paul475

..to everything that's been said so far, but don't take the bait. Whatever the two of you had before, it wasn't enough to keep the boat floating, for whatever reason. Things need to be pruned back if there's to be any new growth. The form of relationship you are interested in may die as a result, but that's how we find whom we are looking for. And then there are times when people just want another opportunity to stick the knife in and twist it, particularly when it looks like they are hurting more than you are. They don't consciously plan to do this, generally speaking, but that's the way it turns out. So don't waste whatever good will the two of you have left. Move on. If she really loves you and cares for you, she will move on, too...and then the two of you will find one another again and it will be better than it's ever been before!

...how young folks run their relationships. I remember the process and it was arduous, driven mostly by hormones and a strong desire to copulate at the drop of a hat. First of all, if someone disrespects you, they need to do so ONLY ONCE before you show them the door. Period. If you let them do it a second time, you are sacrificing your self esteem for a piece of tail and that has terrible consequences. It's the leading cause of why people can't stay by themselves for very long after a breakup...their closest friend is out to get them! As far as constipation goes, you might try drinking more water and laying off of sodas, coffee and caffeine of any kind. Don't be afraid to get a pregnancy test. You can go to a crisis center for them...I think they give them out for next to nothing. The sooner you know what you need to do, the better off YOU will be. The folks that staff most pregnancy centers KNOW how it feels. The INSTANT someone tries to shame you, walk away. Don't let moralists who have no empathy for people's humanity waste your time. If we designed society correctly, we'd probably have younger kids copulating and popping out kids like bunny rabbits since they are the ones most able to do so and recover quickly. Then we'd have older adults actually raising the kids since they have the requisite amount of experience to do a good job rearing youngsters. But, notice, we artificially create this tension in people based on religious misunderstanding and oppression, with the end result being profit opportunities for those in the world poised to take advantage of all of this excess sexuality that has nowhere to go but to the mall -- to shop, of course. Once again, take a look at why you love people who disrespect you and hurt you. If you're in a long term relationship, the rules shift a bit, but not much. Anything inside of a year that features you eating miles of someone else's crap in order for things to, "work out," is a giant red flag for dysfunction and trouble. But it's trouble that can be fixed so that life is more fully lived with the joy-quotient at its maximum for you.

...find bisexual women almost too hot and the topic of many of my own personal sexual fantasies, I can understand some of your friend's confusion. First, the view from 40,000 feet. Late teens through middle twenties is a time of alot of hormonal activity in men and women. You're hornier than you will be right now than you will be for most of your life. Experimentation and pushing the envelope is a common practice for just about everyone with that, "itch." Secondly, the view from my perspective. I think you set your best friend up. I think you threw her a curve ball because you are really feeling like you are outgrowing her and rather than just keeping things in that particular ballpark, you chose to play by street rules. Not polite. Not nice. But now your friend gets to deal with all the guilt you believe is involved in your growing up, rather than you taking full responsibility for it. There is nothing to feel guilty about. But if you dig inside your head a little, I think you will find some. We all have it. It doesn't belong there. What we don't purge from ourselves we will eventually project onto others, and this little sexual swindle may well be one of those unconscious techniques we need to get conscious of and start taking responsibility for. Never, ever, EVER impose your sexuality on someone you do not feel safe talking with about it. Ever. There are just TOO MANY hotbuttons that can be pushed here and there are precious few folks who are trained to navigate in these waters. Spend some time alone before you go in search of a new best friend. I think you've screwed the proverbial pooch here and may well live to regret ever having told this person an intimate detail of your inner life that was just not appropriate for the level of relationship you had with her. She's confused and angry and hurt, and she should be. You will likely feel abandoned, betrayed and rejected. And you should. Share, check, share, check, share. When you feel someone pushing back, don't go there. It's not nice. You shouldn't require other people's approval of your choices, so don't go around leading with your chin.

