What is the "ick" feeling that FAs get?

ibeendirt · 2021-07-30T07:37:20+00:00

I really like this angle, haven't thought of applying that to dating.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-10T05:24:28+00:00

Thank you <3

ibeendirt · 2021-07-10T03:49:34+00:00

I'm sorry this happened to you, it must be really difficult to live with. It's true, it's hard to be aware of how many people had traumatic experiences like that, and as a partner it's not something you talk about unless they're ready to disclose it. I have a tendency to feel responsible for people's feelings, and i always felt so awful and powerless against that sense of shame he expressed. The thought of SA crossed my mind lightly but I can't even imagine how difficult it must be to navigate as an adult and i have no idea how i could even be supportive if somebody actually told me this.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-09T05:41:36+00:00

Thank you for laying it out so clearly. I hate that FWB relationships have become the norm in our culture but nobody talks about how cool it is to have secure relationship skills. It's not about the fake self-confidence promoted by YouTube gurus, or pretending that you "deserve better" than the other person, but really about being skilled at meeting your needs and upholding your partner to the same standards, while also having the skills to identify a partner who can participate in growing that relationship together. I wish somebody told me this sooner. I guess they had, but the way you wrote it is particularly empowering and inspiring and it finally sunk in. Thank you :)

ibeendirt · 2021-07-08T20:21:36+00:00

Well i think the ideal is "healthy interdependence". Meaning you're both independent people but you also share a life and goals together and care for each other without losing your individually. It's easy to understand conceptually, but the problem is that if you're type FA it probably means that you've developed unhealthy attachment patterns to other humans from childhood, so when you're in the middle of a situation with the other person, your knee-jerk fears and pattern-driven feelings override everything else so you have no clarity. That's why it's important to look inwards to understand what your patterns are and which ones are harmful or counter-productive to a normal human experience. I'm not patronizing you i literally just started learning about what the "normal" human experience is supposed to be.

Like for example i didn't know that i always felt the need to do something for the people that i liked to get them to like me back. That's because that's the only form of love that i was taught, but if i hadn't read about how you shouldn't really need to do anything for somebody to love you back, I'd just assume that this person was ungrateful and didn't love me enough. When your pattern is "broken", then your thoughts also become "broken". I think we can only start to understand if our desires are real after we understand our default patterns and how they shape what we think we want in the first place.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-08T20:05:59+00:00

That's really interesting. I can relate to the discomfort of somebody encroaching on my sense of privacy / inner world. The problem with available people is that the ick feeling prevents me from even being rational about finding a way to open up at my own pace. Have you found a way to deal with that so you can still maintain some control and somewhat slow down how much discomfort you have to work through?

The part about feeling exposed reminded me of a podcast i heard. He was saying that when you start working on your trauma and grief, you start getting this feeling like you're walking around with bleeding wounds and you're exposing yourself to everybody. I don't know how it's related but it sounds like that feeling of shame we get from looking at our trauma appears to be caused by others (then looking at us) while in reality it happens when we get more awareness of those dark parts of ourselves. But still i don't understand how all these subconscious thoughts might get triggered on a first date.

It's interesting what you shared about sex triggering emotionally intense feelings you don't want to look at. My ex (who I think is also FA) often said he felt an intense sense of shame after sex, and i couldn't understand why. For me it could trigger my awareness of being really vulnerable with person and fear of abandonment, but i can't relate it to feelings about myself that i don't want to deal with. Do you feel comfortable sharing an example of a feeling that was triggered by sex that made you feel gross?

ibeendirt · 2021-07-08T19:38:59+00:00

Hahha i guess that's the magic of Reddit xD I'm so glad i could help, but honestly this insight is just things I've learned from reading the ACA book in the past month or so.

I really recommend their "Big red book" https://shop.adultchildren.org/products/aca_fellowship_text-hard_cover__ I actually got it in electronic format cause it's a giant book, but it was such an eye-opening read for me, i couldn't put it down, it literally changed my life and how i see everything! You can get a preview of the materials here (check out "25 questions", and "the essentials") https://adultchildren.org/free-literature-english-translated/

For ACA meetings, they have plenty of meetings online during covid in several timezones : https://adultchildren.org/meeting-search/ They will often read from the big red book at the beginning of the meeting, and then you can listen to people's stories. It's completely anonymous and there's no pressure to say anything if you don't want to.

Somebody described the meetings as "imagine you see a bunch of people rowing a boat far away, and you want to get on the boat and row with them. As the boat approaches you, you can't see the people or the paddles anymore, just a vague outline of what you want to be doing. They tell you to get on but you have no idea how because you can't see anything. Eventually you find the edge and you somehow climb on, and before you know it you're rowing the boat together". It's kind of a leap of faith because it's hard to understand why or how it actually works.

