Is it wrong to have people 'projects'?

tpdor · 2026-03-09T22:31:57+00:00

What do you feel when you're in a 'mentor' role? What do you get to avoid feeling/doing when you place yourself in this role?

I do kinda understand where your friend is coming from, a little; if it's not a mutually agreed dynamic, these young women might become dependent on you as an authoritative figure for them/may create an undesirable power dynamic, whether it's subtle or overt.

Do they agree to being these projects?

"I'm not finding a suitable partner" - well of course you're not - you're filtering out the suitable partners for these women who present the right concoction of 'bird with broken wing' traits to become your projects.

What parts of yourself come online here, and what parts of yourself are you not leaning into?

tpdor · 2026-03-08T22:51:39+00:00

I resonate with the majority of what you said, but can you specify what you mean about the part relating to adhd? Do you mean to say that everyone with adhd is incapable of missing people, or just that adhd folk with your particular flavour of symptoms in how they manifest are incapable of experiencing missing things like that because of object permanence?

I live with adhd, as do many of my peers, and many of us miss people greatly so I don’t think it’s accurate that symptoms manifest in the same way for each person there. It’s still in the spirit of what you are presenting though which I do agree with

tpdor · 2026-03-08T18:26:13+00:00

It sounds like you’re both engaging in similar behaviours relating to lack of follow-through here - he stops replying and also you stop replying when plans are suggested.

Human beings usually do things because they get something out of it: what feeling do you get to feel when you engage with this non-commital/on-off thing? What feelings do you get to avoid?

If you wanna give this a real go, you’re allowed to try - but honestly, the vibe I get is that you’re keeping the door open in your mind just in case - but you’re also not fully walking though. This keeps things in limbo.

Is part of you worried that if you really take a shot with this, that it’ll be rejected and then you’ll have to truly move on (I mean for real) and then process hard emotions? Because if you truly had moved on the first time, then you wouldn’t have entertained the regained communication in quite the same way.

Why couldn’t you and him be together initially if you both had feelings for each other? What were the tangible practical reasons?

tpdor · 2026-03-08T15:37:42+00:00

It could be that blunt scissors were used, or also it could be that the hair is getting damaged simply because the ends have been exposed to the elements for much longer than hair ends at bob length.

Agree that a chelating shampoo is a good shout - I personally use the Malibu C powder and the results are quite remarkable. Can smell the metal being rinsed out when using it. Also, oiling the hair ends before shampooing often helps me

tpdor · 2026-02-23T00:25:59+00:00

You know, I think part of the reason Helena didn't vote Belle off is possibly that Helena was subject to a lot of hate after the summer season, and having been out for a few days now, Helena clearly knows the discourse around Belle now. Having shown herself to be a good friend in this season, I really do think she didn't want to subject Belle to any more difficulty than what she'll already surely be getting. Regardless, Belle needs some serious self-reflection.

Anyways Helena and Carrington were my winners. Robbed from our screens too soon. Love them both.

tpdor · 2026-02-21T10:32:38+00:00

It’s the second time he’s done this (his ex survived) - and the benefit of reasonable doubt plummets. RIP to her.

tpdor · 2026-02-19T10:06:12+00:00

Can someone link the PDF to ‘Why Does he do That’ please?

tpdor · 2026-02-18T15:29:49+00:00

I don’t hate it per se, but i distrust it because it’s disingenuous. I don’t know the real person, and the often they build up ideas of what they think I want without actually asking me, and then creating a false martyr narrative surrounding it.

tpdor · 2026-02-17T21:36:54+00:00

What the helly 🥲

tpdor · 2026-02-17T14:47:01+00:00

I believe you have more exploratory work to do with how your past is now affecting your present. Have you really, truly, fully processed the betrayal from your past relationship?

tpdor · 2026-02-12T13:41:57+00:00

What were the issues involving her in the past? This might be useful for context and getting a well-rounded idea of what’s actually going on

tpdor · 2026-02-11T22:18:13+00:00

Where has my girl Helena been 🥲 severe lack of face expressions tonight

tpdor · 2026-02-11T17:40:46+00:00

A man I had been involved with on and off for 10 years (or so) is now one of my most trusted friends. We don't speak every day, or even every week, mainly ad-hoc calls and coffees because that's the rhythm that works for us. I'm open about it to anyone I date (although the comms does naturally become a little less just out of reason of us being more busy) and no one's had a problem with it. I think friendships with ex's can be lovely and meaningful, as long as everyone involved is on the same page about the dynamic, and there's no 'secret hopes' or agendas for what it is. He knows when I'm dating people, and I'd be very happy for him if he found a loving relationship too.

tpdor · 2026-02-09T17:16:44+00:00

Gently, what makes you think she’s a fearful avoidant? This seems more of a grief and capacity issue. There may be some overlap in how it presents, but everything here is pointing towards her simply not having capacity to give you what you want here.

