Let’s start from the beginning. Months ago, I discovered tulpamancy, and with a few days of effort I managed to create a speaking, sentient tulpa named Iris. I was happy with how lucky I was to be able to create a tulpa so fast. Oh how wrong I was to be happy. Months go by, I was content with her, and then suddenly, while praying as I often so do I heard a response. He, now named Zane, had somehow formed from my prayers without me even trying. Oh well, I thought, this is fine. Another tulpa. That’s okay, right? And so I lived on with him. But eventually, I started getting ideas for another tulpa. I created an incredibly vague concept, but I didn’t start the actual creation process. Her name was Everest. She, then, appeared one morning fully speaking. In her words, she was a “sorta walk-in” however she could not further elaborate on that. Three tulpas, I told myself, was a lot. I could barely handle two and they both didn’t much like me despite my attempts to make them happy. But I was okay with another tulpa, because I had to be; it seemed cruel to abandon them all because they were all fully sentient. So on I went with Everest. And then the Raffy appeared. A young little, I think created while I was trying to age-regress to see what it was like. Again, I did not have any intent to create them. Soon enough Iris reached her breaking point of sorts and told me to “kill her” in her own words. Of course, this meant dormancy. I said no. Every day since she begged me to and finally, I caved since she seemed so set upon it and clearly was not budging. Zane, throughout this, sort of faded away unintentionally and Everest, upset with me, left on her own accord. But now, I can’t just let go of Raffy. They’re so young and innocent, it would break me. But I can’t care for them. They’ve expressed distaste for me. I’ve proved myself an insufficient host for ever other tulpa I’ve had, and they were all adults. Furthermore, I don’t want to accidentally create more, or become a host for more. I can’t care for the tulpas as I should. Please, what can I do? I need advice.

"In love" vs "love" and "dating" vs "bf/gf/partner"
In the mood for a little light hearted discussion :)
What is everyone's opinion on being "in love" versus "loving" someone?
And in the same vein, I suppose especially for anglo-centric countries, "dating" vs "bf/gf/partner" and possibly "seeing someone", and how far away from any of this is a "situationship"?
I just commented on a post in a different sub about "in love" vs "love" and realized what my opinion is there and then:
being "in love" is something that happens to you, almost effortlessly, washing over you, for whatever reason and at any point during the relationship - first glance or all of a sudden in your rocking chair when you're 90 as you look at your partner, thinking how did I get so lucky. I do believe it can also happen many times within a relationship, especially the really long term ones, and it can last any amount of time but will usually happen in waves.
loving someone, however, usually goes hand in hand with effort, continuous and evolving communication, and re-learning to co-exist as you both (or all) change. If all parties put equal effort into the said things, I think that the love will be constant and eternal. It can, however, diminish as effort dwindles by one of the parties. In short, it requires everyone to be present as you go.
I don't have many opinions re: dating vs partner vs seeing each other yet, as I am not from an English speaking country and we have different ways to express that, but I've always wondered.
Do you agree or disagree with anything? What do you think?

TL;DR My online (ex?) bsf lowkey traumatised me by saying he has 3 days left to live. Idk if I should distance myself or talk again
The lore goes deep on this one, buckle up 🙏 Important: We’re from two different countries with different norms/culture. And if u see quotations, it’s from my notes. But in the main story, it’s his direct texts 🗒️
I met my online bsf 8 months ago, and since then we’re like this 🤞 We have the same views, personalities, humour etc. We also talk to each other almost every single day. Now, here’s where the problem kicks in. We joke a lot, but he goes too far sometimes… he’s also needy??
Exhibit A: First month of talking he pranks me into thinking his friend has a crush on me and wants to chat w me 💀 And says he likes pranks (🤧foreshadowing)
Exhibit B: 2 days after meeting I wrote “We talked till 2:38am, but I got the biggest ick. It’s when they’re so blunt and say shit that’s a double edged sword. It’s clear that we were raised differently. I told him a lot I didn’t tell anyone else.” (He prodded my beliefs & what I’m comfortable with)
Exhibit C: He also says shit like, “you’re boring… I miss the old you, the current u is so lame… you changed…” Then say jk 😵‍💫 but only after I react to him.
Exhibit D: May 2024 (After joking around) “All of a sudden he says that he feels embarrassed all the time, So I comfort him and genuinely believe him. He even took long to respond. I said that I’m here for him… then he replied saying that he’s joking . That he says dumb things all the time. I said you’re hard to read sometimes 🧐 then he said he’s too complicated for me to understand. Tf?? Ofc there are complex people everywhere. And you wouldn’t even let me try to understand you, but I tell you everything. so i dry texted him back and said gn” … “That was such an ick. Literally when I read that message I cried 😞 I got flashbacks to when _____ did the Same to me .” (I even told him before about that friendship and how things ended badly)
Now here’s some crucial detail. Well. He had a crush on me 🗿He confessed to me earlier this year, and said to not be mad at him. Given how much I appreciate him as a friend, I acknowledged his feelings but wanted to stay friends (Idk if that was greedy). then he promised his feelings would fade. Soon later he told me about his rl crush, and I’d give advice on how to rizz her up lol. So we’re both very much friends. But then … he started to get more clingy?? He’d compliment me often and every time I’d roast myself he’d make a wholesome UNO reverse card.
In his words, “I like you more than a friend, but less than a lover.” And He’d often ask me to “say those three words”. I’d avoid it bc I don’t think of him that way, but sometimes I say “love you bestie”. And since we’re exclusively besties I didn’t mind. Note; he’s rlly introverted and shy which is why it’s difficult to talk to his crush. Looking back, he may have been treating our friendship as a pseudo-relationship 😵‍💫
Now the main story 🙁
Preface: So we’re joking around as usual. I like to make sarcastic jokes, but they tend to fly over his head. After me saying ily bestie bc he asked to (Im a yes person 🥲), He said “I thought you hate me” and I said “why would I, ur my friend 🤧 NAHH I HATE U” (the capital nahh was the key 😭). I think that made him do this whole thing… bc he then said “ouch that hurt. Ik it’s a joke but it’s painful… out of everyone why u.” but guess what? he then said that he’s joking?? 🗿 and then “lol no one could hurt me the way I hurt myself” I said don’t gaslight urself … then he said “why does my mood always change when l talk to U”
Now to the response - dm thread
Exhibit E: 3 days ago…. “what if I told you that I’m in hospital rn” Are you administered yourself??? RN ? I NEED UPDATES (atp I think he’s joking) “What if I told you I had 3 days left to live” I’d cry 😭 “No you wouldn’t” Yes I would sends a timed photo of arm with an IV in (Now I fully believed him)
Then he explains that he was in a terrible accident but he’ll be fine. That he’s “ just hoping I’ll walk out alive”, that the doctor said he had a 50% chance of living. I told him that I’m praying for him … he said this might be the last time talking to me. At that moment I started to tear up. I couldn’t believe what was happening. He said that he’d undergo surgery the next day and “if it doesn’t go well ig I’ll text you in the afterlife” and that he’s typing with one hand.
I never lost anyone close to me this way. It really struck me, so many thoughts racing. In a prior deep convo he opened up about his self-esteem problems. That he thought he was a bad person and incapable of deserving love. That he’s been into trouble. So in my mind, a possibility could be self harm. I couldn’t even type messages properly bc of how upset I was. I told him that I’m crying rn… then he replied ..
“Shit! Please tell me ur joking. I’m in big trouble. How long will you stay mad” … “So you really do care about me”
(I DDINT EVEN SEE THAT — so he did do this bc he thought I didn’t care which is stupid)
“IM SORRY ITS A PRANK” sends a screenshot of hospital stock image
I then sent him a long paragraph about how I don’t like when people play with my emotions. That I already told him this. (He’d always ask me what would make me mad at him)
I barely cry and this made me cry sm my eyes were swollen in the morning 😀 so idk .he said he’ll never do anything like that again and spammed me texts but I didn’t respond, except for on tiktok where he asked when will I forgive him & that he won’t text me again till im satisfied. I asked him why he did it. He said, “I was wrong and stupid”
So. Should I keep him as a friend? Or Ghost him? Idk. Tbh I don’t wanna text first atp.
Rn I feel used, like I’m here for his amusement . I’m still not over it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this? The thing is, I’m holding onto all the good memories we have. He is honestly such a wholesome guy, and I don’t want to lose him… but was this the last straw???

At this point of time I am confused with the decisions that I need to make in the upcoming time.
I may sound naive but pls help me if u have anything to add.
Background - I am looking to earn good money while doing some meaningful work. Considering my long term goals I am looking forward to reaching some senior roles within the corporate setup. Not looking to retire early just because I don't know what I will do with a lot of time at my disposal, I enjoy working and keeping myself occupied with something or the other. I am not a person who will want to work on his own business idea(startup) rather I will prefer joining some small team and growing up the ladder along with the organization's growth.
my_qualifications - Risk Quant at Bulge bracket bank, CFA L1, Tier 1 UG .
Options that I have - 1. Shifting to the tech (FANNG) and then after a few yrs pivot into managerial roles but don't know how I can grow beyond engineering managers. It's pretty unclear for me through this path, The main concern is that the tech industry is getting too competitive with everyone trying to enter the workforce; a good number of options for 3-15 yoe but at the same time I don't see a lot of director+ level folks from india. 2. I always dreamt of having mba from top iims. Here I am not getting answers to whether it will be a good move to pursue mba from iim a/b/c/isb (being too optimistic here 😅). I don't know how this will help me in the long term(been hearing to not consider ROI from short term perspective) and also how good will it be financially. Me having a low undergrad gpa in range of 7.5-8 naturally reduces my chances of getting good summer intern from iim especially the consulting ones. Is there any possibility of IB given that I have an experience of working at some good names from top tier bank(if going through mba route i will prefer working for a year or 2 before joining the program). Product management do interests me - have interned with the unicorm as a product manager. Can someone shed light on PM vs SDE in long term, is it that at some point of time moving up the ladder is comparatively easier for Product peeps owing to their visibility to cxo's. Also not that coding is boring to me but also not that interesting so that i won't try anything else.
May be pretty vague questions for u all but pls do let me know if u need some more details to advise me on anything. Just wanted to have some serious discussion on it. Tried reaching out to few of my seniors 2 3 yrs out of clg but unfortunately they themselves are confused to some extent.🥲

First, if anyone has seen the Rising segment - you'll notice the YouTube video is heavily brigaded by hasbara trolls. There are several pro-Israel websites & apps that coordinate brigading articles, videos, social media posts, etc. that criticize Israel.
One such website is 'Iron Truth' - which in addition to spamming comments, will also spam reports to get critical content taken down.

• The Intercept did an exposé on 'Iron Truth'.

Intro

Bri is alleged to have been insensitive to the Israeli guest, the sister of a hostage. But I think it's important to actually watch the video and listen to what the Israeli guest is saying.
In an interview with Glenn Greenwald yesterday, Bri says the Israeli guest reached out to Rising on their own accord. The guest specifically requested Briahna do the interview which set off red flags. Nevertheless, Bri's producer went ahead and booked the guest. On Twitter, concern-trolls are criticizing Bri for 'rolling her eyes' - but Bri says it was moreso directed at her producer for setting the 'interview' up since it was clearly politically-motivated.
The guest ostensibly came on Rising to talk about her sister, but then she began making political statements that have long-been debunked. So Bri felt compelled to push back on the political statements. In-turn, the Israeli guest would say 'I'm not a politician' - then launch into another political statement.
The whole thing feels like a set-up.

