u/AzureRipper

I'm going through some difficult therapy topics at the moment and there are times when I feel depleted and low on energy. It's not exactly a depressed state, because it's temporary. It's more that my nervous system feels depleted and I need some emotional rest.

On days like these, I have the physical energy to cook but struggle to figure out what to make. I usually crave something comforting and happy, that would cheer me up.

What are your go-to "happy" meals to make when you're feel sad and need something to cheer you up?

Just saw Unshattered yesterday. Loved it and cried at multiple places!

One question that kept coming to me - why where they recording themselves in 2022-23? I'm not talking about parts in the studio when they were making new music, but the stuff before that. Specifically, the conversations with Mike, Phoenix and Joe, where they were talking about getting back to together and just hanging out and making music. The recordings are also clearly a professional recording setup.

Why would they be doing pro recordings of these conversations before they even decided to get the band together?

I live abroad and my mom insists on calling me every weekend to keep in touch. I say "insist" because she gets anxious if I don't call. Even if I've told her in advance that I'll be busy or that I'm traveling somewhere, she'll still call me "just to say hi".

90% of the content of the phone calls is her talking about herself. Not just "talking" either, but basically ranting about her life and telling me about all her life problems. These range from her issues with my dad, issues with my brother, and a lot of other problems that basically stem from her refusing to set boundaries... Until last year, I was still somewhat invested and would try to listen and give her advice. But she never does anything about the root cause, so I stopped giving advice and started to just passively listen while doing other stuff or when I was out for a walk.

Today I tried an experiment. She once again started talking about my brother and his issues with his life (what do I even care?!) and I thought "what if I play music on top of the phone call?" Turns out, I can do that and hear both the music and the call. So I continued my walk for the next 30-35 mins while listening to my music (Expedition 33 soundtrack, in case anyone is interested).

She didn't even notice.

Normally, when in a two-way conversation, most people can tell when the other person is checked out. If I was in a conversation with someone and they were clearly uninterested, I would change the topic to find some common ground. Nope. She kept talking.

Every week, she asks me the same 5-6 questions. I could basically play bingo with this and win every time.

• How's the weather?
• Have you done your grocery shopping for the week?
• What are you making for lunch and dinner?
• Maybe she'll ask me questions about how some of my friends are doing.

Today's experiment felt like confirmation of something I've been noticing for a while - that my mom basically talks to herself while on the phone with me. I'm just an excuse for her to feel like she has someone to talk to. I could stick a dumb chatbot in front of her and she wouldn't notice the difference.

I came across the concept of "emotional homelessness" today. It says that a lot of people who experienced trauma or otherwise grew up feeling unsafe or without a sense of belonging experience this feeling of rootlessness or just not feeling "at home" anywhere.

I never felt at home growing up. There was no place that was ever safe, except in my imagination. I used to experience a fleeting sense of home when I would have sleepovers with some close friends but that was it.

The first time I ever felt at home was when I moved out and moved away for college. Being far away from my family - I experienced safety and belonging for the first time ever. Once I graduated, I got myself a job that involved a lot of travel, so that I could avoid my family. Other people would hate the travel and wanted to spend time at home. I loved the travel because the constant movement felt safe.

Over the years, I've learned multiple languages and moved around a lot. I now live abroad and people often ask me if I feel homesick or miss my family or hometown. I don't. I never had a true emotional home in any of those places. I only found home once I managed to get far away from my family and the environment I grew up in. There's no home in my family of origin. The home that I have now is something I've painstakingly created over the years, through lots of therapy and hard work and my trusty imagination.

My sense of home is actually still in my imagination but made real through EMDR. It's a small countryside home in Japan, next to a small stream, close to forests. There's me, my younger parts, lots of pets, my ideal mother figure, and my EMDR therapist who occasionally visits us.

After all these years of being emotionally homeless, I finally found a home.