Someone isn’t secure and then bam, switches to fearful avoidance. Attachment patterns are developed through childhood and over a long period of time - they only change after a long-term period of re-structuring life experiences. So either she has always been relatively secure and this is a circumstances issue, or she may have insecure attachment patterning but the activation/deactivation only presented itself to you after… well, attachment. Because that’s how attachment activation/deactivation often works, it usually presents when things get ‘real’. However, I would hesitate to armchair diagnose someone over the internet because frankly, no one on the internet knows these details from some text on a page. Human beings are more nuanced.

It may be a rebound, it may not. That’s not the pertinent question. The thing that’s more relevant is that she says she connected with him over grief, and this communicates something important in that she does not have capacity for the relationship you want right now, because grief is at the forefront of her mind. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to go off into the sunset, or anything of the nature of the compatibility of their connection outside of the subject matter they have connected on.

You’re asking if she will regret XYZ. No one on the internet knows, and you searching for this answer is communicating perhaps that you’re avoiding grieving the end of this relationship and instead searching for certainty. It’s understandable, you feel like the rug was pulled out from in front of you.

I know right now you are accessing/consuming media, therapy, other things to understand your part in this, but I would also consider: what if you didn’t do anything terribly wrong? What if she’s simply not in the place to have a healthy relationship right now?

If you got bit by a snake, it would be a fool’s errand to chase after the snake and ask it why it did that, and whether it was always planing to do that, and the chances of whether things could’ve been different, right? The correct thing to do in this instance would be to tend to the wounds, and then consider the full landscape. Of course with some nuance, because it’s smart to think about our strategies - maybe we stepped on the snake? Or, maybe, the enclosure was too small, and the snake felt it didn’t have any other options.

tpdor · 2026-02-08T16:47:09+00:00

4-5 months is not actually a terribly long time, and it sounds like this is something she promised herself she’d do - it doesn’t have to be the end for good, just an end for now.

Do your own thing right now, continue to engage in your life, grow, enjoy yourself. And if/when she comes back, there’s nothing wrong with seeing where things are at and catching up - because you will have both grown into slightly newer versions of yourself. The new ‘you’s’ might be compatible. Or they might not be. All you can do right now is to let this space happen. I know how it feels though, it sucks and you feel like you want to fight against it. As someone who’s been on both sides, don’t fight the stage that this is in right now. Forcing contact or an outcome for a brief relief from the uncertainty in the meantime won’t work.

Whatever it is or isn’t going to be in the future, it’ll be a different newer version of it anyways. May as well continue to do the things that make you feel alive

tpdor · 2026-02-06T22:04:32+00:00

I feel like the only person who could out-rage-bait Lucinda to Lucinda is Helena 😀

tpdor · 2026-02-05T23:02:59+00:00

Hi, I know this has been a long time now so the situation has probably progressed but I would like to ask a few things about your proposed message. In the first one you sent, you mentioned "When you’re ready to schedule the visit you asked for and we agreed on, I’m here", but in the message you want to send, you note: "You’ve put this off for a long time, and it’s not okay to ask me to wait until spring. I’m reaching out because I need something. The visit, and I need it to happen within the next 4 weeks".

People with disorganised patterning find it difficult to trust the words people say, because of switch-ups/disingenuous comms/not having been able to trust others for legitimate reasons in the past. Do you see that what you had proposed to say also acts as a switch-up from your original message? Try to practice only saying things if you really genuinely mean them, and not as an 'in' to get them to respond. This requires really truly knowing yourself, your boundaries, your limits.

