Dear Lily:

I re-read through your posts in other threads for hours today. This will be a first post of two.  I will post a second post tomorrow.

A couple of general observations: (1) I read again and again how calming and refreshing it is for you to walk in the countryside, by the river, collecting herbs, being out in nature- I wish you could do more of this, but I know that it is difficult to get out during winter time. (2) I don’t think that any person likes to be criticized, but some are more negatively affected by criticism than others, and you and I belong to the group  more easily harmed by criticism. Therefore, when I post to you, I need to keep this in mind. I have no desire to criticize you and I know that if I did, it will be most unhelpful to you. My goal is to never criticize you.

* In four days it will be Christmas 2020, and you plan to not visiting your parents. On December 25, Christmas of 2018, you posted: “I’m visiting my parents.. My sister said she always gets depressed when coming home. Now I’m feeling also a little depressed”- I hope this makes you feel better about not being there this Christmas.

On that day, you wrote about your 2019 New Year objectives: “For the new year hope that I can value myself more and not let others take advantage of me or disrespect me. I rather want to take better care of myself”- and you have made lots of progress in this regard, more to be made. I hope that even when you are anxious and feeling lonely, that you remember that you had made progress, and aim at making more progress.

* You most recently mentioned K again, thinking about him and feeling stress. My understanding, following my hours of reading today, is that you have been thinking/ obsessing about him yet again because, like you suggested, you are lonely. You are a human being and humans are social animals; we are people who need people, just like the song says. I understand that people also drain you, and lots of conflict, awkwardness and distress accompany many social interactions for you- but it doesn’t change the fact that you are human, and therefore, you need people.

I know that K was and is wrong for you, but.. there were some pleasant moments there for you, some much needed affectionate touch and a few much needed affectionate words- so you miss the touch and the words. Before him, at times,  you missed the dormitory man, because even with him, there was some touch that felt good. These two men- one clearly abusive, rude and crude, and the other inattentive and disrespected-  are the only closer experiences you had with men, therefore you missed them both at one time or another.

You grew up with hardly any affectionate touch/ affectionate verbal expressions, so you miss the little affection that you did experience with these two men.

Regarding K, I hope that you will spend less time thinking about him, miss him less, and feel calmer when you read some of what you posted before in regard to him: “he often takes phone calls and talks to the callers for a few minutes, while we meet. Or he looks at this smartphone…he is always very busy, so that I don’t know if there was room for me in his life… he doesn’t contact me often or tell me much about what is going on in his life. He is always busy with his work, studies, family and friends… I feel like I’m only getting crumbs of his attention… He doesn’t show much interest… He doesn’t really have time for me… he also leaves during a text message conversation without saying goodbye” (October 2018).

“My friend said, that it doesn’t make sense that he really doesn’t have time to call or text me. Because when he was with me, he was always on the phone, talking to someone else. One time, he even called someone, after texting with them on his smartphone while we were eating out. He didn’t ask me a lot of questions, didn’t seem to want to know more about my life. He never had much time for me.. he wanted casual sex, but he also wanted to appear like a good person. During that phone call he acted like I was unreasonable for asking more of his time. He acted like he was too busy” (January 2019).

“Just in the past months, what happened with K just stressed me a lot and weakened me… I never was part of his everyday life” (March 2019). “I want to leave the story with K behind me, finally” (May 2019).

“After this new communication with him it was more clear than ever that we don’t fit together. How he doesn’t respond, if I write a long message and all that. It was always like that, I was trying to explain myself, but no real response! It was so frustrating… I should better not try to get into a mental discourse with him. It is a waste of my time! I only get responses like ‘O.K. for your message… I can see why it did not work, I can see that he is not responding to what I am telling him at all'” (August 2020).

Second post- tomorrow.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by .

Dear Lily:

I just submitted and lost the post I worked on for hours this morning. This is very difficult for me- it was an almost perfect post. This is frustrating to me beyond words. I used quotes from your shares since 2016, now they are all lost and I am too tired to go through your threads once again.

I will post to you now based on my memory alone, not going through the quotes that are now lost to me.