...is because it wasn't really love to begin with. It is, "normal," for the romantically inclined to think that when the rocks in their head fit the holes in someone else's that, by golly, they have a relationship. Nope. Romance is about courtship and mating rituals. It's feels like fun because that is the way we are wired. But the sad fact is that infatuation is ALL about projecting our image onto someone else and getting bummed out when they don't match our expectations, or our image, well at all. It's not loving to project my baggage, my wants and my issues onto another person. It is not loving for me to psychically grab my lover by the throat while she grabs me by the nuts. And yet, this is precisely how we end up getting married. It is not enough for a "normal" person to WANT to be with someone, we have to have the extra security of ensuring that a NEED comes into play. "Normal" ain't "healthy." Healthy involves a fair amount of reality and truth in how the two people feel about each other and who they really are. Love is a healthy expression, and romantic infatuation can be that, too, but we have to realize that our ego fantasies are all about concealing our deep hatred of ourselves and others beneath the wholesome motives of being, "normal." Blow right through normal and find healthy. Love is there in my experience. In the meantime, you can try starting at the ending of the relationship. All the disappointment and betrayal and abandonment gets experienced up front, leaving the two partners available to actually let their guards down and, with nothing to prove, move back towards the feeling of falling in love for the first time.

I used to be an IT manager over about 7 people in the educational testing industry. The educational testing industry was my bread and butter for a long time. I think I've outgrown that now. I'm tired of stubbing my toes on people who just don't get, "it." I did spend two years doing all sorts of coding and designing -- mainframe, database, web -- for the financial services industry. If there's one thing I've had reasonable luck with it's investing. I bought into a gold fund in the Summer of 2002 and it's done very well. Not a long term investment, I don't believe, but at least I've made back my money, and then some, from the crash. How would you know if you were emotionally retarded? If you were self centered and narcissistic, you wouldn't -- other people's feelings would not clue you in whatsoever. But that's where most of my information comes from...watching other people's responses to my behavior. There's also just a general inventory of the number and types of people you find yourself relating with, or feeling "safe" with. Booze is not good for emotional or psychological growth of any kind. Especially as we get older and our serotonin systems start slowing down. You can get support to help you do that even in Britain. Plenty of good people in AA over there. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking...not a "strong" desire or an "honest" desire, just a simple desire. If you go to what's called an "open" AA meeting, you should fit in rather well. It's one network of people that is nearly global and always good for the kind of support you are seeking. A strong indicator for adult chronic depression is childhood trauma. Not being able to recall major parts of your childhood makes the diagnosis of childhood trauma very likely. Narcissism and self centeredness are also indicators that point in that general direction. Like I believe I've mentioned, paul four seven five at witty dot com is my email address...we can forego the middle-man here and just talk directly and privately about ourselves. I think we might be able to help each other. I know there's a real estate auction this coming Tuesday that would be nice to flip some properties and get my head above water for a while. What I've been doing, somewhat unsuccessfully, is spreading myself very thin. I keep up with my job search agents online, try to keep up technically, investigate moneymaking opportunities when they appear, help other people with their computer problems, help other people with their recovery and/or emotional problems, and then go out and scout out the places I'd really like to work at and fill out an application. Or two. What I think I need to do is simply commit to doing one thing full speed and that one thing would have to be efficient and effective at generating income. If that one thing is sales, fine. I haven't sold since I was in my 20's, but I did well for the two years I was involved in it. If I believe in the product/service, I can get people excited enough to close them. A sociopath? Hmmm. Well, if you WERE a true sociopathic personality, you wouldn't have much of a conscience and you wouldn't feel much in the way of loneliness. Sociopathic tendencies are a possibility, but I'm not very fond of labelling people and watching them sink to my lowered expectations for their behavior. Much better to simply notice the behavior and observe where the blockages are. So email me and let me hear about how you skin the cat, so to speak.... Mr. Greg