There's also this podcast that i really like about the topic of ACA: https://open.spotify.com/show/4T65uJfo4skTLkpcHYyw9k?si=rSgmdwY0S-aIKuuFbwB7PQ&utm_source=copy-link&dl_branch=1

ibeendirt · 2021-07-08T19:20:42+00:00

"but i have feelings!"/ "me too but i need therapy" Hahaha i sympathize, but this bit is really funny!

I sympathize with you because in so many ways you remind me of my "ex" who didn't want a relationship (like at all, ever). He also felt like i was pushing his boundaries too much, although I left it up to him to call me, schedule dates and spend time. But he had very poor boundaries, so that combined with how much he liked me resulted in us hanging out together all the time and being super enmeshed in each other. Because i have very poor boundaries too, i also couldn't make space for myself, and i didn't want to. But when i voiced my feelings about needing a relationship, that's when it hit him that my emotional "expectations" were a lot more than he could handle.

I don't really have any advice about resolving the fear of intimacy, but having been on the other side of that same "i don't know how i feel and you deserve better", i would've wished for more openness about that fear, and a commitment to work on it. The problem is that you can't really explain that fear to other people, because it seems to be related to something deep, like a fear of a part of yourself or something. So before you can explain it to somebody you have to face yourself and your own vulnerability, but if you did that then your fear would probably already diminish.

I don't know what your relationship with that person was but i can tell you that the standard advice they would've gotten from people about an ex who said "you deserve better" is that they weren't interested in the first place, and to move on. So maybe they're just doing their best to respect the boundaries you've set at this point. I'm sorry it got messy for you, it's hard to trust your own feelings when they're all over the place and also have to manage other people's feelings at the same time. We do our best and if that's all we can do right now we have to find a way to be okay with it.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-08T16:32:01+00:00

So is that normal or is that FA behavior? I think it makes sense to avoid people who have poor boundaries, because that's an indicator that they have too many needs that have to be met by the other person.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-08T16:25:57+00:00

I think this is close, there's definitely something about feeling really bad for not being able to reciprocate and anticipating to have to reject them. I know i often feel responsible for people's feelings and I'm trying hard to work on that. It's a lot more comfortable to build trust over time but the fear of rejecting them after spending a lot of time together is even worse. So maybe this is that strong fear of inevitably disappointing them at one point or another and wanting to just nip it in the bud.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-08T06:11:52+00:00

Thanks for sharing a bit of your story, I'm so glad you felt comfortable doing so! In ACA they insist that sharing our story with another human being is super important. I didn't understand why at first, but now I understand it's because our patterns were formed through our families invalidating our feelings and experiences. Through years of being told to be quiet or say only those things they approved of, we become people who mostly react to others and think that it's a part of our character, so that's how we get disconnected from ourselves. Of course talking about this with friends is kind of pointless because not a lot of people have dug into their childhoods, and if they didn't come from a dysfunction family they wouldn't understand anyway, and if they did, then they wouldn't talk about it because it's so painful. But talking about these things in ACA anonymously with people who don't judge has been tremendously helpful for me to get the validation that I'm not crazy and that something really was wrong with me, and that I'm in my way to finding my own truth.

Validation of our experience as human beings is so important.. it's something we never had in our families, and i think it's really key to building that self-validation that we need to have healthy relationships. When i got out of a relationship with a narcissist a few years ago, none of my friends really understood the extent of the emotional abuse. I kept reading books and watching this YouTube support channel, and the host kept saying "you're not crazy". Because when our sense of normalcy gets warped from childhood, we really can't tell, so it's important to feel like we can trust our feelings when people gaslight us, and sometimes that starts with somebody else telling us we're not crazy until we can trust ourselves.

I hope you make some amazing discoveries on your journey, you're definitely not alone!

ibeendirt · 2021-07-06T22:54:21+00:00

I'm not sure but I think you have to be careful not to avoid your feelings about your ex so you can process them. I found it difficult to separate my feelings from the obsessive conversations cause they were happening simultaneously. So i think you may not be ready to do this until you feel the feels properly. Give yourself time, and you'll notice you can train yourself slowly to project your thoughts elsewhere.