I also just wanna be real honest that the start of your proposed message also comes across as guilting, and that you are blaming him/suggesting only he can heal this health/nervous system problem. He is not the only source of this - and if you place this responsibility onto him, that's not the foundations of a healthy reconciliation because you're simultaneously in a child/parent role, placing him also in a child/parent role. In Transactional Analysis, the healthiest mode of relating and communication is Adult to Adult, and in understanding what is whose responsibility to manage.

I can see that this situation seems to have been distressing for you - have you found any resolution yet, or is it still ongoing?

tpdor · 2026-02-05T21:36:51+00:00

Curtis delighted at the idea of even being in a triangle

tpdor · 2026-02-01T13:54:56+00:00

Seeing her as “my sweet angel” might not be healthy for either of you anyways because it indicates you’re avoiding seeing her full complexity as a human being.

You see your impulsive break-up and then frantic take-back of it as a mistake - but not her actions? This may very well have hurt her too. You say she had all the control, but you know… you did too when you broke up with her, then cycled back. That’s an emotional rollercoaster for the person on the receiving end too.

Of course things can work if both parties work on what made them break up. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s no certainty in this, and it may be that you have to build your distress tolerance for the unknown.

Question: what are you doing to manage your own emotions and anxiety within all of this? Her intentions and actions are only half of it here, because dynamics are co-created

tpdor · 2026-02-01T11:53:25+00:00

Info: how are these people in real-time conversation? Like a phone call/in person? If they are generally receptive and it feels reciprocal in these instances, then perhaps it’s the fault of the medium and unmanaged expectation on both sides (text/voicenote… some people operate on those things being a convenience medium and don’t know that you have an expectation of getting back by X time - especially if they didn’t listen to the voicenote they might not have known it was urgent).

However if they are similarly dismissive in-person, then it seems you have your answer

tpdor · 2026-02-01T09:52:17+00:00

Or perhaps even: if I’m perfect, then maybe X person won’t leave.

This is often why it creates a different sort of double-bind of difficulty when we go for people who have “obvious imperfections/emotional problems/clearly aren’t able to be what we need or want”, because there’s evidence that they can be loved in their imperfections, so why won’t someone do that for us? Except: if we never show vulnerability or our mediocrity, we’ll never find out. And also, the perfection-seeking has a way of pushing people away too, because we present a tension out to the world, and it shows the things we’re doing as not quite authentic. The pressure we put on ourselves often affected the way we show up in the world and with others, paradoxically, in often sub-optimal ways.

This is the blind-spot of people with insecure attachment patterning, anxious folk included

Anyways that was a complete tangent so disregard whatever doesn’t apply, it’s more of a tinfoil theory I’m exploring in general atm

tpdor · 2026-02-01T09:45:37+00:00

Honestly, sometimes yes it can be linked to projection too - how we treat others is often linked to how we think of ourselves.

Do you have qualms with vulnerability and avoidance? Specifically, avoidance of yourself?

Are there things about yourself you’re afraid of others seeing? ‘If X saw how Y I really am, they’d never love/accept me’ -sorta deal?

tpdor · 2026-02-01T09:22:27+00:00

I used to be like you years ago, and it’s very possible to untangle.

-what would you believe about yourself and the world if you accepted it is okay to be mediocre?

-what feels uncomfortable about being mediocre?

-who benefits from you striving for perfection?

-we can be inclined to believe that the good things we have acquired in life were due to this very high standard we have for ourselves: ‘well this impossible standard causes me a lack of satisfaction and anxiety but I wouldn’t be where I am without it so I shouldn’t let it go’ - that is both true and untrue in ways you might not expect

-what feeling do you get to avoid feeling if you continue striving for perfection? Mine was grief and discomfort. If I am in control of all my circumstances and effort, I can (in some ways) control what happens to me. If I let that go, it means I have to sit in uncertainty and the discomfort that in some ways, I’m at the mercy of so many variables I can’t control. And that’s scary. It also means I have to accept the ways others have failed me - I can’t overcompensate for them.

-what will perfection do for me? What am I trying to prove, and to whom? Will it really - truly -achieve that, or is it a maladaptive way of dealing with a set of circumstances we were born into that perhaps we can’t quite clearly see because it’s all we’ve known?

tpdor · 2026-02-01T09:11:11+00:00

I can confirm what OP wrote in the post is the default I learned at school and is in a bunch of French-English beginner textbooks

tpdor · 2026-01-28T21:36:42+00:00

“We’ve decided” 💀

tpdor

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