Hi Botanical95,

I’ve been there, it’s awkward, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Time will make it a smidge better. And the more you see him as a mere acquaintance, the less you’ll miss him as a friend. You may even question your judgment when you were younger as to why you picked him as a friend. Bonus, you’ll get to see him treat people the same way he treated you, or hear other people complain about him!

Keep in mind that the way he was with you is the way he will be with everyone he eventually gets close to.

It may help to take a break from that church. Give YOURSELF a vacation from him without waiting for summer.

Best,

Inky

Dear Botanical95:

Our brain holds hundreds of thousands of neuropathways, I am guessing about the number, maybe more. Some of the neuropathways, or connections between neurons in our brain, hold dry memory, such as the structure of a molecule of water, and other connections hold emotional memory.

When you watched that instastory, the image of this former friend reached your brain and activated an emotional memory connected to his image, that memory rushed to your awareness and felt intense.

I suppose you were surprised it happened because you resolved some things regarding this former friend in therapy, correcting your assumption of guilt, and you felt much better as a result. I believe the reason you felt that rush of anger at him and whatever other emotion that was activated is because the experience you had with this former friend is not isolated in your brain. It is connected to other experiences with other people. And those were not resolved yet.

Most of our relationship-type emotional neuropathways are formed during our Formative Years, the years of our childhood, while interacting with the people in our childhood.

Our emotional memories are not isolated memories, the are connected in webs of neuropathways. So you resolve one part of that web, and then you find out there is more to resolve.

Sometimes leaving a place or a group will give you the relief you need, avoiding a particular person. But if a certain distressing emotional experience repeats itself in different locations, different people, then better resolve the reactivated issues, one by one, patiently.

anita