• Bri says that for many months, the The Hill execs seemingly worked to sabotage their own show. Bri describes how there was complete staff turnover and censorship on Gaza (reducing anything Israel/Palestine to just 1 segment or bloc).
  
  • Bri's producer, Joanne Levine, would attempt to reclassify content as 'Radars' (opinion pieces) and while these segments were an avenue to talk about Gaza, The Hill insisted that mainstream critiques of Israel's atrocity propaganda be categorized as Radars as well. In effect, turning a major news story into an 'opinion piece' to distance The Hill from the findings.

This firing seems to been a long-time in the making, but Glenn points out the inherent risk in criticizing Israel in the American mainstream. That being said, Bri felt it was worth it to work at The Hill in order to platform the kind of critical analysis of Israel/Palestine that is lacking in Old Media.

• As an aside, Bri doesn't blame Robby Soave (her co-host) & implies corporate may have pushed Robby to adopt positions/push his own positions harder, even when he didn't really have his heart in it.
  
• What IS concerning though, is the coordinated fashion in which negative 'clips' about Bri proliferated online prior to her firing. She did a debate a month ago, moderated by Konstantin Kisin - and yet, the clips from the debate didn't wind up online until just before her firing. Richie Torres, AIPAC whore, also helped spread those clips & unsurprisingly was revealed to be a target of astroturfing by the Israeli government.
  
  • Glenn feels that Bri was targeted for some time by Zionist trolls and the Right - who unironically and cynically used the language of #MeToo to go after her.

The full interview with Glenn Greenwald can be watched here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDYYe-4ZojI

But anyways, back to reviewing the deranged hasbara guest's tactics:

1) Hasbara talking-points: "What would America do if [insert a nearby country] did X Y Z?"

Instead of directly answering Bri's question, the guest goes on a rant with a lot of familiar hasbara bullshit - oscillating between presenting herself as just a 'concerned sister' vs. making debunked political statements.
Well, if America was militarily occupying those countries and stealing their land, then that would change the context of any such attacks. Israel is an apartheid State that expels Palestinians from their homes and steals their land.
In Area C of the West Bank, Israel's ratio of demolishing Palestinian homes to granting building permits is 100:1.

Israeli authorities refuse the vast majority of requests by Palestinians to upgrade or build homes, schools, health clinics, wells, water cisterns, animal pens, or other structures. Between 2016 and 2018, Israeli authorities approved less than 1.5 percent of applications for Palestinians to build in Area C, 21 applications in total, while issuing 2,147 demolition orders, according to data obtained from the Israeli Civil Administration by Bimkom. 759 In other words, it issued 100 times more demolition orders than building permits in this period.

• Human Rights Watch - A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution

Israel's pervasive denial of building permits to Palestinians, not just in the West Bank but in Israel proper and East Jerusalem, is part of its overall agenda of preventing the growth of Palestinian communities.
Along with its other crimes against the Palestinian people - anyone who isn't an ethnoreligious supremacist/nutjob can see why Palestinians are upset & fighting.
Not to mention, the Israeli guest's mentality seems to be 'if Palestinians do X to us, then we're justified in doing whatever back'. Apply that in reverse as a talking-point and see where that gets you with Zionists.

2) Citing ZAKA, a discredited organization that stages crime scenes & spreads lies AND lying about having 'seen' photographic 'evidence'

The Israeli guest claims to have SEEN with her own eyeballs 'photos of rape happening'.
This is 1000% bullshit and hilariously, she cites ZAKA - an Israeli organization known for lying and staging crime scenes, whose founder was alleged to be a serial rapist (and committed sudoku to avoid prosecution).
ZAKA has been discredited thoroughly by the Israeli press for spread atrocity propaganda, such as outright lies & staging of crime scenes:

[...] In the meantime, Zaka volunteers were there. Most of them worked at the sites of murder and destruction from morning to night. However, according to witness accounts, it becomes clear that others were engaged in other activities entirely. As part of the effort to get media exposure, Zaka spread accounts of atrocities that never happened, released sensitive and graphic photos, and acted unprofessionally on the ground.

• Haaretz - Death and Donations: Did the Israeli Volunteer Group Handling the Dead of October 7 Exploit Its Role?

Approaching the group a little more closely revealed that three of the Zaka volunteers were making video calls and videos for fundraising purposes. According to the non-Zaka observer, the body was part of a staged setting – an exhibit designed to attract donors, just when the race against time to gather and remove the bodies of victims of the massacre was most urgent.

• Haaretz - Death and Donations: Did the Israeli Volunteer Group Handling the Dead of October 7 Exploit Its Role?

ZAKA was in severe debt before Oct. 7th. One of its prominent members, Yossi Landau, head of operations for the southern region, went to a Las Vegas fundraiser and told audiences of 'beheaded babies' and pregnant women being separated from their fetuses - both widespread lies.

In the first home he and his colleagues entered "we see a pregnant lady lying on the floor, and then we turn her around and see that the stomach is cut open, wide open. The unborn baby, still connected with a umbilical cord, was stabbed with a knife. And the mother was shot in the head. And you use your imagination, trying to figure out what came first."

• i24 News - Israeli emergency responder: 'I saw 20 children shot, burned and piled together in two piles'

Everyone knows the '40 beheaded babies' propaganda is bullshit. Only 1 baby died on Oct. 7th - due to a stray bullet. Mila Cohen, aged 10 months. Haaretz has a list of all the victims by age and name.
And the Patten report specifically debunked the claim of a pregnant woman being killed and her baby being removed from her:

14) The mission team conducted a visit to kibbutz Be’eri and was able to determine that at least two allegations of sexual violence widely repeated in the media, were unfounded due to either new superseding information or inconsistency in the facts gathered. These included a highly publicized allegation of a pregnant woman whose womb had reportedly been ripped open before being killed, with her fetus stabbed while still inside her. Other allegations, including of objects intentionally inserted into female genital organs, could not be verified by the mission team due in part to limited and low-quality imagery.

• United Nations - Mission report: Official visit of the Office of the SRSG-SVC to Israel and the occupied West Bank, 29 January – 14 February 2024

But onto the specific claim of 'photographic' evidence of rape taking place.
The Patten report & the Israeli government have both said there is no video or photographic evidence of rape/sexual assault taking place.

74) In the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified. Further investigation may alter this assessment in the future. Nevertheless, considering the nature of rape, which often does not result in visible injuries, this possibility cannot be ruled out based solely on the medicolegal assessment. Therefore, the mission team concluded that circumstantial indicators, like the position of the corpse and the state of clothing, should also be considered when determining the occurrence of sexual violations, in addition to witness and survivor testimony.
[...] 77) The digital evidence discovered during independent open-source review appeared authentic and unmanipulated. While the mission team reviewed extensive digital material depicting a range of egregious violations, no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence was found in open sources.

• United Nations - Mission report: Official visit of the Office of the SRSG-SVC to Israel and the occupied West Bank, 29 January – 14 February 2024

Israel personally requested Pramila Patten to review their collection of evidence.
Haaretz in an April 2024 article reports that the Israeli government has no video & photographic evidence of sexual assault taking place:

Beyond this, from inquiries put to three bodies in the defense establishment by Haaretz, it emerges that the intelligence material collected by the police and the intelligence bodies, including footage from terrorists' body cameras, does not contain visual documentation of any acts of rape themselves. Overall, the police and the State Prosecutor's Office refuse to make public details of their investigation, which, they say, is in progress. The many obstacles in its path were present from the outset.

• Haaretz, April 2024

The Pattern report also debunks the claim that the positioning of dead bodies always implies sexual assault took place.

47) Additional challenges emerged due to erroneous interpretations of the state of bodies by some volunteer first responders without relevant qualifications and expertise. Some examples include mistaking “postmortem pugilistic posturing” (a ‘boxer-like’ body posture with flexed elbows, clenched fists, spread legs, and flexed knees) due to burn damage as indicative of sexual violence; misinterpreting anal dilatation due to postmortem changes as indicative of anal penetration; and mischaracterizing grazing gunshot wounds to genitalia as targeted genital mutilation using knives.1

• United Nations - Mission report: Official visit of the Office of the SRSG-SVC to Israel and the occupied West Bank, 29 January – 14 February 2024

3) More hasbara: crying about food & water not getting in TO THE HOSTAGES? And when Bri correctly points out that Israel (including Israeli civilians) is blocking aid, she blames Hamas.

Who is blocking aid again? Israel:

• Reuters - Israeli protesters block aid convoy headed to Gaza
  
• Oxfam International - Israel government continues to block aid response despite ICJ genocide court ruling, says Oxfam
  
• CNN - At the edge of Gaza, Israelis try to stop aid trucks
  
• The Washington Post - How Israel’s restrictions on aid put Gaza on the brink of famine
  

Etc. etc.
The Israeli guest is mouthing propaganda similar to those Israelis who block aid to starving Palestinian children.
Again, this is low-brow hasbara bullshit and would cause any sane person to roll their eyes.

4) Claims Israel has a cease-fire deal on the table and is waiting for Hamas to agree? Nope, Israel has outright refused the latest cease-fire deal just yesterday.

Israel has repeatedly said that it cares more about its military operation than returning the hostages:

• Haaretz - Analysis Israelis Want the Hostages Back. So Why Is Netanyahu's Government Ignoring Them?

Israel has hoped that Hamas would reject ceasefire deals so that it could prolong the genocide:

• Haaretz - Analysis Netanyahu Hoped Hamas Would Reject the Cease-fire Offer. When It Didn't, He Turned to Sabotage

The settlers in the Israeli government have threatened to collapse the government, thereby exposing Netanyahu, if the ceasefire deal is signed:

• BBC - Israeli ministers threaten to quit over ceasefire plan

Etc. etc.

5) Finally, after so much bullshit - the guest claims that 'if the world doesn't help Israel, there will be another 9/11' and she goes onto slander the student protest movement against her apartheid State's genocidal rampage. She specifically mentions MICHIGAN though - because Michigan -> Dearborn -> etc.?

So, at this point the Israeli guest is just being Islamophobic and making psychotic, alarmist claims.
This kind of low-information stupidity goes hand-in-hand with Zionism, so again - what should Bri have done?
The guest was a supreme idiot. A clown.
Bri rolled her eyes and got fired for politely (as much as humanly possible so long as one has an IQ above room temperature) handling a hasbara troll on her show.
But this was a long time in the making, because The Hill is simply intolerant of criticism of Israel. Briahna hit the threshold and her time was up there.