...you need to, "let go." Four months is too long to go without giving yourself closure. Waiting for someone who was not astute enough to pick up on the fact that you were emotionally abusive in the first place means that she, too, is emotionally abusive. She waited for you to become vulnerable and then, quite unconsciously, began dropping bombs on the relationship waiting for you to explode into the behavior she needed to complete her own dysfunctional cycle. She is abusing you, and you have been abusing each other, for far too long. It was a toxic relationship not because you are bad people but because you are two people who were never taught how to be in partnership with another human being. Use the hurt and the anger to rebuild your perspective into something that will more attractive to healthier partners. Once you cross the threshold, this woman will mean nothing like what she means to you today.

...what I read in your prior post were not the words of someone whose mental faculties were particularly acute. If you are depressed, your faculties will move like you are in a tar pit. If you are coming out of a depression, it may seem like your mental faculties are sharper than ever, and depending on how long that depression lasted it may simply be situational. Once the decision FOR SUICIDE has been made, the depression can sometimes lift...this is still not a good thing. The lifting of the depression is, but not the reason why it has lifted. My computer -- CPU, Motherboard -- fried last week after about week into the grief over the loss of my wife's grandchild. It was pretty shocking to walk into an ER room and see that yellow-skinned infant wrapped in swaddling, the parents and my wife with blood-red eyes. It's just been one thing after another, y'know? I feel like I'm at my wit's end here...able to function, but one of more serious disappointment and I'm not sure what I'll do. I'm at some sort of jumping off point to be sure; I've sent out hundreds of resumes and applications and, well, I'm not 25 years old anymore, and I'm not from India...so my prospects are pretty grim. About the only thing brightening my day is watching the entire Bush Administration getting bitch-slapped around the Beltway...they have been a significant part of MY problems for a good long while now -- economically, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally. I am aware of what my PART in my problems are, and have been, at least more than the average bear. I simply detest those who abuse their power and yet am attracted to them like a magnet. I can be, and have been, a good subordinate to SOME bosses throughout my career, but when it comes to what I think is right and wrong, if they simply rely on their organizational position for all of their authority, I just can not stop myself from obsessing about their demise in one form or other. I was about 5 years old when my father started saying some really hurtful and bigotted things to be older half-sister -- she was effectively my surrogate mother and about 9 years my senior. I remember telling him very matter of factly that he had no right to make her cry and feel bad and he unloaded on me. I remember flying backwards through the air and ending up with a fat lip. I developed a stealthier method of defying him from that day, forward, and it really hurt me more than him. But knowing doesn't help. I realize that I've said and done some things in defiance of authority both where I used to work (I was a manager and I thought that meant something -- it didn't), and to the Bush administration (I immediately began writing letters, letters, letters to every journalist I had any kind of relationship with, and several letters to the editor of online publications), and this crusade probably got me into trouble, too. Sad, but true, that speaking your mind and calling them like you see them can have an impact on how you are viewed accross the board. But in the end I know I was correct...Bush and the CIA set 9/11 up and killed our own citizens in order to put forth a Fourth Reich that, they hoped, would be superior to the Third one which the Bush Family was complicit in supporting in the first place. Alot of innocent people have been murdered because of the games these bastards have played and alot of US foreign policy decisions were made in our name that we had nothing to do with as a people and as a government. Specifically in my case, Bushes', "No Child Left Behind," was simply a cover that allowed his cronies to devastate the Educational Testing Industry's infrastructure. If I had kept my mouth shut and been a good pawn, I might have been spared getting laid-off; but I just could not. And I could no longer justify wasting my time pursuing an organizational agenda that was designed to exclude people whom I felt were worth salvaging. So now they're hurting and they will do their level best to keep Reed from knowing what is REALLY going on. I've seen it happen before. These are tough people, even if they are technically inclined. I took the projects on that were costing them the most in late penalties and saved them 5 out of the six million they had gone into the hole over. They still laid me off and the more astute, but organizationally incompetent, took the credit. That would be fine but I'm beginning to suspect that my good name is being impugned by these slimy bastards because, well, when word gets around and questions are asked, someone has to come up with an answer within the old organization. And they've shown no compunction against lying to save their own behinds. I've heard through the grapevine that Reed has installed their own CIO over the mess that I was a part of...I offered my services but no one has gotten back to me. Before it's over they will wish they had because if the new CIO is truly Reed's guy, they will have him out of there inside of 16 months. Guaranteed. Or they will sell the company, if they're smart. But, enough about me, whaddya think about me? I have to try and get my newly refurbished PC up and running and get off of this old hackneyed machine. No hard disk speed or space, and too much memory to be useful, but not enough to make a Ramdisk out of. Something's going on with you and I'm not quite sure what it is. You're defending yourself well, intellectually, but your problems are almost entirely emotional. It is possible to be highly intelligent, yet emotionally retarded. That retardation is generally induced by childhood trauma. Therapy won't help until a firmer psychological foundation has been poured and allowed to set up. No drinking, Fletche. No smoking grass, either. You can't rebuild your perspective using only half of your nervous system. And it sounds like you need to keep your chin up right now, so the few moments of "not feeling," that drugs and alcohol afford won't come anywhere near the price you will pay in increased depression and feelings of worthlessness. You should email me at paul475 at witty dot com and let me know how you are doing. I don't know if you can help me, but I know I can be of some help to you, even if you don't think so right now.