My current focus in therapy is a lot around family and especially my parents. They came from poor families and worked really hard to immigrate and build better lives for themselves/us. They provided all the material needs - money, home, nice vacations, educational opportunities, extra curricular activities, etc. I have no complaints there. Where they completely missed the mark was the emotional and relational side of things - being emotionally present & available, creating a psychologicaly & emotionally safe environment at home, role modeling healthy relationships, and so on. Nothing. Zero.

Over the past few weeks, I've been slowly coming to accept a few things.

First, this is about their limitations and it has nothing to do with me. They probably didn't experience any kind of safety when they were kids, so maybe they just don't what safe and healthy relationships actually feel like.

Second, there's nothing I can do to make them change. My entire life, I've been stucking in the mindset that, if I just do something more or something different, maybe they will finally love me. That will never happen. I cannot teach them how to be emotionally present or healthy. If they're unwilling to learn, there's nothing I can do that will change them. (Here, I'm not saying that they are incapable of feeling love, but that they are incapable of showing and communicating that love in a healthy way.) This comes with a lot of grief because it means letting go of hope. All my life, there's been this hope that "change is possible, if I do enough". Letting go of this hope is difficult but also freeing - I'm no longer chasing the impossible, nor am I taking responsibility for their limitations.

Third, there's probably Maslow's heirarchy of needs at work here. They struggled in their lives to meet more basic needs, which I take for granted. Now, I have the luxury of complaining about more higher order things that they probably never experienced either. It doesn't diminish my experience but it does help to put things into perspective.

Lastly, but probably most powerful - they are my family but they're not my only family. I've grapppled with wanting to disown them emotionally because I struggle to see them as family when there's no love or emotional connection here. It occured to me today that, maybe they're just part of a broader constellation called family. They're the provider part of my family - who've provided for me financially, materially, and in so many other ways. Then, I have other people who are part of my family, which provide for my emotional needs. In a way, I'm expanding the definition of family and assigning different roles to people within that. Maybe this isn't relevant for everyone, but I feel the need to label these relationships 😅 This expanded definition makes me more willing to stay in that middle ground of "they provided A but not B and that's okay".

My current focus in therapy is a lot around family and especially my parents. They came from poor families and worked really hard to immigrate and build better lives for themselves/us. They provided all the material needs - money, home, nice vacations, educational opportunities, extra curricular activities, etc. I have no complaints there. Where they completely missed the mark was the emotional and relational side of things - being emotionally present & available, creating a psychologicaly & emotionally safe environment at home, role modeling healthy relationships, and so on. Nothing. Zero.

Over the past few weeks, I've been slowly coming to accept a few things.

First, this is about their limittaions and it has nothing to do with me. They probably didn't experience any kind of safety when they were kids, so maybe they just don't what safe and healthy relationships actually feel like.

Second, there's nothing I can do to make them change. My entire life, I've been stucking in the mindset that, if I just do something more or something different, maybe they will finally love me. That will never happen. I cannot teach them how to be emotionally present or healthy. If they're unwilling to learn, there's nothing I can do that will change them. (Here, I'm not saying that they are incapable of feeling love, but that they are incapable of showing and communicating that love in a healthy way.) This comes with a lot of grief because it means letting go of hope. All my life, there's been this hope that "change is possible, if I do enough". Letting go of this hope is difficult but also freeing - I'm no longer chasing the impossible, nor am I taking responsibility for their limitations.

Third, there's probably Maslow's heirarchy of needs at work here. They struggled in their lives to meet more basic needs, which I take for granted. Now, I have the luxury of complaining about more higher order things that they probably never experienced either.

Lastly, but probably most powerful - they are my family but they're not my only family. I've grapppled with wanting to disown them emotionally because I struggle to see them as family when there's no love or emotional connection here. It occured to me today that, maybe they're just part of a broader constellation called family. They're the provider part of my family - who've provided for me financially, materially, and in so many other ways. Then, I have other people who are part of my family, which provide for my emotional needs. In a way, I'm expanding the definition of family and assigning different roles to people within that. Maybe this isn't relevant for everyone, but I feel the need to label these relationships 😅 This expanded definition makes me more willing to stay in that middle ground of "they provided A but not B and that's okay".