My Gf and I have been together for a year, and honestly she's the best thing that's ever happened to me.
So one day she was going with her female colleagues to purchase items for the place she works at. It's past 12 as well, and she decided to video call me whilst waiting for her driver. (Indian 30M) He is balding and slim, but not sexy in any way shape or form.
The clock ticks 12 and I am honestly a bit disturbed since it's late and the place where we live normally doesn't treat her nationality with respect.
The driver approaches her, and she suddenly compliments him that he's slim and sexy, (she has never called me slim or sexy) whilst I'm on a video call with her. This honestly made pissed me off to the point I remained silent. Since I don't like talking when I'm angry, cause I tend to go overboard and end up hurting myself in the end.
So when she got home, I addressed the issue calmly claiming that it wasn't a very sensible thing to do. Since honestly speaking I was flabbergasted upon hearing her compliment and laugh hysterically. It made her look cheap. And I told her that she basically hurt my trust and my feelings. She claimed that in Filipino culture it's only an expression.
And I let it slide.
2 days later.
She finished her night shift and whilst we were discussing how her day was in bed, she gets a message from a random number, basically flirting with her, at 1am. She said that she didn't know this person. Then she proceeds to tell me that her colleague asked for her number and gave it to the customer. And I told her that personal matters do not mix with business matters. So she goes on saying that the guy was old, it was the friend of the boss. Eventually catching her in her own lie. She said that she gave him the number. And didn't know it's a bad thing. Didn't at all expect him to message her at this time as well. She covered the truth with a lot of lies.
Getting to the point.
I feel that my trust is broken. I love her to death and everytime I bring the topic up she gets hyped up and so defensive. I just want an apology. I am an avod overhinker, to the point it affects my health. The driver is always at her workplace and my mind keeps thinking that she's cheating on me with him.
Not only that after I caught her lying about the phone number issue, I keep thinking that she's hiding stuff from me, and this is eating me alive.
One evening we got into an argument at the stairs and she stormed off telling me that I'll always be thinking this way, even though it's a mistake from her side. And she rushed home. While I was heating dinner she comes and asks for a kiss like nothing ever happened.
I'm just losing my mind, super paranoid. I hope someone can give me tips to calm down, please.

How should I (m34) move on from my best friend (f33) who's ghosted me?
This has been a difficult experience to describe. I (m34) have been friends with Sally (f33) for ten years now. A couple of years in we became very close friends. The friendship is entirely platonic (I am gay), but Sally was definitely one of my very best friends until about six months ago. Seven years ago she also met Brian (m38).
Sally is a beautiful, intelligent, and kind woman. I have always admired her ability to support friends with compassion no matter the circumstances. She has had some quite difficult mental health problems of her own, which has often resulted in her disappearing or being flaky. Despite this, she always appears optimistic and on top of things when she’s present (although I suspect that’s a part of the problem). She has usually managed her mental health well, and is open about seeing therapists, taking medication, etc.
Brian I can only describe as a highly disturbed individual. He has (so I’ve heard) some quite severe mental health problems that he’s more or less refused to deal with. Pretty much since the start of their relationship, he’s been hostile to me, other friends, and Sally’s family. Almost every time we’ve met, I’ve received an apology from Sally afterwards about Brian being generally grumpy, or directly unpleasant to me or other people (i.e., serving staff, other friends). He was unfaithful to her in the early days of their relationship. I’ve heard reports that he has screamed at Sally, broken things in the house, thrown (soft-ish) things at her, etc. I suspect there’s more beneath the surface.
A few years ago I moved abroad, and Sally and I stayed in touch. She soon got a new (busy!) job and contact declined. I expected this, but eventually the level of contact got very low indeed. I noticed she would only call me when Brian was away, or if she was out of the house. Soon, weeks would go by without a response to messages. Calls were scheduled and then were promptly rescheduled, or she’d just disappear when the time came. I wouldn’t hear anything for a week or two and then an apology that brushed over everything without offering an explanation.
Last year they got engaged. I was disappointed, as I felt that Brian was pretty much the worst match and quite possibly abusive. Contact dwindled further. I then heard from Sally that she was being pressured into having a wedding with immediate family only. I last messaged her about it in December and have since not had any response. They are due to get married in a month.
I suspect that something is not entirely right. I am fearful for Sally and her safety, and mournful of our lost friendship. I would reach out to her, but I have done this so many times over the past years, and particularly in the past couple. She refuses to open up if we do talk, and so I don’t think continually messaging would have any effect if she clearly doesn’t want to engage. For a while now, I have resolved not to push on the messaging, and to match the energy she’s putting into the friendship.
On a slightly selfish level, I am also pretty upset that a friend who was so close has disappeared in this way, with no explanation. It’s hurtful to be continually ignored. Living abroad, I have really struggled with loneliness, and this has made it worse. Recently, I have come to the acceptance that being needlessly miserable is a waste of time for myself. I have therefore decided to move on and prioritise finding new friends in my new country.
Since telling her to dump Brian is a bad idea, I have eliminated any temptation by removing her from social media and deleting her number. I now have no way of contacting her. This also serves as a way for me to get past what happened. If Sally wants to get in touch, she isn’t blocked and can still message me without a problem.
What is the most mature way for me to move on without hurting my former friend? Should I keep channels open or accept the friendship is now gone?

So as the title indicates, I’m wondering how you’re all handling callers, that grind your gears so bad that you feel a ball of fire in your chest growingthat makes you want to explode with rage?
Over the last few weeks and more so in the last few months, I have noticed a grand increase in the number of undeniably angry callers. Angry about waits. Angry about benefits. Angry about politics. Somehow though, many of them believe it’s appropriate to scream and berate workers. Personally I have always tried my best to tactfully handle the calls and resolve the issues with a calm and diplomatic demeanour, because I know it’s not actually personal.
But there are some people lately that have been nearly tipping me over the edge. It never used to impact me the way it’s starting to now. It seems like many people want INSTANT results. They want it done quick and NOW. I can understand the frustrations, I really do! What is not acceptable though is taking personal frustrations out on the person they are speaking to on the phone.
Some days when I leave work, I just think to myself what on earth is going on? The audacity! I would neeeeverrrr behave like people on the lines. The entitlement oozes, the condescending nature of some people is beyond me. I’m an empathetic person, I can put myself in another persons shoes. I can read between the lines. It’s part of why I’ve been proud of the work I’ve done. Say for example, recognizing when someone may be suffering with some mental health issues, then modifying my speech and how I go through the call to make it a better experience for them.
It all comes back to the ones that seem to be getting under my skin though. It’s the ones that if I was at a family dinner, I’d leave because I wouldn’t be putting up with that “stuff” lol. I don’t caaare if you don’t like our PM AND you have a bumper sticker to prove it. It’s NOT my job to manage your expectations. My job is to answer the question that you called about, not to debate. This isn’t a debate club. I am not about to listen to someone tell me their personal opinions on who they think should have the choice of marrying (if you catch my drift). It’s unacceptable and I will not engage.
Without needing to consistently remind a caller that we need to keep the calls on track and professional. How are all of you handling these scenarios? What do you tell the callers that puts a “full stop” to the dialogue happening; without disconnecting the call?
I know there are some amazing and creative people on this subreddit that might have some tools under their belt. I would LOVE to hear from you.
Thank you to all the public servants that continuously put their best foot forward every day. The jobs are often thankless but I really appreciate you all! Your kindness, humility AND humour have made the days a hell of a lot more bright than they might otherwise be. 🙏🏻❤️

I used to think that I have slight social anxiety disorder, because sometimes I feel awkward to talk to strangers even afraid of but sometimes I can start a conversation with strangers like in a bar or in a library. But today I found my social anxiety was actually more severe than I thought.
Tldr I am so sick. The real desperate moment is that I find out something that I thought I could do or I could do before, I can’t do anymore. What should I do now? I’m totally lost because I thought I could change myself, but in fact I can’t. I can’t afford going to therapist or medical treatment. What at least I can do? I’m really desperate now.
Today there was an social event and I wanted to overcome my anxieties. ppl talk to each other casually. I had prepared best opener imo and have got many stuffs to talk about. There was a small group of 3 girls and one of them I found cute. There was an excellent opportunity for me lasting like more than 15 mins. I did nothing.
There were so many times I so wanted to go join them but my legs turned into jelly I walked to them till the last step and held back I usually had no big problems talking to ppl who are chilling but today fear gripped me I have never felt so anxious so helpless so frightened so desperate the feeling was like trying to talking to others while seated at a rollercoaster freely falling, opening my mouth and not being able to pronounce a single vowel. 15mins I was being cooked so hard all I hoped was that my friend could come sooner to help me get through this. However when my friend came they left. When my friend is heading towards me they were saying goodbye to each other. I don’t know how to describe the feeling. It could just kill me.
And then the girl I like went away alone and I thought I might still got a chance. I and my friend followed her a lil while(which is incorrect and creepy) and figured out she was going back to her dormitory. My friend didn’t care what I was thinking and just wanted to go back to find the crowd because he missed the beginning of the event. And since she’s heading back to her dormitory I finally gave up and headed back.
I felt so bad so so terrible so fucking regretful I wanted to do it again but I knew if it happened again I still would’ve done nothing, which made me feel even worse. I felt like puking and crying and gasping. I couldn’t hold back my tears and felt revolting. I couldn’t stop biting my hands my fingers my knuckles. I cried so desperately.
And then we found the crowd and I noticed another cute girl with her group of 4 or 5 girls. She was a bit less cute imo than the former one but I still got good chance for like 10 mins. Even though I regretted a lot I regretted so much I still did nothing. I just didn’t know how to cope.
And then we got back to the starting point, and they were socialising with other people for like another 5 minutes, and there were guys. I tried so hard I tried so damn hard but I just couldn’t do it. I tried so hard not to let myself regret. But I just couldn’t do it. I thought of starting talking to guys first to gather some courage, but I found that I couldn’t even talk to guys. I asked my friend to help me together to break the ice, but he was unwilling to do because he didn’t like them and was chilling alone. And finally they left and headed back to the dormitory. Same plot happened again. I followed them for a while, so fucking damn desperate to at least say something, but I just couldn’t. And then I came back again, thinking that at least I have to talk to someone. But I still couldn’t.
Then the feeling of regret gripped me again. I was so choked I couldn’t even breathe. I wanted to kick some railings, but even this I couldn’t do it, ended up crying so fucking helplessly.
The real desperate moment is that I find out something that I thought I could do or I could do before, I can’t do anymore. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was just a pale, desperate animal, whose scarlet eyes burned with anger and anguish.
What should I do now? I’m totally lost because I thought I could change myself, but in fact I can’t. I can’t afford going to therapist or medical treatment. What at least I can do? I’m really desperate now.