I started that now lost post telling you how delightful it was for me to read your recent post, how your intelligent, insightful, organized and thorough post is evidence of your emotional healing and progress. I added that it is okay with me if you do not respond to every item I bring to you in any of my posts, and that whenever I do not respond to a particular item in any of your posts, you are welcome to let me know what it is that you would like me to respond to, and  I will attend to that particular item in a following post.

I clarified what I meant by my aim to not criticize you: I did not mean that I will not point to you being “on the completely wrong path… making the same mistakes over and over again”, when I believe it is the case- but that I will do so without anger, irritation, impatience, etc.

As to the body of the post, summarized: the dormitory man was clearly and consistently rude, crude, extremely disrespectful and abusive to you. It is common in some cartoons and movies to depict a character as 100% bad,  while in real-life it is not this black and white. But in the context of the dormitory man’s interactions with you, he was as close to 100% bad as can be. And yet, you felt empathy for him, not for yourself (stating that he was not a bad person because in his culture that’s how people normally behave, and that it must be difficult for him to be far away from his family, etc.). You stated that you were the terrible person and the abusive one, not him. When you asserted yourself against his harassing you at one point, you felt guilty for having done so, fearing that you hurt his feelings. And following that one assertion, you allowed him to harass you yet again.

I then proceeded to quote from Wikipedia’s entry on self preservation: “Self-preservation is a behavior or set of behaviors that ensures the survival of an organism. It is universal among all living organisms”- I then proceeded to say than at first look, your behaviors with the dormitory man show a lack of a self-preservation instinct: you allowed him to abuse you, feeling bad not for you.. but for him. I compared it to the following imaginary situation: a deer notices a mountain lion approaching it and it thinks: if I run, the mountain lion’s feelings will be hurt, poor lion.. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. So the deer stands there, anxious, becoming the lion’s dinner.

I then quoted more from that entry in Wikipedia: “An interesting phenomenon sometimes occurs in social animals. Animals in a social group (a kin) often work cooperatively in order to survive, but when one member perceives itself as a burden for an extended period of time, it may commit self-destructive behavior. This allows its relatives to have a better chance at surviving”-

I then went on to explain that as a young child,  you did not have a perception of yourself as a separate person from your parent. In your child’s mind you were part of a Unit of two: your parent and you. (For simplicity, I referred to your interactions with one parent only: your father).

The Unit-of-two consisted of a strong, guiding part (your father) and a weak part that needed guidance (a dependent child). The naturally weak part needed the guidance of the strong part so to gradually develop a strong, separate perception of self. But when your father turned against you aggressively (being rude, cruel to you, expressing that he disliked you, hitting you, telling you terrible things, etc.), he guided you to view yourself as bad, something deserving his aggression, something that needs to be destroyed.

Connecting this to what I quoted from Wikipedia: to promote the survival of the Unit-of-two, you had to destroy one part of the Unit (you stated that you were in the habit of directing your anger toward yourself, physically hitting yourself at times, as well as considering suicide as a child- the ultimate self destructive act).

Your empathy therefore was not with the weak part of you, but with the strong part of you, aiming instinctively at promoting the survival of the Unit. Fast forward, your empathy was with the abusive dormitory man, not with the one he abused (you).

I then added another point: you disliked your father for his closed mindedness, for his attitude of “his way or the highway”, for his focusing on other people’s faults, but not on his own faults. What you did next, perhaps more so in your second decade of life than in your first, was to take the extreme position opposite to your father’s:

– it was his way or the highway—> in the context of interactions with others, you made your way invalid, and it was about his (a man’s) way, not yours.

– your father  focused on other people’s faults—> you became blind to other people’s faults while they abuse you, excusing others’ bad behaviors.

– he did not focus on his faults—> you overly focused on your faults to the point of making yourself sick.

anita

Dear Lily:

My day is fine, thank you, it’s still going (1:45 pm my time, 10:45 om your time). I bet your home smells good having baked cookies, and I can imagine you baking to the sounds of classical music and candlelight (how classy!).

I recovered after losing my post yesterday, thank you for your concern. I read your recent post and want to reply to it more Thursday morning, in about 16  hours from now. I will still be on the computer  before then, but I am not focused enough to reply to you at this time. Good night, Lily, sleep well.. it’s almost Christmas.. (how exciting, even if one celebrates it alone)!

anita