This question might be somewhat specific to those who've done some kind of parts work and are able to distinguish younger parts from the present/adult self.

I often experienced this feeling of deep loneliness and disconnection that nothing seems to resolve. Even when I'm with people, there's this feeling of somehow being disconnected. Just today, I had a social event at work that was really nice, but I still ended up feeling disconnected. It feels like it's my younger parts carrying the loneliness, and the present-day social activities aren't meeting their needs.

Does anyone else experience this? Have you found some technique or method to reliably meet the younger parts' need for connection?

I've been doing EMDR mixed with parts work for a long-time, so I'm familiar with those modalities.

Når jeg reise til Oslo, la jeg merke til (noticed?) stedene som "Nordmarka" eller "Østmarka". Hvorfor er det kalles "marka" i stedet for "skog"?

Annet, mellom lufthavn og flyplass, hvilket ord er riktig på norsk? Jeg kjenner om lufthavn er en tysk ord som er vanlig på dansk. Også, jeg har hørt Gardemoen kalles som "Oslo lufthavn". Men i Bergen bruker de "flyplass", likesom svensk. Er det en dialekt forskjell eller er det en riktig ord?

Does EMDR work for processing disgust towards other people?

I had my most recent session last Thursday. Since then, there's been further layers showing up (as it always does). I have a hunch that one of the emotions I'm feeling is disgust towards me dad. This feels a bit strange because I've felt anger and fear towards him, but never disgust. In fact, disgust towards other people has never come up as a theme. There has been shame and disgust around myself that has come up, but not towards other people.

The disgust is primarily around my dad just being a piece of shit. I feel disgusted by him and angry towards him.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

I've had a few rough weeks recently. A combination of work-related stress (which is now over) and some difficult topics in therapy. I've also had some other present-day stuff going on that kept me busy and didn't leave much room to really process things and let it all settle.

I'm taking a day off tomorrow to give my nervous system some space to calm down and recover after several weeks (probably close to 2 months actually) of nervous system activation.

I'm struggling to decide what to do tomorrow, so looking for ideas :)

I think I would like to do something close to nature, but the weather forecast is predicting rain, so I might need a backup option in case it rains. I could also just do something at home, BUT if I stay home, I want a clear plan of what I'm doing, so I don't end up doomscrolling all day long.

I've probably asked some variations of this question already in recent weeks, but this is an ongoing topic in therapy for me, so different layers keep coming up.

I'm currently making my notes for this week's session, and it occured to me that - maybe my parents are simply incapable of real emotional connection. I know they were emotionally unavailable/neglecting for my entire childhood (I'm 32 now) and I used to believe that they didn't love me or that there was something wrong with me. Now I understand that it was more to do with emotional unavailability and immaturity.

I know that my parents basically hate each other, or just barely tolerate each other. The only reason they're still together is because they didn't see divorce as a valid option. I think they also did the whole "family and kids" things because they were supposed to, not because they actually wanted to.

However, the challenge for me is that I'm a deeply emotional person and I struggle with the idea of being in a relationship with someone where there is no real connection. It feels fake and it feels like I'm pretending to be someone I'm not. Moreover, I don't think my parents even know who I really am. They never accepted me as real me and I grew up pretending and masking to feel safe. Being queer has A LOT to do with this, but it's also a lot of cultural/preference differences. I felt more afraid coming out as a non-vegetarian than as a queer person..

Anyway, this leaves me in a place where I'm struggling to make sense of my relationship with them. Is there role of "parents" really just the role of "providers" (since there is no real relationship here)? Do I see them just as people I'm related to? Or is it about re-defining my expectations from the role of a parent? And is this pattern rampant in South Asian/immigrant families or is it just my family?

Right now is 8 pm where I'm writing from. I live alone and today is one of those days when I'm feeling super lonely at home. I came home from work, went to the gym, came home and had dinner... and I've just felt very blah and alone since then. The past few weeks, I've been playing a new video game (Halo: Campaign Evolved) in the evenings after work. Yesterday and today, I just haven't felt like it.