I've been lurking on this sub for some time now, I didn't think I'd ever be posting here.
Now, this is most likely going to be a long post, so I apologize in advance.
My(M28) Fiancée(F26) and I have been together for a little over 3 years now. She is the most wonderful, loving, warm and thoughtful person I've ever met. I could be looking down the gallows and all it would take is one smile from her and I just knew everything would be okay.
A bit of background, I moved out of my home state in the beginning of the pandemic to stay around family since they lived a few states away. After a year of me living there, I met the woman who would change my life. It was truly a storybook, Love at first sight moment, I looked into her eyes and I just knew. The air just danced with electricity. Absolutely monumental.
We didn't see each other for a few weeks after that point, but I was not able to get her out of my mind. For the sake of anonymity, I won't go into full detail, but efforts were made, and we found each other and decided to go on a date.
The next couple of months were world shifting. I couldn't believe that everything I'd heard about love actually ended up being true. We bonded heavily over talks that lasted all night, random adventures together to explore this beautiful earth we've been blessed to experience. After really getting to know and understand one another, we decided to convert this minivan she had into a camper and go explore life on the road for a bit. What an enchanting and connective experience that turned out to be.
Now, to make sense of this next part I do have to go into some history we'd both experienced with trauma/abuse.
My father passed when I was very young and the man my mom ended up marrying was just an abusive mess, Physical, mental and emotional abuse were an actual every day occurrence, 15 years of every day agony and turmoil. On her side, Her parents were essentially absent due to drugs, so she was raised by her grandparents.
We both deal with different levels/types of trauma & trauma patterns/responses.
Around 6-7 months in arguments and disagreements entered the relationship, She had been entertaining an ex of hers for some extra validation, which hurt me in ways I couldn't express.
We had worked through that and the issues that came with it, things were going beautifully again when a very unexpected suicide death happened in my close family, I have a history of "MDD" and suicide attempts, so this death hit a trigger in me with the strength of a locomotive, and affected me in ways that are still be uncovered today. With that, it Brought on over a year of extreme confusion, existentialism and it essentially undid the years of Therapy and CBT/DBT that I had.
From that point, a pattern started, we'd argue, it'd turn into a fight and then I'd get overwhelmed with everything and suggest that maybe we weren't right together(JFC If I could go back and stop myself, I would).
She deals with some pretty heavy anger issues, she would constantly lash out, and due to my history of abuse anger cut particularly deep.(She did let me know it was something she dealt with in the beginning)
at that point a vicious cycle begun, she'd get angry or irritated, last out at me and an argument would ensue, eventually ending with the discussion of us splitting. It wasn't an every day, or even every week thing, but the severity of them would leave a lasting impact each time.
When the dust finally started to settle from the family death I'd experienced, things started to make more sense to me and I was able to piece together that I had been in an odd state of dissociation from the death.
We had a good few months/almost a year, things felt as magical and intense as they did when we first met and life was wonderful. I had my Love, we were doing pretty well financially and we had gotten into making some incredible music together, that is up until a few weeks ago.
We had gotten into an argument after having some drinks and some things were said back and forth that didn't sit right with either of us, we didn't know at the time, but that, I believe, was the end of our relationship.
This past weekend, she decided that she wanted to go out with her friend after work for a couple of drinks, she then decided to literally stay out all night and have no communication with me, which unfortunately triggered and intense fear that something happened to her. When she got home the next morning we got into a huge fight and we both just let out all the ways in which the other had hurt them or made them feel unseen/unheard. We ended the fight on good terms and it was really just eye opening.
After everything I decided I was going to put on a podcast from my favorite comedian, Theo Von, to try to cheer myself up since the dude is absolutely hilarious. The episode I clicked on was with Tim Fletcher, an expert and really a trailblazer in the world of complex trauma. The episode was incredibly illuminating, and also heartbreaking.
I completely resonated with EVERY. SINGLE. THING., Turns out I have been dealing with the effects of complex trauma(CPTSD) my entire life. So after finishing the episode I just went and learned everything I could about complex trauma and how it truly affects every single behavior, Thought, action and feeling. after hours and hours of lectures and reading, It dawned on me that this was actually a codependent relationship. I found that I had essentially all the signs of being a Co-narcissist, completely disregarding my feelings and needs to ensure that she was okay, even if I was on the brink, which over time can build resentment. She has displayed so many signs of being a narcissist in the context of a relationship, and it's something that she said she was always worried about since people have brought it up to her in the past, of course, when she mentioned this to me I did everything in my power to convince her that she wasn't, Still, I love her DEARLY.
Which brings us to now, things are still very up in the air, she's "unsure if she wants to keep trying". Which I totally get, it's been a turbulent year and a half with us, but now with some real direction and an idea of what's been the underlying cause of our issues and how to fix them, It feels like it just happened to late, It doesn't seem like much can be done other than time and hope.
If you've experienced anything I've talked about, PLEASE look into complex trauma. Tim Fletcher is the person I would really suggest looking into, the main is a saint truly doing Gods work. Don't delay it, it may bring things to a point of no return.
Thank you for taking the time to read a broken man's thoughts.

I really need some advice, please help
A while back I met this girl gaming online. We had a really good time and we added each other. We started playing together a lot pretty regularly on a daily basis pretty much, often even till the middle of the night. We also started texting each other on Snapchat a lot during the day and night too. After a few weeks she told me she liked me, and I told her I felt the same way. Ever since then we got even closer, we used to talk all day long via Snapchat, and then game together at night. The conversations were always so alive, funny, interesting and just amazing. As time went by, she showed her interest in us dating a few times, at first it was in a more jokingly way but later on she was more direct about it. And I told her that even though I do like her and would date her, I don't think I can because we live in different countries and we have never even seen each other in real life, we never hung out together in real life. So considering that, it didn't seem like the best idea to me even though it was really hard for me to say. Mind this until this point, we had been talking and playing for multiple months and we even had some "spicy" talks here and there during these months. Anyways, after a few more weeks after I told her I didn't think us dating is the best decision, she decides she needs to walk away from me. She said that while we're still talking and gaming, she only wants me and because I said we couldn't really date (She understood that too I think) she can't have me, so she needs to cut all connections with me for bettering herself. At first I tried to talk her out of it because I really did like having her around, liked talking to her. But eventually I understood her. So a few days after that, she had just blocked me on all platforms completely. Saying I was sad and that something always felt like it's missing was an understatement, but I comforted myself by saying this was the right call since we couldn't date, and because I remembered the little deal we made that if we're both single at 30 years old, we'll try to get in touch again. So after a few months I eventually got used to not having her around, even though it was really difficult. And I thought that is where the story ends for us. But then, a few weeks ago she reached out to me again. I was so surprised and I asked her what is this about because I was worried something serious had happened and maybe she needs help or something , but she just said she was really to be friends again. Mind you, the time we were apart was a few months, half a year more or less. Anyways, I got really happy because like I said , I did like her when we talked, I I liked talking with her. We started catching up and talking (I'm really excited) and stuff, and one of the first things she asks me after not seeing me in months was "Do you have a girlfriend?" I told her I didn't, and asked if she had a boyfriend - she said yes. And I know we never actually "dated" but I can't say I was happy to hear about it as you can imagine, but I quickly moved on pass it and changed the subject. Anyways over the next few days she had barley responded to me on Snapchat and on tiktok where we also used to talk, and when she did respond, the responses were so so dry and she only answered my questions, never asked any questions back other than a few generic ones like "how about you?" After I initiated and asked how she was doing. The only times when the conversation felt a bit more alive was when she talked about her boyfriend. She sent me messages about him and messages like "yeah so last night me and him we..... Oh wait I shouldn't tell you what we did oops hahahah but you know, couple stuff hahaha". That obviously bothered me a lot but I didn't say much. Obviously her returning wasn't a great as I thought, so I still tried to "save" it. I asked her if she wanted to call or play a game online like we used to to a lot back then, she agreed to call and also to play online (different occasions). In both times she was still so dry and uninteresting in me, and it made me feel so shit. In both times I would say something, it wouldn't be quiet for about 10-15 seconds and then she would just start talking about something else, or just randomly ignore me and what I'm saying. During the time we called it was even worse, the entire call all we did was talk about her boyfriend as if that's something I want to do. She told me about how he sleeps in her bed, how they share a toothbrush, about them going on dates and also on his mess-ups, and told me she might break things up with him. And again, I'm aware we never officially dates but come on, she had to know I didn't want to hear anything about it right? She had to be doing it on purpose right? No way she was this naive right? Because if it wasn't clear, we only cut connections with each other because we couldn't really date so it was "worthless" to her I guess, but when we did cut connections I did still had feelings for her and she for me (She claims) so this whole interaction is super hard for me and I'm sure you can see why. Anyways, after a week or two, she tells me about how she's about to go on a date with a guy who is 20 (mind you she is 17 and I'm about to turn 18 soon), so of course I told her it sounds weird and that guy is weird and untrustworthy. I spent the whole day talking to her about it and trying to prevent her from doing it because I didn't want her to get used or something by this guy who is 20 and wants to go out with a 17 year old minor. That day was the most we texted ever since she came back. Eventually she said fine and that she would cancel the date with him. That was less than a week ago. And now just yesterday she had told me about another new guy she started seeing (again, why would she keep doing this? She had to know it hurts for me to hear all about it right?) but again I didn't really say anything. Mind you it has been like a month give it take since she came back and this is the THIRD guy she has told me about already. What's up with that? Anyways, last night I get a text from her. Ooo maybe it's her wanting to play a game online? Call? Ask about me? Talk to me? Make jokes with me? Watch a movie with me? No. She told me about this third new guy. She told me about how they kissed and whole I'm feeling so so shitty and trying to process what I had just read because it's such a difficult situation for me, she just send me a picture of a hickie on her neck saying "he also gave me this". I just snapped, I felt like someone had just shot me, like someone's had just kicked me in the face. Imagine a girl you like leaves you, comes back, acting all cold and dry, basically only talks about her boyfriend(s) and then tell you about how she kissed and how a guy sucked her neck and left a mark on it. So I just wrote a long message finally telling her how much is bothers me and how much I don't want to hear anything liket this ever again. She said we should call so I called her. In the call she tried telling me she didn't know it could be annoying and hurtful for me but I don't think it possible, a part of me wants to believe her but there's just no way she didn't know and had no idea it bothered me (the guy who liked her and she left while he liked her to hear about her kissing and sleeping with guys right?). Anyways as the call went on she promised she would stop doing this from now on, and we finally had a conversation not about her boyfriends. We talked about me for a change, and about her too. It was a difficult conversation but it was a good one, we even sort of made plans to play online the next day. The next day comes around and I (as I normally do) ask her how her day is going, especially because I was in a good mood because of the call fr the previous day where she said she wouldn't be so dry when we text and that she would stop telling me about her boyfriend(s) and what they do together. She responded with "VERY GOODDD" to my question, so naturally I asked "ohh that's awesome tell me about it! How's so??" And she literally replied with "uhghhhhh hmmmm my boyfriend came over. Anywaysss what about you?" And I just felt so so shitty all over again. Because why do I have imagine what her and her boyfriend did for her to call the day "VERY GOODD" like even if it's not something sexual I still don't want to hear anything about it AS I SAID ON THE CALL ON THE PREVIOUS EVENING OMG. I straight up just didn't respond to the message and she started acting all defensive saying "well you asked bro what did you want me to say" as if she couldn't say "oh yeah I didn't do much today just relaxing at home, what about you?" And she tried to act as if her saying "VERY GOOD DAY" in caps lock wouldn't make me ask about it. So ever since then we are kinda fighting on Snapchat Because of it. Okay so, a lot of you are probably asking yourself "why aren't you just cut all connections with her? She makes you feel so so shitty ever since she came back because all she does is tell you about her boyfriends and what does with them (at least that's all I remember from all of our short and dry conversatios, all I remember from these recent conversations is feeling so bad about myself, feeling so shitty, feeling like I was kicked in the face) and even when you told her about it, she continues" but the thing is, I just remember how amazing it was before she left, how much fun and good times we had and I can't bring myself to do that. I really want to keep a connection with her but I just don't know what to do. I really need some advice about this whole thing. What should I do about this? How do you think I should act? And sorry for the long read by the way, I just really needed to get this off my chest and seek some advice.