Well, I've been out of work since November of last year...I could use the money more than the UN. It really does sound like you're very depressed. All the symptoms are there -- the hopelessness, the joylessness, the slowed motor and mental processes. This is a serious condition, a medical condition, and it can be treated. Effectively. And it will feel like a ten ton boulder has been lifted from you. My suggestion to you is to get to a psychiatrist and give yourself a few more weeks on the planet for the medications to work. You've waited this long to declare utter defeat, you can certainly wait a few more weeks -- if the pain will be on the decrease. One more thing...you will have to quit drinking, at least for a good long while. Alcohol is a depressive and that's the last thing you need in your body right now. I can't make you want to live, but if you want to live I can certainly help you hang around and turn the corner on this kind of pain. I know it well enough to know that it is a very temporary thing. It won't hurt like this forever, I promise. Hope to see you around the ol' cyberquad... Greg

Jak se mais? ...If you haven't noticed already, the IT business, in general, is under direct assault by the ruling elite. At least from a US perspective this appears to be the case. Our IT unemployment rate is like 60%. The business idea is impressive and very worthwhile. Your website could be made to tell a much more effective story for alot less money than you realize. No, I'm not talking Bangalore. God, if there was anyone worthy living in that sh*hole they would be a rare find, indeed. It appears all the worthy talent headed for Canada. Socialized medicine comes through when all else fails. That and a higher wage. What you have there is a good base and I know some folks who can hook you up with a network of developers (unless you already know a WSI representative of your own) that can give you a multimillion dollar look for less than 10 grand. Maybe even less than 3 grand. Nothing in it for me, just hooking people up with employment...if you want something you gotta give it away, first. This alchy b-friend...Fletche, there's no accident who meets. If he's an alchy and she picked him, she also picked YOU. Have you taken an objective look at your behavior patterns around controlled substances, alcohol and pills? I mean, if the bastard is going to steal your wife from you, you can at least get the most you can from the experience. Gotta have a boundary in place...no more bullshit from the ex. It's an open invitation to be injured. I don't care how good anything about that relationship was, rat poison can smell as sweet as freshly baked bread. I'm having a helluva time watching this woman go behind my back and lie about me to my friends as some sort of twisted ploy to get me to surrender to her charms. (??). Obviously there is a thinking disorder running rampant in her brain, but this time, I'm not going to allow pity to confuse my emotions with love. I deserve the best and so do you. If we work on our own insides and take steps to make the changes indicated, healthier choices will start showing up in our lives. Take good care...Greg