Instead, I've just been doomscrolling social media and reddit. I'm looking for connection of some kind but don't know where to get it.

What do peeps do when you feel like this?

My go-to solution is to keep myself distracted with activities or some kind of entertainment (like video games or books) but it's just that - a distraction.

I've put on some YouTube vlog channels for now, just so I can hear someone talk.

Right now is 8 pm where I'm writing from. Today is one of those days when I'm feeling super lonely at home. I came home from work, went to the gym, came home and had dinner... and I've just felt very blah and alone since then. The past few weeks, I've been playing a new video game (Halo: Campaign Evolved) in the evenings after work. Yesterday and today, I just haven't felt like it.

Instead, I've just been doomscrolling social media and reddit. I'm looking for connection of some kind but don't know where to get it.

What do peeps do when you feel like this?

My go-to solution is to keep myself distracted with activities or some kind of entertainment (like video games or books) but it's just that - a distraction.

I've put on some YouTube vlog channels for now, just so I can hear someone talk.

I made homemade pizza just for myself for the first time ever yesterday. Store bough pizza base, pizza sauce, pepperoni slices, some mushrooms, and pre-shredded mozzarella.

I realized afterward that all the ingredients I bought easily added up to the cost of a pre-made or frozen pizza that I could bake at home. Now, the pizza sauce and other ingredients are enough to make 3-4 more pizzas but that would mean I end up eating pizza every day for the next 4 days.

Can I freeze the sauce and pepperoni and mozzarella? And then what's the best way to use it the next time I want to make pizza at home?

On a per portion basis, it's cheaper to buy all the ingredients and assemble at home. But for a single pizza, it feels like I might be better off just buying a pizza instead of the ingredients.

I made homemade pizza just for myself for the first time ever yesterday. Store bough pizza base, pizza sauce, pepperoni slices, some mushrooms, and pre-shredded mozzarella.

I realized afterward that all the ingredients I bought easily added up to the cost of a pre-made or frozen pizza that I could bake at home. Now, the pizza sauce and other ingredients are enough to make 3-4 more pizzas but that would mean I end up eating pizza every day for the next 4 days.

Can I freeze the sauce and pepperoni and mozzarella? And then what's the best way to use it the next time I want to make pizza at home?

On a per portion basis, it's cheaper to buy all the ingredients and assemble at home. But for a single pizza, it feels like I might be better off just buying a pizza instead of the ingredients.

(I'm still raw from a therapy session, so this is an emotional brain dump.)

I've been doing trauma therapy for a few years now and currently working on a topic around my family and my mom specifically. My dad is an abusive asshole - that's easy. My relationship to my mom is much complicated because I can see that her intent has usually been in the right place... but she's still sucked as a mother. She's a case of incompetent and negligent parenting, despite good intent.

I also recognize that a lot of my parents' circumstances has been their own generational trauma. They both grew up poor and had their own struggles growing up. On top of that my mom is a massive people pleaser, probably out of her own insecurities. And both my parents have the recurring line of "we did so much for you but you are ungrateful".

Thing is - I don't think they did anything for me or my sibling. I think it was their own insecurities and need to prove themselves that motivated them. I don't think they even wanted kids, they just did it because they were expected to. All this leads to a family environment that feels like it's just a "cardboard family" as I refer to it in therapy. It's hollow, with no real relationships to hold it together. But my mom still clings to it as if her life depends on it.

I feel angry towards them because I think they could have made different choices. Stayed in India if they didn't want to leave their families. Not had kids if they didn't really want to be parents. Not blindly followed societal expectations. Not stayed married if they hated each other. But my therapist asked me today - "did they really have a choice?"

I don't know. I guess there's a part of me that wants to believe they had a choice so I can blame them for it. If they didn't have a choice, that means I have nowhere else to direct my anger. It's easier to blame specific individuals than to accept that circumstances (and people) sometimes just suck.