I'm not sure if I want insights or for somebody to talk me out of it. I don't actually know what I have yet, but a schizophrenia diagnosis has been crossed off by my doctor because I apparently have too much insight and am too functional to be schizophrenic, and he suspects schizotypal personality disorder instead. Waiting on psychiatrist to be free. However, my symptoms lean very much positive, and at one point, I cut an inch deep into myself with a knife looking for a chip planted in me by Satan in my sleep. Because of this I was deemed a potential danger to myself and prescribed 1 mg of Rexulti a day.
I don't seem to be getting any side effects, apart from a sort of sluggishness I've noticed the past few days. Not sure if that's because of the rexulti or not, but I feel dumber. Also, I still believe what I believe. The only difference is that I seem unable to come up with new "delusions". I still believe demons are all around me - the difference is that my brain can no longer give me answers as to what they're up to. And that actually leaves me more scared - before, at least I could have an answer and something to do to protect myself, even if it hurt me, I had an answer at least. Now it just feels like duct tape has been plastered over my brain's mouth, and it still shrieks at the top of its lungs, but I can no longer make out what it's trying to warn me of. It's ominous. I'm scared I'm causing people hurt, sending the universe into disorder, by taking my meds. I just want to listen to my brain again, no matter how awful what it has to say is.
Also, it's a conspiracy, I swear. All of my friends, and my whole family, are on meds now. My two best friends are on ADHD meds, and the other, anti-anxiety, my stepbrother's on antidepressants and so is my mum, and my stepfather is on his diabetes meds. They're putting something in our meds and making us all ignorant to something, but I don't know what. So, yes, I must get off them. But my friends keep urging me not to, and I can't tell if they just care about me or if they've been brainwashed.
Sorry, that turned into a whole thing, but I've written too much to delete. What are your thoughts, if you've been in a similar dilemma?

reposting because my husband starting asking about my reddit username and account so i had to delete and make a new account.
i need help, guidance, or advice. I’m 23 and i’ve been in my relationship since i was freshly 18. He was 21 when we met and we met in the month of January working at a restaurant together. In march he asked me to be his girlfriend, which i said yes.
I grew up in an extreme abusive household and had constant emotional, physical and sexual abuse my whole life so by the time I was 18 I was set on moving out and was working constantly as a server to move. By April, I had saved enough money to move out and afford my own apartment. During that time, he helped me move out and began staying with me constantly. We were in the honeymoon stage (i would like to add he told me he loved me for the first time during sex) but I was also tired of taking care of the bills and handling everything on my own so I asked him to help me pay rent or that i needed space. He began helping but things started the change. He would call me relentless if i didn’t answer my phone.
We went through a lot of personal traumas together during these last years, his father committed suicide, we suffered a miscarriage and i dealt with a lot of mental health issues. we ended up getting married in 2022. Since then things have been so toxic. We argue to the point that I feel lost , confused and manipulated. He has such a short temper, if anything goes wrong or not of plan then he is so angry that he makes everyone on edge. I feel like i’m constantly making excuses for him to people and i’m always on edge. I feel like I need to have cameras and recorders to show him how he acts and to prove what i said because he will twist my words. My best friend of 14 years left because of him and my only friend left says he’s a narcissist and abusive.
i want to leave a lot of times but when we get to that breaking point and i say i want to leave he apologizes, cries and promises he’ll change. I don’t work and im completely financially dependent on him. I asked in December 2023 for a debit card since our bank account does have both of our names on it. He told me he ordered it but he never went and got it, i’m not sure if he even called and ordered it. I asked him to get counseling and he never did.
right now he’s always upset because i don’t initiate sex, but he hurts me before and during so of course i don’t want to have sex. He keeps asking repeatedly until i give in because he’ll just get upset and give me the silent treatment. During sex, he grabs my arms, puts them above my head and holds them down hard even though i’ve asked over and over to not do that because i have major sexual trauma and don’t like to be restricted.
I feel like I have repeated my childhood and married someone just like my father but at the same time i feel like i’m being dramatic and i’m the sensitive one or the one who’s in the wrong.
I have no way to work or leave my house and i feel so trapped.

I’ve been living with my parents ever since I graduated college last year. It’s a weird dynamic that I have with them. I almost feel like a tenant in their house because we hardly talk and I rarely see them due to our work schedules. For the first several months of living with them, I honestly had zero social life…and they knew that. I would only ever be at work or at home. But then one night, I went on a date with my (now) girlfriend, and I was so excited to tell my parents about it. I just had a really good feeling about this girl and knew it was someone I’d be proud to bring home. When I told them, they were really excited for me and ended up meeting her within a couple weeks. I think they like her, but they’re kinda just naturally kind people so it’s hard to tell their true opinions. It doesn’t really matter because I’m happy and have high intentions to marry her. We’ve been together for half a year now and it’s going great.
Anyways, I went from spending that little bit of time at home to essentially never. Once I get off work, I drive to see my gf. Every single day. At some point, I started sleeping over at her house. She lives with her grandparents so it’s really easy for me to sneak in through her window and leave in the early morning to go to work. Even though I’ve met her grandparents, they probably would be against me sleeping over. So my gf sneaks me in when their back is turned…luckily they’re deaf asf lol.
When my mom noticed I wasn’t sleeping at home anymore, she asked where I was sleeping. Because she’s your typical Christian mom, I’d know how she feels about sleeping with a partner before marriage. So I lied and said my gf’s grandma lets me sleep in their guest room. Anyways, I’ve been doing this for months now and neither my gf’s grandparents NOR my parents know the actual truth behind what we’re doing. Every now and then, my mom texts me that I shouldn’t be taking advantage of my gf’s grandparents kindness by sleeping over so much. This is honestly valid, except I’m not taking advantage of their kindness. They don’t even know I’ve been in their house!
I’m pretty certain that my gf and I will end up forever partners and this means that our families will eventually have to meet. This scares us shitless because of the amount of lies we’ve told. It goes beyond just spending the night. We are constantly lying about our whereabouts and the trips we’ve taken. Are we assholes by valuing our peace/love/time together over the trust of our families? But more importantly, how the heck am I going to break it to my parents when the time comes that they’re going to meet her grandparents?

I, 22F, have been debating leaving my immediate family behind for about 6 months.
To give context, I'm the youngest of 3. My sisters are 31F and 28F. My parents were both alcoholics, my dad died due to complications related to it at 44. I was 14. No one else will ever admit it, but he did when he got sick and we never got a formal diagnosis.
My mother is now 49 and ever since my dad died her alcoholism tore the family apart. I had mental health issues before his death but her instability afterwards ruined my relationships with my older sisters and with her. It was never good to begin with, but she was mixing antipsychotics and alcohol to cope. It would lead to her screaming at me and treating me like shit, there was so much verbal and emotional abuse. No one around me did anything, they would often tell me "Stop acting like you lost both your parents.I She was nowhere near a place to be a mother to me at that point. Their alcoholism started when I was 2, we were raised by 2 different sets of parents.
I got so angry as a teenager, I started drinking I started lying to everyone about anything that mattered to me because firstly if I didn't, they would inevitably make it everyone's business. My mother did that my whole life, which is why I never shared anything before anyway, and also partly why I lied constantly as a teenager. Secondly was, I wanted to drink and not have anyone get in my way. I admit I was impossible for a time. I was really really difficult. I had no one to turn to because even when I did try, I would be forced to "talk it out" with my mother. As soon as she would drink after any conversations I attempted over my feelings, she would scream at me until I apologized or cried as a way to "mend things". My sisters told me I deserved it for being so difficult.
My sister and brother in law had to pay for my last year of high school. I didn't ask they just did it because it's a huge deal in the family. It cost a lot and when I didn't make it, I lied about it for a year. I felt so much shame and guilt and I didn't want them trying to pay it again. My plan was to finish it another way, and give them their money ASAP. I felt sick every time I thought about it. I will repay them. This messed up even more of the relationship with my eldest sister and I don't blame her. This event changed me in a big way. I stopped lying, and my drinking lessened a ton. I felt like a horrible human being.
Furthermore an incident with my mother when I was 20 changed me even more. She got wasted one night, she told me she is just waiting for me to move so she can die. We fought, I tried to hide the alcohol and she got aggressive and verbally abusive with me. I gave her the alcohol, and locked myself in my room to protect myself. I called my eldest sister and told her I'm scared of what she'll do in the morning. All she said was "she knows she was wrong, she won't do anything." I begged her to go to therapy the next day, and eventually she did for a short 2 months. Her excuse for stopping was "I want the money for other things and I'm better now."
I stopped drinking so much and completely stopped caring about what she did after that. I stopped trying to help her depression. I stopped cleaning the house to cheer her up. I stopped doing little gestures for her. I barely spoke to her for a very long time.
Last year around June, I got a job opportunity 2 hours away and moved literally overnight. Before that, I was living on the same property as eldest sister, in my mother's home at the back. I worked until I got a stomach ulcer and couldn't make rent. I had no choice but to move back with my mother.
I called my sister and finally told her all I had felt since that night. The fear. The anger. The pain.The depression. She quickly told me "You can't hold grudges, or else everyone could hold grudges against you for lying to us." She then spent the next 30 minutes telling me I need to stop acting like I can handle life without my mother, and I need her for AT LEAST another 10 years to guide me through life. She had the audacity to tell me my mother doesn't drink that much anymore she doesn't know what I'm talking about. She kept saying how I know nothing in life, and eventually I just stopped listening at all. Something about that conversation just put things into perspective for me.
Every single time I tried talking about my feelings, even before the lying and horrible decisions on my part had started, I was met with similar reactions from anyone I spoke to. I was constantly told nothing is wrong and I'm the one who needs help. I was insulted to my core if I ever mentioned the alcohol abuse of either parent, even as a young child. Those 6 months away from everyone, made everything so much clearer and that conversation just hit me on a new level.
Recently, I've been going to online al-anon meetings, and I hear this is common in families where addiction is a problem. Since I've been home, I have replayed so many different memories from the past. After everything that has happened, my goal is to pay my family back for everything I owe them, but never go to any family events again.
On the other hand, I feel I did deserve everything that happened and I need to accept anything they do to me especially after I lied for so long.

For some context, me and my girlfriend have struggled with our sex life for most of our seven year relationship, I'm 24 and she's 27. We've had several conversations about what we can do to 'spice things up' or make it more interesting as I would be the only one initiating sex and it would always be relatively average with her half the time as she can often not seem that invested. After a big argument and then an actual rational conversation our sex life would get back on track for a little while, but then like usual it would revert back to the same issues.
This time I questioned having sex during our lunch break today at work (we worked from home today), and she laughed and said no, which was obviously not the problem, but then she immediately went "yeah actually let's do it". As soon as we started to make out and she was doing stuff to me, she just went "we can do it but I'm not really wanting to" and "if we do it we've gotta be quick" (we had an hour and this time thing keeps coming up, even when we've got all night, it's like she wants it over with). I immediately pulled back because I don't want sex with someone who doesn't want it, and she got offended.
After explaining why this keeping on happening was annoying, and made me not feel like she's invested in our sex life, she went into defence mode stating that she often does it without saying that she's not into it because she feels guilty, which has now made me never want to have sex because I don't know how she's truly feeling. I feel it's unfair she never told me this in the first place? I've repeatedly said to her that we need to communicate better on all fronts with sex but she never sticks to her word.
We've had other issues too, where she'll say that she wants to have sex later, and then never bothers with it. It's not a big deal, it's her choice, but when she'll do it for literal days on end it starts to feel like why should I put up with someone who will set expectations all the time just to not follow through?
I don't want to be harsh, or sound it, and I speak with a calm soft voice when I speak on this subject, but she'll immediately start raising her voice.
Just some other context, it's not the only thing that she lacks any confidence in. She doesn't clean, that's left to me. I do the washing, and wash up. She'll cook, but not as often as she'll want to order in or do something very easy.
I did wonder ages ago if it was depression, but it's clearly not, she couldn't be happier half the time about things that excite HER, but if it's something that excites someone else she doesn't listen or get involved. Her family have called her selfish before and she can have some mood swings.
At the same work place, there's this one girl who she is aware likes me, and even the other day essentially said that she's cheated on all her other boyfriends and is now in an open relationship, basically signalled to me that she'd do it with me. I don't want to, and I won't, I love my girlfriend - my concern with this is that although this has made my girlfriend rightfully hate her and feel threatened, this doesn't even seem to have triggered anything in my girlfriend to do more, or give more. I feel like she expects everything done for her and given to her without giving anything back.
What do I do?
TL;DR! - I'm 24, she's 27, I'm a male, she's a female, we've been together for 7 years.