So the inevitable has occurred. The woman who simply had to buffalo herself into my life while I was in the middle of therapy, is packing up her shit. G'bye. She's tired of *my* shit. I've been out of work since November. It has been tough times, but we've managed to be pretty good to each other through it all. But she insists on playing with her meds and we're both bipolar -- she's got a somewhat more chronic affliction history than I do, but her stuff needs to stop being important to me right now. Right now, my head is swimming. She says I'm mean and nasty. That I haven't changed. She met me in the middle of therapy, others who have known me longer say that I have changed. She's been along for the bumpy ride that I did my best to discourage her from taking. Some have said that I saved her life. Perhaps I did. I got a maid and a somewhat satisfying sex partner out of the deal and she got to get her life stabilized. It was the best I could do at that time because I just knew I couldn't tolerate alot of extra bumps in the road. I needed stability, too. Well, one year out of therapy and now I get this slap in the face. I don't feel like I can handle it all. My nervous system is just shot. I can't allow a comeback after something as traumatic as this. Meds or no meds, she's just not inclined to grow up. She thinks everything is fine and that she is the graceful and dignified one, but I only see that on the surface. To live with, I'm dealing with someone who simply can not put labels on their feelings and talk about them. She vomits them up when she gets fed up with something that's not going according to her plan. Whatever. I love this woman, but I am not IN LOVE with her. I've sort of given up on romantic love ever since I read, and understood, A Course in Miracles. It would be nice to have some infatuation and some passion, but I do fear what the old me did with that stuff in the past. Keeping things somewhat cordial and distant, as opposed to being entangled and enmeshed on a daily basis, seems to work for me. I guess self control is important to me because I was out of control for so many years -- like 37 of them. And many of those 37 were lived around alot of out of control people. I feel sadness. I feel hurt. I feel discounted. I feel disrespected. I feel anger. I feel rage. I feel fear. I feel grief. I feel vulnerable. I feel violated. I feel unimportant and insignificant. I feel like crying, but the tears don't come easily for me. I feel excited about the future. I feel worry about my present. I feel overwhelmed. I feel alone. I feel lonely. And sometimes all a person can do is just sit with their feelings, as uncomfortable and jarring as they are, and just feel them. Oop. Door opened. I have to go now.

...but some hot, naughty sex sounds really good to me. Notice that when I put it just like *that*, it turns you off. It wouldn't turn off someone who was sexually aggressive, and it probably would turn on someone I was intimately involved with. It sounds to me that you've found yourself a very caring, very loving and very willing emotional cripple. Not that you are going to be feeling much better about now, but my point is that all of this dilly dallying around is really dishonest. And when things between two people are dishonest, someone usually gets hurt. And since it seems you were the more accomodating partner (allowing the situation to occur in the first place), you are the one at risk here. Both of you are hurting; both of you want to be nurtured back to some sort of stable level of self esteem and are willing to risk losing more self esteem in order to accomplish that. Not smart. Done all the time, of course, but it's not smart. Like it or not, much of what you mentioned as being indicative of strong emotional feelings for you can be purely mechanical stuff...been there, done that. The way to throw a monkey wrench into this sort of compulsive rebound behavior is to quit trying to SOUND honest with each other and start BEING really honest with each other. Here's a possible script: "I really like you, but, as we've talked about before, I'm an emotional retard right about now and don't know, or realize, what it is that I'm trying to do here. I feel really powerless to stop myself from wanting you, and wanting to be with you, because I am really emotionally raw and vulnerable. So any further physical involvement between has got to come with the condition that there are no promises, no strings, no commitments, and just alot of friendship, support and real love. If you can't hang with that, I understand, and I'm not even sure that I can. I don't want to turn this into a free-for-all ***fest where we see each other as a last resort because the healthier folks out there can spot us from a distance, or there was a mix up in our regular dating pattern. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that this has been nice, but it is a trap for both of us if either of us are unable to walk away at any time as friends, be grateful for the love and support we received from each other up to this point in time, but recognize that romance and partnership were just not in the cards for us." How's that for a nice cold shower? Should be a giant hard-off for anyone who's just looking to use you...and a very frightening caveat to anyone who thinks that, "love conquers all." Love does set all things right, but where things end up depends ALOT on where they started in the first place. By being this honest, you'll accomplish two things. 1. You'll effectively put the relationship on more solid footing than it has been on up to this point in time. If it falls apart, it wasn't worth the trouble, believe me. If it gets stronger -- hey -- you've got something worth looking into. 2. You won't be saying anything that isn't true for any OTHER relationship that's already out there, or ever will be out there. I'm sorry if any of this sounds insulting, because it's not meant to sound that way. Sometimes I need to be told stuff I already know just because, in the heat of passion and delusion, I forget who I am...part of that self esteem-for-some-lovin' thang I touched on earlier. Anyway, this is what I would do if I were in YOUR shoes. Hope it all works out...I know it will work out for the best no matter what happens.