I'm currently working through a lot of grief related to my parents being emotionally immature, neglectful, and pretty shit at parenting. They did a pretty good job of providing financial and material things, which I'm grateful for, but that's all they did. I grew up in a family devoid of love, affection and real human connection.

I've come up with the metaphor of being an "emotional orphan". That I had people providing for me but they were just caregivers, not real parents. That comes with a weird mix of grief and relief. I feel sad at the idea of being an orphan but it also gives me relief because I can finally let go of expectations. If I'm an orphan, I won't have any parental expectations.

Then I remember that I used to imagine this as a kid too. I had this story in my head that my real parents had died and left me with a foster family. And that that's why no one loved me. Now of course I'm starting to realize that they're completely incapable of loving anyone, including themselves.

Anyone else feel like this?

I'm currently working through a lot of grief related to my parents being emotionally immature and pretty shit at parenting. They did a pretty good job of providing financial and material things, which I'm grateful for, but that's all they did. I grew up in a family devoid of love, affection and real human connection.

I've come up with the metaphor of being an "emotional orphan". That I had people providing for me but they were just caregivers, not real parents. That comes with a weird mix of grief and relief. I feel sad at the idea of being an orphan but it also gives me relief because I can finally let go of expectations. If I'm an orphan, I won't have any parental expectations.

Then I remember that I used to imagine this as a kid too. I had this story in my head that my real parents had died and left me with a foster family. And that that's why no one loved me.

Anyone else feel like this?

I'm 32, currently re-playing Halo CE (through MCC) as "preparation" for playing the remake (Campaign Evolved). I want to re-play the original before the remake to have a frame of reference for what they changed.

I played the original Halo CE when I was a teenager. I think my first attempt at the game was when I 10 or so but I couldn't finish it then. I finally managed to finish it when I was 15-16.

Now, while replaying CE, the game feels much harder than it felt when I was a teenager, even though I'm playing the same difficulty (Normal). It's not that the gameplay difficulty has objectively changed but my tolerance for experiencing any kind of setbacks or mistakes feels different. I feel scared and stressed out in sections that I don't remember being scary. And I'm relying on a lot of video walkthroughs for shortcuts to get through the game. These didn't even exist when I was a kid! I just played through the game through trial and error and had to figure things out. That's why it took me so long to finish it - there were limited resources if you got stuck. So why do I need to look up shortcuts now?

Even with some other games, I start to get frustrated and agitated if I have to repeat a section more than twice. As a teenager, I remember several missions (in different games) which took 10+ tries to finish, but I would just practice and get through it.

Anyone else experience this? I can't tell if it's just age, lack of time, other adult life stressors, or it's just my nervous system/stress tolerance that is completely fucked.

I'm 32, currently re-playing Halo CE (through MCC) as "preparation" for playing the remake (Campaign Evolved). I want to re-play the original before the remake to have a frame of reference for what they changed.

I played the original Halo CE when I was a teenager. I think my first attempt at the game was when I 10 or so but I couldn't finish it then. I finally managed to finish it when I was 15-16.

Now, while replaying CE, the game feels much harder than it felt when I was a teenager, even though I'm playing the same difficulty (Normal). It's not that the gameplay difficulty has objectively changed but my tolerance for experiencing any kind of setbacks or mistakes feels different. I feel scared and stressed out in sections that I don't remember being scary. And I'm relying on a lot of video walkthroughs for shortcuts to get through the game. These didn't even exist when I was a kid! I just played through the game through trial and error and had to figure things out. That's why it took me so long to finish it - there were limited resources if you got stuck. So why do I need to look up shortcuts now?

Even with some other games, I start to get frustrated and agitated if I have to repeat a section more than twice. As a teenager, I remember several missions (in different games) which took 10+ tries to finish, but I would just practice and get through it.

Anyone else experience this? I can't tell if it's just age, lack of time, other adult life stressors, or it's just my nervous system/stress tolerance that is completely fucked.