To preface, I'm autistic, so I hate when people touch me in general, but especially when I don't expect it. I don't even let my friends or (most) family hug me, like the only person I'm comfortable with hugging me is my partner and my brother.
I was at a weekly small video game tournament that's held in the back of a (well-lit) bar. The place wasn't necessarily cramped, but you do have to slink past some people and say "excuse me" a couple of times to get from A to B. This will be relevant later. My first game of the night was against this guy, and immediately he was plugging headphones into the console. I said "oh, I'd like to hear the game too", to which he responded, "I have a splitter", and i said "well i dont have headphones, I'd rather hear it from the speakers." Now, the place wasn't quiet, but it wasn't loud enough to drown out the game's audio, and there are some audio queues in the game to help you know what's going on, so hearing it is important. He then said "You can't even hear it from the speakers though". And I said "Well when we're in the match the audio is louder so I can hear the important stuff". He looked at me like an idiot, and was clearly upset that he couldn't use his headphones. So he just said "okay, whatever". Like, a little rude, but nothing crazy.
We played, he beats me, then I go back to stand next to my friends. About 30 seconds later someone aggressively brushes past me, and I hear "excuse me", and it's the guy I just fought. Could've been a mistake, but already I'm like, okay, this guy is probably pissed at me for not letting him hear his game even though he won. Later on, he does the same thing, someone bumps into me from behind, same guy. At this point, I go from rolling my eyes to actually being anxious. So after my next game (which was my last, I also lost that one) rather than standing, I went to sit at a small table near my friends, and motioned for them to join me.
My girlfriend was with me at the bar. She doesn't play in the tournament, but she goes to socialize. We are very visibly together since she watches a lot of my games, we stand next to each other a lot, and sometimes she'll give me a kiss on the cheek before going to talk to people. So, she's standing pretty close talking to a small group of people, but I can see her. And I see the guy bumps into her. What the fuck. Does he just bump into everyone? Am I reading into this too much? So I watch him for a sec, and he isn't doing that to anyone else. He waits for the crowd to split, he speaks up before coming up behind someone, he taps people on the shoulder. The tournament is mostly men, so maybe he's just being polite to them? I don't know, but it's very suspicious, I feel like he's for sure targeting me, and doing it to my girlfriend too because he saw her with me.
So it's about an hour later, and I had joined a "redemption bracket" for people who got out of the tournament early. I'm standing with the person I'm about to play, talking about our character matchups. For context, I'm wearing a sleeveless top. Next thing I know I feel two hands on my shoulders, MY BARE SHOULDERS, and I'm being moved to my right. WHAT THE FUCK. It's that fucking guy, he's moving me out of the way to "get by me". For a second I was just completely stunned. I was so shocked, and confused, and trying to process what just happened. I've been grabbed by my waist before by guys "moving me out of the way", but this was so much worse. This felt so much more gross. I snapped out of it, and felt anger propelling me to confront him. I caught up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and said "Don't fucking touch me like that", and he looked at me like I was crazy. The fucking audacity. I walked away. The night was completely ruined, my anxiety made me a shaking mess, I did horribly in my next game, and went home with my gf shortly after.
Like I did the cardinal sin of not letting this guy monopolize the game audio, I told him no, and the whole night he thought he could just fuck with me, AND my girlfriend. I tried to tell her about it on the ride home but all she said was "ugh, what a dirt bag". Maybe I didn't communicate how violating it felt, but it feels like her reaction was proportionally small. I tried telling another friend later (who I had met at these tournaments) and they said "yeah that guy's an asshole". Another tournament friend just said "ugh, guy's suck". Like, I know I wasn't assaulted or anything, like on paper I've had worse happen to me, but this felt a lot worse for some reason. The way people responded kind of implicitly informed me that it wasn't as big of a deal as I was feeling, and I tried to just let it go.
The guy didn't show up to the next few weeks of tournaments, but everytime, I dreaded going a bit because i thought he might be there. Walking into the bar each week I felt a shock of anxiety shoot through me, anticipating that he might be there, or I might have to fight him. And every time I would think "this is so stupid, why do you feel this way, why are you having this reaction, it wasn't a big deal". Like, for weeks I kept thinking about how gross it was, and how mad I felt, and how entitled he felt to just put his hands on someone, me, my bare skin.
Anyway, flash forward to yesterday. The organizers of the weekly tournament are hosting a tournament at their house. I've been to their house before, they are very cool people, they are great hosts, so I'm really excited to go, and I feel totally safe and relaxed with the idea of going. I show up on time (which means I'm early in this community), and there were like no cars parked, so I had to be one of the first people there. Well, my girlfriend and I walk in the door, and that fucking guy is there. I was completely blindsided. I felt anxiety immediately filling my body. I briefly said hi to the hosts and went to sit isolated in a corner to try to calm down. More people started showing up, and saying hi to me, and I must've been visibly uncomfortable because people kept asking if I was okay. I was trying to get things under control but it wasn't going away, and it was made worse somehow by everyone just casually talking to this guy and exchanging pleasantries with him and whatever.
I told my girlfriend I wanted to leave and we left. I wasn't in a good state to say bye to anyone so I just kind of left. When I got in my car I started crying and I don't even know why, it just happened. My girlfriend was shocked and asked what was wrong, and I told her I couldn't be around that guy. She said something like "oh okay", which made me feel kinda ridiculous for having this reaction.
Like on paper it was such an inconsequential interaction but it just had such a big, lasting effect on me. I feel so completely weak and stupid for reacting this way. Like I don't even want to go to the tournaments anymore. This stupid thing is just consuming me, and it was such a little thing compared to what a lot of women have to deal with all the time.

My most recent cptsd episode gave me some interesting clarity about myself. When I was triggered, (and anything that connects to my core fear of people being extremely angry at me, could be a trigger) I felt like I had no control over my actions and behaviors. In reality, I was dealing with toxic levels of abuse and stress on a daily basis. All of my behaviors during my downward spiral, that I expressed for others (over caring, over explaining, over protective, trying to right what I believed was a wronged action) was what my survival mind wanted for me.
I was maxed out with traumatic levels of stress. It was affecting me physically before I had the big breakdown.
I was doing the best that I could before the traumatic triggering event. I was practicing meditation, I was using EFT and TFT when I was hit with panic attacks. I was trying to exercise daily to release stress. I was practicing eye movements therapy. I was trying to hum when invasive thoughts hijacked my mind. I was journaling about my thoughts and emotions. I was using tuning forks to balance out my anxiety. I was taking CBD oil to help manage my tremors ( I have functional movement disorder which can be caused by abuse.) I was in a therapy group for emotional abuse. I was practicing Qigong and Tai Chi almost daily. I was eating healthy, I was doing my best to take my medications.
I was already struggling really hard to manage my life.
I was trying my best in a very limiting situation. When the traumatic trigger happened, my mind physically didn't have the stable, secure, and logical bandwidth to manage it and my survival mind took over.
That was hell. My daily anxiety got worse. My insomnia got worse. I felt empty, like a dark, vast, null, void inside. My tremors were worse. I loss my appetite. I was nauseous. I was getting sloopy on my daily hygiene, and cleaning the house. I was having nightmares. I wasn't getting enough sleep. My body was too tense, I wasn't capable of completely relaxing, I was struggling to concentrate on my coursework.
And then the dark moment of pain hit me. I felt like a horrible person after my breakdown. I felt like those who had witnessed it were mocking me, criticizing me, judging me deeply. That sent me spiraling deeper into my darkness. I felt like I was in deep, deep trouble.
I wanted to leave the planet (not die, but if it were possible to live on another plant, I would have left immediately.)
I did write a heartfelt apology to the main person who experienced my bizarre behavior and breakdown. I developed a plan of accountability (I would leave them alone for the rest of my life). I explained where I was coming from and why I did/wrote what I did.
But that dark, empty void feeling. That feeling where everything hurts and nothing made it feel better. When I was pushing myself through the motions. I had experienced it before. It was a looooooong time ago. Maybe even decades ago. I remember feeling that way often as a child. And it clicked, I had cptsd as a child. I had it as a teen and I had it throughout my 20s, 30s, and some of my 40s. And that I had come a long way from healing from those awful childhood experiences.
And currently, I'm living in the same house, with the same people who broke me as a child. I was dealing with deeper levels of traumatic abuse, too.
It makes sense how and why I broke down and did such an embarrassing thing. My survival brain was still trying to protect me the best way it knew how. I was stuck in that survival mind for weeks on end. I was fighting for my life in my mind, and on the outside I had to pretend that everything was fine. I was denying my own deep pain to myself.
Factors that would have prevented my breakdown would have been to be in better housing, by myself, away from my abusers. To have been living in a safer environment. To have had the financial security to take care of all of my needs. To have been able to get my stalker to legally stay away from me. Oh yeah, I was (and still am to a lesser degree) being stalked by a relative. But since that person is the "golden" relative, everyone chooses to believe and protect them and blames me for the abuse and torture that they bestow on me.
It's too much! Even with a healthy mind, all that was happening to me was too much for ANYONE to handle.
I think that's it for us. It's not the last triggering event that sent you over, it was all the build up of harm, neglect, abuse, and suffering that you were trying to manage before then.
If the mind was like an adjustable bucket full of water. I think healthy minds have less water inside (let's say the water = stressful emotions and events) and their buckets are more flexible in adjusting to the levels of water inside them. Meaning that because of that elasticity, they could manage the water inside better. Where as, for folks like us, our buckets are more rigid, less elastic, and it's filled to just over the brim with water. It's harder to adjust and manage the water levels because there is no room to manage it. And the walls are weak and leaking. While people with the stronger, healthier mental buckets have sturdier walls, no holes, less water, and are more manageable.
Of course our emotional bucket spilled over onto others, we were maxed out and life was still pouring water into it. We needed help. We may have been asking, begging, pleading with life to scoop some of the heavy waters out. Instead the water of life kept flowing and those around you were telling you that you were fine, because they were fine, so how could you not be fine, too?
It's a messed up cycle of life. Those moments of breakdowns, meltdowns, extreme panic attacks, the behaviors our mind went through to protect us, that was our survival mind.
Once you have the capacity after you spilled your water and you are able to breath a little bit better, the pain is a little bit less, it's okay to admit that your primitive survival mind took over. It's okay to thank your mind and body for trying to protect you.
Honor that you survived.
Then whatever you are capable of doing, get help. Sign up for mental health app and use it, find a therapist, a counselor, a support group, post your thoughts, questions, concerns on here. And yeah, drink more water to flush the toxic cellular energy out, try to manage your sleep better, take naps if you can, take a few moments to stretch or do some focus breathing techniques, add in more healthy foods. Do it small. Even if that means being aware and making the effort to have one glass of water. That's better than none. Walk for 5 minutes. Take a multi vitamin, sit outside for a few minutes.
After you do those better behaviors and habits, acknowledge it. At the of the day, remind yourself of ANY of the better choices you made today. If you can, appreciate yourself for your effort, even for just having the thought about doing better. Thoughts are energy. Thoughts lead to action. Start planting the mental seeds to grow the thoughts, behaviors, habits that you desire to experience. Pretend in your mind that you are doing the better behaviors and habits that you desire to do.
May we all find ways to repair our mental bucket. And may we all find a way to leave toxic environments, toxic relationships, gain stability in our weakest areas, and find folks who accept, understand and are supportive of us. May luck be on all of our sides.
I see you, I hear you, I'm giving you supported space to process your emotions and experiences. I care about you, and I'm rooting for you. I'm rooting for myself, too. I love that you are here in this world. You are worth of healing for you.