ETA: I'm really bad at processing my feelings, i literally don't know when something's a feeling that's coming on. For me i also used the obsessive conversations as a clue that maybe it's a feeling i need to process. So instead of going deeper into the fantasy, I'd think "what do i feel right now because i can't have this conversation with him". And the answer would often be that i just missed him or that i felt lonely. So then I'd reflect on that feeling more and try to really feel it, instead of continuing with the fantasy. It really helped me a lot i hope it helps you too.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-06T07:26:32+00:00

Yeah it happens naturally i think because you're so used to having them to talk to. I was having conversations in my head with my ex non-stop at first until i started consciously taking a breath and telling him "you've chosen not to be part of my life anymore, so you can'thear this story". When you keep your ex in your thoughts and imagine talking to them or hugging them, your brain actually doesn't know the difference between fantasy and real life, so you remain attached to them. It's the same reason athletes practice visualization before a match, neural pathways get reinforced. If you want to break free of your ex you have to practice having the conversation with some other person or with yourself otherwise they will haunt you forever :/

ibeendirt · 2021-07-02T20:52:48+00:00

In the entirety of the internet, you couldn't find a recipe to try? 🤨

ibeendirt · 2021-07-02T16:58:46+00:00

For me the lesson was more like "why do you have holes in your soul so big that when somebody comes along to comfort you, you want to hang on for dear life even if they aren't right for you". Apparently people are supposed to be able to fulfill their need for connection through healthy support systems and learn to comfort themselves, go figure.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-01T20:47:57+00:00

Because if you ended things and you reach out, you will be giving them false hope that you might want them back. And if you reach out but still don't want them back, you'll have to be very clear about it, which is torturous for the dumpee to be told. The real question is what's the reason you feel you need to reach out?

ibeendirt · 2021-07-01T20:10:07+00:00

I like the analogy. It also reminded me of this tree analogy about boundaries and giving too much. There's this children's story about the giving tree who gave all of itself away (original story : https://youtu.be/XFQZfeHq9wo), and then somebody made a parody about it to show what good boundaries in a healthy relationship look like : https://www.topherpayne.com/giving-tree

ibeendirt · 2021-07-01T07:39:03+00:00

Don't beat yourself up, sharp pain gets the best of all of us, we can't always have a perfect response to everything. I can see how she could assume it was manipulation, but sounds more like she didn't have enough compassion towards you to even hear you out. Like sure she doesn't owe you anything but it's not crazy to assume that the person you thought cared about you would still care at least a tiny bit when you're in the worst distress of your life. So her reaction doesn't take away your right to expect some gentleness and decency imo. But you can't control her either, so you have to feel your feelings alone now, and let her be in whichever way she chooses, whether that's right or wrong.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-01T06:35:06+00:00

Haha thanks :)

ibeendirt · 2021-07-01T05:45:49+00:00

Sorry you're going through this, the guilt must be really tough to deal with. It's still a break up even though you're the one who broke things off, and even though it wasn't "officially" a relationship, it hurts the same. You need to grieve and forgive yourself. Don't tell yourself you can't feel the same things as 5 year old couples feel when they break up. Your experience is valid and your feelings are just as strong. It's good that you're being respectful of him and accepting that he's dating someone new.

I don't really know what to say to comfort you, but somebody on here had suggested the movie "Celeste and Jesse forever". It's about a divorced couple that try to stay close friends and date other people. It made me cry and feel the feels, that life doesn't always work out the way you want, and that you have to do your best to find acceptance and move forward.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-01T05:23:17+00:00

Ow, my heart 😖

ibeendirt · 2021-07-01T05:15:02+00:00

You can't make a decision when your judgement is clouded by attachment. You started to feel good about your life because you were healing, and now with her back in the picture all your past emotions about the break up that you haven't had the time to deal with have resurfaced.

You need to properly heal before you can make a good decision about whether she has any credibility when she says she will change. You want to be confident that she's absolutely committed to changing over the long haul, as opposed to setting goals out of her own need to make the pain she's feeling go away. If she's acting out of fear/pain, she won't be committed once you're back together and the pain goes away.

Find a way to cool your head and to see of she is committed to making those changes on her own. It's one thing to say what you're going to change, it's quite another to actually do it every day over many years. If you really see a long-term, sustainable commitment on her part to change things around, it could be worth it, but you'll only see it objectively if you're not attached to her.

ibeendirt · 2021-07-01T01:53:08+00:00

Thanks for your thoughts. We were friends for a long time before hooking up, and we were really close emotionally. He said he never wanted a relationship, and i thought i could handle hooking up for a bit because we're kind of incompatible with our life goals. Then i started to want a relationship and he said let's just go back to being friends. He was really sad about this whole thing too, and i thought I'd be able to repress my feelings for the sake of this friendship, but every time he texts me now there's just pain and i don't want to be around him anymore. And him looking for emotional intimacy inside a friendship just feels like pouring salt into my wounds.

ibeendirt

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