear) or start a new one.
anita