I ( almost 18 male), met my girlfriend ( just turned 17 ) a couple of years back, when i was 15. The love between us started out of nowhere and we got along togheter very well. Her parents were doctors and were very strict and had a better financial and social status then me and my family and juged me on that. With time that became a problem and i started to see that they were very wierd and were bad pepole. In the first week of us beeing togheter, she had a party at her house with a couple of people and i stayed at her for that night knowing her parents wouldn’t come home, we got a little bit intimate but nothing serious and then we slept. After that her parents came home because of her snitch brother and caught us sleeping in the bed. After that she got grounded for a mounth but we still saw eachother, she would skip the last period of school just to meet for an hour or a copule minutes some time or she would go to her grandma house and leave her phone there because her parents had her location, even though we went trough all that, it was percious time and we got even closer to eachother. Me and my gf gotten intimate pretty early, in the first mounth of us beeing togheter and she lost her v-card with me. Before we did it, we had some intimacy, kisses, touching each other, and everytime i did something like that i would ask her if she is ok with that and if she is 100% sure, she was positive but for the first time we did things like that, she kept saying that she doesn’t want me to belive that she is a hoe for doing this things with me and i reassuerd her everytime and told her if she feels like it, then its ok and that i would never try to take advantage of her and that i would take this relationship seriously. After that we would get intimate at parties, we started going down on each other but nothing more because she wasn’t ready. For new years we went to a party and there she lost her v-card with me. After that we got along even better, sentimentaly and sexually, she belived in me as a guy and we had the best sex ever, we did it everywhere, we went to parties, to hotels, sometimes i would go to hers when she was home alone. Everything was going fine till i found out something that I couldn’t accept. Before i was with her, she was with another guy that her and his family were very close to eachother, they were also doctors, it was a childhood relationship, she was around 11 years old and he was around 16 when they got togheter, but it was nothing serious, they would see eachother every couple of months or so in vacations or family meetings. He wanted to have sex with her but she wasn’t ready so he started having sex with other girls and when she got a little bit older (13yrs her), (around 18yrs him), he started pressuring her to have sex with him and told her that she is a bitch for not doing it with him, later she wouldn’t accept him seeing other girls but she found out that he cheated on her again and she broke up with him, as i said, it was nothing serious, they would see eachother a copule of times per year and would text eachother pretty rarely, to me that is a huge age gap and i see him as a pedo. All things were said and done but there wasn’t nothing that i didn’t know about, she told me all this stuff when we got togheter. But while staying at a hotel with her, while she was sleeping, i snoped trough her phone and found out that this guy wanted to give her a Christmas present while we were togheter but she turend him down, and blocked him. Then his friends were messaging her telling her that he misses her very much and that he got very drunk but she turned him down, but not in the way i wanted, she didn’t just cut it off, she talked to them, told them that is over and to take care of him to not get that drunk so nothing would happen to him. I thought that she did that because she cared about him, but when i confronted her she told me that she didn’t want their families to get involved and if they did, that would cause a lot of problems. That was something very toxic and i told her that it matters what she wants, not the people around her. After that i wanted to break up with her, i felt betrayed because i was lied to and that was something that i told her from the start I couldn’t accept. She kept pursuing me for a while and after that i told her that if she wants to continue with me, she needed to tell her parents what happened and to not be so controlled by them and do things that she doesn’t like just because they wanted to. She had a conversation with her mother, told her everything that guy did to her and how he wanted to force her to do stuff and her mother didn’t seem upset at all ( and that was pretty weird ), she told her that they wouldn’t go in vacations with his family anymore and if they do, she will stay at home. After that everything was fine but I didn’t feel comfortable around her. After some time i go with her at a friends birthday party. Some guy tried to touch her and i beat him up and ruined the hole party. After that she got very drunk and made me look like a bum. We had a fight because of that and then i wanted some space from her and told her I couldn’t see her with the same eyes. I went alone to a house party with my friends and there was a girl i was getting along with, i started to feel more distant to my gf and didn’t want to get togheter with her anymore. Me and the girl at that party kissed, but after that i felt woken up and realized that my gf was the girl i want. So after the party, in the morning i went to her place, she was alone and got back togheter with her and hesitated to tell her what i did because i didn’t want to lose her. I realized how much i mean to her at that time and that i was her whole world, her family and the love she felt from me didn’t feel from anyone. Her parents weren’t around while she was growing up and she spent most of the time with babysitters, when they had free time they would go to parties and not take care of her or spend time with her and all that high class bullshit, nobody ever stood by her side and took her defense, she seemed to them more like a burden if they did that, so everytime she had a problem, people would just brush her off. I really liked that i was everything for her. That also came with some problems, she wasn’t raised how she was supposed to be and didn’t know a lot of things and i had to teach her things about life, how to resepct herself, how to take care of herself and many more, but that wasn’t a problem for me, i liked that also. We had the best summer togheter ( sum 2022 ), we had a lot of fun, went on vacations, we were very romantical, she started to sleep at my house and that was a very sensible subject to me, I didn’t had the best home and I didn’t wanted to be viewed differently about that and i also never bringed someone to my house because of that, but she hit it of and made me feel better about myself and made me not see it as a problem anymore, she got along with my family very well, everything was so good. Then we had a little fight, but it wasn’t serious and after that we went to a vacation again and we brushed it off, with time, i saw that she would get things from her mom’s personality and she hasn’t a good personality or perception about life. She started to be mean and egotisic and wanted to view things differently, that a men needs to bow down his head in front of a women and that is the way her parents are and that is what she thinks it’s normal. We had a fight on the beach and after that she told me that even though she makes me very mad, i still wouldn’t leave her and she will be the only one i think about even if she is mean to me. That made me very mad and i felt like she viewed me as a simp and i told her what happend between me and that girl at that party and to not put herself on such a pedestal and that she isn’t special to me if she doesn’t try to be, that if she will be mean to me and doesn’t try to be special, there are always other girls and i don’t need to be in a toxic relationship. We had a fight but then we talked it out and everything was ok. She started highschool (9th grade) at a private school because her mom tricked her to think that this was the best choice. After a little time she started telling me that she wants to live her life, that she wants to have fun because she is young and time will pass, there where things that she saw girls doing around and it made her think that she was left out and she said that her mother also kept telling her that she will have a sad life and that she needs to go and have fun (only to start problems between us), I told her that we can have fun but that i don’t like going to the clubs all the time and getting wasted especially when im with my gf, i like to go to birthday parties, home parties, i dont really like festivals that much because there are a lot of weird pepole, i am a pretty chill guy, i am also a boxer and if i have fun i like to keep it low key. She didn’t really had friends, she cut them all of after getting with me because i helped her to see that they were fake, some of them flirted with me while she was literally biside us, some of them tried to take money from her, talked bad about me and her, some of them were hoes. Her mother noticed that and told her that if i will leave her, she will be all left alone with no one around her and that scared her even though i reassured her and told her that we are the only ones we need for eachother. She was desperate to find friends, she got along with some girls at school, but she wasn’t the type to be around guys, she didn’t like that and she also believed that every guy who is around a girl thinks about her in a sexual way in some form or another, she realized that from me and some of my friends and she believed that a guy doesn’t view a friendship with a girl in a sexual way only if she is togheter with one of his friends or if she isn’t an attractive person but in some cases they still do. I wanted to meet her friends, to go out together with me and my friends also but she kept distance and everytime she would leave it for another time. One day she was pressuring me that she wants to go to a club because she had never been and that all her friends would go. I got mad because i was tierd and told her that i don’t want to go and told her to go alone, she didn’t want that. After that a friend called me to go to a club and i thought it was the perfect time. We went, she saw all the drunk pepole, all the high and wierd pepole and that night me and my friends got into 2 fights because of other wierd guys, one of them was disrespectful to the girls we were with and i knocked him out and the other ones (35+yrs huge men) sexually assaulted my friends sister by toching her and we got into a fight with them and the police came, after that my gf told me that if she wants to have fun, she wants to keep it low key as well. With time passing by she started to view things differently because all of the things that were around her and all the pressure from her mother. She went on a vacation in the winter break, she told me that she will go with this girl and that she is a family friend. I found that there was a hole entourage there and the girl she went with started to hang out with them, it was hard for me to believe that she didn’t do it too, she came back and i found out that this girl came with her brother, she didn’t tell me anything about him because she thought that i will get mad, the only interaction i saw them have was that she hid his vape in her room so his parents wont find out, but she tried to lie to me and that made me think about a lot of stuff. A couple of months pass by and i found out that she had an entourage, with guys and girls. After i found that out she wanted to break up with me, because this relationship wouldn’t work and that i was controlling, manipulating. All the pepole there told her i was a bad person and a psycho and it is best for her to leave me, she belived them but i knew something was up. The main person that was telling her that was a girl that was in her school, lets call her M. M was always telling her to leave me, but when i looked closer to the people she would hang out with, I realized that M was a girl who flirted with me and tried to kiss me a couple of months prior, i knew she was a friend of my gf and didn’t think nothing and i viewed it as a test. My gf didn’t know but then i told her and there was more stuff that made her believe that M was a fake. All this time we kept seeing eachother but not that often, we still had sex rarely and i tried to repair things and make her come back but she always said that she doesn’t know, she wanted to make us not see each other as much so she can make herself get away from me, till she decided and wanted to break up with me, she viewed me as a different person. We still kept contact but she was keeping stuff away from me, like when she would go out with them and things like that, she was thinking that i would come after her and fight all the pepole she was with. After that her and her first highschool friend, lets call her A, were getting along with this group that M had, they started to hang out more and more and they viewed themselves as a family, they even had a group chat. After some time she goes to a girl birthday party, this girl was in their group and she was also in my school. After that she gets drunk and calls me, telling me that she misses me and wanted to meet up. She came to my place, she kept wanting to have sex with me but I didn’t feel like it, i had a lot of questions, but i had, it was the most emotionless sex i have ever had. She slept and then i went through her phone and found out all this things about her group, who they were and all of that, all the pepole she would get along with. Her and A would get along with 2 boys from this group. I was looking around more and more to find something but there wasn’t nothing that showed that she cheated on me, these 2 guys (also ugly af) in her group kept talking to her about group stuff and how fake was M, nothing serious, but i saw that they always told her to not get back with me and that i am a bad person. I confronted her with that and told her what these guys want from her, she kept telling me that i am the only crazy person who thinks almost all the guys think sexually about a girl. After that i got their socials and started to look around more and ask pepole about them. I had a friend who knew them and i asked him to talk with them about my gf. He asked them who she is and how they know her, they told him that she is a friend of a girl in their group and that they wanna fuck her and things like that. I got my friend to ss the convo and send it to me to show it to her, i showed it to her and she started to believe me, after that she went to M birthday party and she saw that this guys were trying to hit on her and then she totally believed me. We got back togheter, she was sorry for the things she did and that she didn’t believe in me. She bought herself a ticket to a festival and she wanted to go with her friend A, but that was before we got togheter, so when we got i found out and i bought myself also and i went with them, she viewed the hole experience as i told her it will be and didn’t really like it, i also saw how childish A was. With time she got more mean and started to be more like her mother, we would have fights, she would curse at me, hit me and everytime it seemed like she thought that she was entitled to do so. She got jealous very