Torment in the mind

[HeWhoIs]

I was just horsing around with my nephew on Facebook when I dashed out something that made sense for once:

 

"An imaginary tormentor is worse than a real one, because he never goes away."

 

Think about that the next time you want to turn your former husband or wife into silly putty, and that person doesn't even know you're thinking about them.

[waffle]

I wanted to turn him into something, but silly putty wasn't it.

[journeynow]

Ah, yes. True, we sometimes torture ourselves with our own thoughts.

 

More along those lines:

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

-- Mark Twain

 

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

-- Don Herold

 

Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which will never happen.

-- James Russel Lowell

 

Some of your hurts you have cured,

And the sharpest you still have survived,

But what torments of grief you endured

From the evil which never arrived.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.

-- Edgar Watson Howe

 

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

-- Thomas Jefferson

 

There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.

-- Josh Billings

 

There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.

-- Seneca

 

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

-- Michel de Montaigne

[HeWhoIs]

I always loved this quote until those great many troubles really did happen to me:

 

 

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

-- Mark Twain

 

 

Just see my other threads - no reason to repeat myself or completely derail my own thread. My son went to one therapist and she was so surprised when he told her what he had been through that he felt he had to console her, so he didn't go back to that therapist.

[Onigirilove]

I was just horsing around with my nephew on Facebook when I dashed out something that made sense for once:

 

"An imaginary tormentor is worse than a real one, because he never goes away."

 

Think about that the next time you want to turn your former husband or wife into silly putty, and that person doesn't even know you're thinking about them.

 

I really like this, because it can be interpreted differently from different points of view and from different points in a persons lifetime and situation. The imaginary tormentor can be anything really, from a memory, a real person, a regret, a thought, feeling, or even fighting the invisible man in yourself. Thank you for sharing this!

[Hermes]

Worse still, one is allowing the individual to flit around the corridors of one's mind. So the "ex" or whoever, still is exercising power, from afar, and you are giving them that power.