Dear mindoverheart:

I feel for you. I am sorry you are shattered, feeling guilty and in despair. This is a distressful, painful state of mind to be in.

I see your user name here: mind over heart. There is the rational mind and there is the emotional mind/ the heart. The two need to work together for best results and how to make them work together is often a lifetime process and I hope you give yourself the empathy that you need and deserve and the patience to work this long process.

It is a process, so it takes time and thought, evaluating and re-evaluating, experiencing and learning from experience. Can you take a break from the guilt and despair and think: I need to learn from this and go on. It is like being angry at a young child who is learning to walk: do you beat her up for falling or do you hug her and encourage her to get up and walk again?

How are you supposed to get it right, to get this mind/ heart thing right from the beginning? A young child never gets it right (as far as I know) from the very beginning, walking and not falling right from the beginning.

The fall is painful, give yourself that hug that you need, forgive yourself, understand all you wanted was to love and be loved (nothing to feel guilty about)- you just went about it the wrong way. Consider getting up sometime and doing better next time.

anita

Dear mindoverheart:

You are welcome. If what I wrote above helped you, please read it again as you need to and I hope you post again so I can respond to you again. There is no quick fix to this, there will be ups and downs…

anita

Dear mindoverheart:

I think I understand. I have similar feelings about sex, I believe. You asked how you could convince yourself that you are stioll worthy of being loved… I think that when you meet another man, and once you proceed slowly and wisely with the new man, wiser for learning from this experience, you at one point will share with that man your thoughts and feelings, including this very thought, and you will wait for his reaction.

Because you will be taking it slowly and you will be learning about who he is before you bring it up with him (the new man in your future life), you will be increasing your chances of a good response from him. You will not be bringing it up with just anyone, only with a man you already know, and i mean KNOW, a man you studied, you listened to and learned about.

And when you do, I suppose it will be scary, and then well… it can very well be, very possible, that the new man in your life will feel great empathy for you for having suffered over your mistake, as you do now, and he will want to make you feel better, to feel loved in spite of having made a mistake.

maybe the new man will be aware that he too had made mistakes. Maybe even his sister had made a similar mistake to yours. And he may understand that To Err is Human. And maybe he will love you more for you having been hurt as you have.

And as a result of his reaction, there will be tears in your eyes and you will feel that not all is lost, that you are loved. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?

And it is, oh, so very possible to happen. Really- it is!

You just LEARN that you do need to study people, to learn about men slowly, patiently, be it as friends for a long time before you proceed to share mentally and physically. This is how you do it, I say.

What do you think?

anita

Dear Guilty:

You are welcome, anytime. Hope you post again- and hope someday soon it will not be “Guilty” Reminds me about guilt, healthy guilt has a time limit. The purpose of feeling guilty is one and only one: to learn from behavior and correct it. Once you learn and intend to correct (in a future relationship with a man)- then let the guilt go. From personal experience, feeling guilty for five decades (!) did not at all make me a better person. The other way around, it hampered my healing and wasn’t good for anyone, definitely not for me. Learn, change, move on. Leave the guilt behind. Till your next post, take care:

anita