...but that doesn't mean it will be easy. You ask your ex in the nicest, most sincere tone of voice that you can, to find another place to live. You won't be able to heal your hurt, much less control any outcome, that involves dealing with the distraction of having other people in your face all the time. If he wants to be a bigamist of some note, and you're into that, you can ask for a more formal arrangement involving his current girlfriend. But my sense is that this whole thing is overwhelming and you need to get some time and space between you and this emotionally abusive relationship. Best wishes....

...a two week break of zero contact seems like the best approach. Both people need to be clear what it's about, what the rules are, and where you will meet up to discuss your relationship at the end of the two weeks. That's the general approach. Read Dr. Susan Forward's book on Obsessive Love for more details. My specific sense about your situation is that you are tolerating, at least, emotional abuse from your partner. I can tell you from experience that this almost always escalates into physical abuse and violence. My dear, you have a ka-ka magnet inside of you that you have to learn to turn, "off," or you will simply find another abuser to be heartbroken over. In the words of Maya Angelou, "When someone SHOWS you whom they are for the first time, believe them."

...law school AND therapy?? Therapy and therapists get a bad rap, and sometimes it's deserved. But true therapy is NOT something that should be attempted while undergoing the stress of a degree program at any competitive university. It will shred a person into little bits. Therapy changes a person's relationship with themselves and everything around them, including other people. And when we are close to a person engaged in this level of self discovery, it FORCES us to go to the same depth of self understanding, or bail out of the experience. There is NO ACCIDENT about who couples up and who sticks together for longer than 90 days. We are each other's angels, and we meet when it is time for something important to learn about ourselves. Real love is a very scary thing because either party can pull the plug on the physical relationship at any time for ANY reason. Love requires that we let go and honor our beloved's journey. As long as this woman is in therapy, she won't be stable enough to have an LTR with. If stability was what you were looking for or thinking that you needed, guess what? You have a perceptual deficit in need of attention and repair. There is NO WAY IN HELL that a person who CHOOSES stability in their life would choose to be with someone who is in therapy and wants to get a law degree. Wanting is one thing, and it's easy enough to achieve -- simply demand that the impossible be possible and you will WANT for alot of things. But choosing is a bit more difficult because it involves acceptance of the situation as it exists, and then taking action steps to prepare one's self for actually obtaining what one is choosing to have in their life. Take responsibility for your choices up to this point in time and realize that you are precisely where you have chosen to be. Now, what do you want to do about it?

...at work in the world. When I get them all figured out, I'll probably write a book or something. That may take a while, and meanwhile, people need support. If it hurts to play games, then quit playing them. With games, there's always a winner and a loser, by definition. When someone loves someone, they want everyone to win. That's what those great feelings are about. Unfortunetly, we can be the only one capable of feeling them in a given relationship. Let go of sex as a part of love. Go for the love, first. To have love, be love.