easily, if a girl would look at me, she would get mad at me. She had times were she would be ok and times were she was a bitch, everytime that happend she would be sorry and say she doesn’t know what is happening to her and reassured me that she still loves me with all her heart and that no one took care of her like i did. After that came the time for her to go with her family on vacation again, my phone broke and she gave me her old one, she told me that she would go alone in this vacation, but after few days prior i see her ex little brother message her on insta to ask her if she would come in this vacation, she told me that he got things mixed up probably. When i got her old phone, something told me to activate her icloud (all theirs phone are conected to her fathers icloud) photos and convos and then i saw that she went in vacations almost all the time with her ex and his family. In the time she was with me, she went in 4 vacations, the first one was in spring break in Seychelles, she went with her ex family, in the second one in the summer she went to Spain this time with him also, the third one in the winter break, i think it was in Maldives, she went just with his family, and the fourth one in Maldives, in the summer break, again this time with him also. I confronted her and her family would force her to come, buying her plane tickets and paying for everything in advance and telling her with a couple of weeks before. Her ex this time was around 20yrs, he also had a gf, and my gf was around 15-16yrs at the time of this vacations. In the pictures i’ve seen they would all sit in a group and i asked her why, she told me that her parents would get upset over this type of things and I couldn’t understand how they still accepted her ex as a family member even though he did all that stuff to her, it was like they didn’t care and it was so toxic. I snooped out more and found out her dad was very wierd, he had wierd sexual fetishes, he would cheat on her mother, he had nudes with him in his phone and a lot of things. Her mother also would talk with her friends about other men and it was disgusting. While i looked through her mother’s convos i’ve also seen her talk about her daughter relationship with me. She was talking to a friend and was telling her that she would do anything for me and her daughter to break up, if she doesn’t want, she will make me want to break up, she said that she doesn’t want her daughter to be with someone good who loves her and she feels happy with, she said that it is better for her daughter to be even with an old man that she doesn’t like, someone with some prestige or a high social status that will bring more reputation to their family name. I think that is very sick and i was so disgusted with them. Her family always talked bad about me, they would curse out me and my family and talked about us like we were trash. Her mother tired everything to associate him with her, my gf brother was sleeping in the room with her ex and his brother, one night, my gf brother locked the door and my gf mother said to her ex and his brother to go and sleep with my gf in the bed and she was already asleep and didn’t know anything, they even took pictures of them. She came back, had a talk about everything, but I didn’t want to tell her the stuff about her family because I didn’t want to hurt her and I didn’t think she would believe and she would get mad at me and we continued, but I wasn’t ready to be with her again after all that, i still loved her, but i felt uncomfortable. After that i found out a place where her old group was hanging out, went and got revenge on them. With time we started to have fights more and more and they got really bad, we would hit eachother and she will always get on my nerves. I usually would break things around me, i always told her to stop getting on my nerves but she didn’t want to listen. All this time we were spending with each other, her friend, A, would call her to hang out but she always said she was busy with me and A would get very mad, she wanted her just for herself. School started and she began to hang out again with A. My gf cut off all the conections she had with that group but A didn’t, i told her that if she was a real friend, she would chose her over them but she didn’t listen. She even started med school and even if she hated it in the past, she was saying that she doesn’t want to become what her parents force her to, and her and A started togheter med school, dreaming that they will work in the same place. At one time she wanted to go on a class trip, she came to me telling me that she will break up with me if i don’t let her go, because i always try to control things, I didn’t know where that came from, i would’ve let her to go if she just came to me and asked me about it, she didn’t need to do all that, I didn’t wanted to talk to her about this stuff at that time, it was a better time to talk to her after she came back. 2 days pass by and she comes back, we meet to talk, she said she was sorry for all that and that she didn’t need to do it, after we talk this, she starts crying telling me that she missed her mother while she was gone and went to see her and her mother told her that she doesn’t have time for her because she needs to go to a party. That broke her heart and all the little faith she had left in her parents was gone. I reassured her that i am always here for her and that her parents were always bad pepole, she just has to accept it, the fact that her parents can’t be like the other ones she sees. She talked to her brother and told her the same thing. She talked to her grandma (dad side) and told her that her mother said that she doesn’t really love her dad and she choose him just because they were compatible. Her mother strated to try to buy her with things but it didn’t work. A week pases by and her mother comes to her and after all those things she just says sorry. She believed in her, almost like she tried to lie to herself that her mother is a good person and started to get along with her. With time, A and her mother started talking bad about me, brain washing her to make her think i was a bad guy. At one time she cancelled all the plans we had with an hour before, just for her to meet with A. After that she said that she realizes she was wrong and won’t do it again. Every time she wanted something from me, she would blackmail me, telling me that she would break up with me, i couldn’t take it anymore and i started blackmailing her to with the videos we had together so she would stop that. Then she strated doing it again, cancelling me ,but this time she will say that she needs to study. The second time this happens i call her on ft and suspect that somebody was in the room with her, then i went to her place and i could hear her and A talking while hanging out on the terace, i was relieved because i thought something else, but then i hear A talking bad about me to her and telling her that she needs to break up with me. I called her and told her to open the door, she got mad at me and said that she doesn’t want this relationship no more because i am manipulative, A was standing in the back and was just laughing, after that i asked her opinion on something and she said she doesn’t get involved in others relationships, she left and i talked it out with my gf. We went to my friends birthday party, i told her from the start that i need to help him organize and i would be busy at sometimes. We got there and when i went to help him she got angry, strated to get jealous, she was angry so she started to drink, she got very drunk and strated to fight with me because she was jealous of a girl. We went to my place and i told her if she wants to keep arguing we can’t stay here because we will wake up my parents and they told me that they don’t want us to fight in the house no more. She said she is calm and after that she kept arguing, yelling, hitting me. She got food to eat and then she kept yapping, i got mad and knocked the food on the floor, we cleaned, she got more mad and started to fight me, i kept begging her to stop and that we will talk tomorrow, she didn’t listen, she kept hitting and then she got up on me and started to bite my cheek very hard, i told her to stop because she is hurting me and she is make a lot of noise, she kept biting harden, i tried to push her off me and she hit her nose and blood started leaking, then my mom came in because she woke up. I felt so bad and didn’t know what to do or say. She was very mad, she only viewed me as the one who did all the wrong things. We talked about it for a long time and we got back together. The fights didn’t go away and i was tierd of them, she kept changing as a person and when i tried to talk things that she would do wrong and how to put a stop to all of those things but she just kept arguing. With time the intimacy part of our relationship got worse, from getting intimate almost everyday, sometimes multiple times per day, to doing it once a week or less. We always got along very well on this part, i was putting her pleasures before mine, always focusing on her climaxing, even more than once and then letting her take care of my pleasures, one time, i made her orgasm 6 times in a row, the sex was good, long lasting and always passionate. With time a lot of problems came and I didn’t know where from, i believe it was the fact that the pepole around her started to change her perception about me, she started saying i was using her for her body, i told her that i don’t am in a relationship with her just for the sex and if i wanted sex, i could get it from anywhere, i choose her because i love her and want a future with her. She told me that isn’t true and i am with her because she is the most sexually available person to me. A lot of bad perceptions like those came and i always tried to reassure her. In the past mounths i was battling with depression, anxiety, overthinking, insecurities, money problems, a lot of family problems. She started seeing me as a loser, that i don’t do nothing with my life, that academically i am a bum, that i am a mamas boy and that i am always complaining about stuff. The truth is that i never was a beta male, i always was manly, i am around 5,11 i am an atractive guy and i seem very atractive to others. I never went with my problems to nobody not even her, i started doing that because she was begging me to do so, to open up to her so we would be closer to eachother and i did that the past months. I always worked to do something with my life, i am a professional boxer but I didn’t had my debut yet, my father is a singer and i also sing and I’ve dreamt to become a singer, academically im not the best in my class, but not the worst (in my country they evaluate us on a scale from 1 to 10 and i am a 8,50+ student) i don’t know where all her perceptions came from but she started to see me as the bad guy that she needs to get rid of. She wanted to go on a school trip again and she asked me, i told her that i want to talk about it face to face, she started saying that i am a manipulating piece of shit. She told her parents everything, her mother called my mother and started to threaten her. After that i still tried to talk it out with her, we still saw eachother very rarely, her school work got very hard and she had med school work too and she was busy. Everything started getting wierd and she was doing things to not have as much contact with me, we had sex a couple of times but it was bad and she was arguing, if i tried to be close to her, to kiss her she would pull away telling me she is not in the mood for kissing or she will find something to do like playing on the phone. It seemed like she tried to break the contact between us little by little so she couldn’t fall for me again. One night i was hanging out with my friends in front of a store, some drunk guys came and knocked a old man out, we made them leave, then me and my friends split up, i went with another guy back to the store to buy something, then the same guys from earlier came out of the store but they were more meny, one of them came charging at me and he called me by my name ( wierd thing because i never seen them before ) i fought him and then the other jumped me, my friend couldn’t get involved because he was threatened with a knife, the same guy tried to slash my face, but i dogged it, after many more hits i fallen down, my friends arrived just then, the guys ran into a car and got away and after that the police came and started a hole case on this. My gf gotten a massage from this fake account, threatening her, telling her that she wants to take revenge on her because she stole her friend and said that she is a person from her circle. Many threats were made and then i got involved, this person knew me and what i was capable of so she backed off. She messaged me too, trying to make me break up with my gf but that didn’t work. Me and my gf still weren’t on good terms and she started to hang out with more pepole from her school. My gf talked with her friends and they made her think that i was the one behind the fake account and that it’s all a scheme for me to win her back so she would get back with me. She started believing more and more that it was me and i think that this was the plan, if she couldn’t make me break up with her, she made her break up with me. I kept stalking around trying to find out who was behind this. I heard around that the guys that jumped me were friends with people from her school and that me question some things. I got called by the police to come and talk more about the case and they told me that everything isn’t what it seems, that these guys didn’t started to jump me randomly, they had a plan all along, some girl that they were friends with made them do it and they wanted to make it seem like it was randomly. I started to put 1 and 2 togheter and told my gf everything but she didn’t believed me, she said that i faked everything and that this isn’t possible and that no friend of hers would do anything like that. She broke all contact with me, she would just answer on a couple messages per day, i only had her location but sometimes she would turn it off because she didn’t want me to know where she would go so i couldn’t go after her. She started going out, to colleagues birthday parties, she didn’t had a way to go, her friends would take her with them. One night she went to a club where a lot of people from her school went, some pepole that i know would keep me up to date with what she was doing, they told me she went to this club, they sent me videos to see. Looking closely i saw her, she was in a corner chilling with 2 or 3 girls, she was away from all that chaos, but then i saw that were all those pepole were, there were the guys that jumped me, they were hanging out with pepole from her school and from her cricle. Immediately i thought that these guys were friends with the girl who made a fake account and then i knew and it was confirmed that it was a friend of gf. First i got scared that these guys came to do something to my gf so i went there to see it myself. In the way there i also thought about my gf having to do something with this, that she put the hit on me, but there were very low chances. I got there i didn’t want to appear suspicious so i walked on the other way of the street and i looked, i saw my gf, she wasn’t hanging out with any of them, she was with 2 girls and those guys didn’t seem to have a business with her. I called my guys to come there. They wanted to bust in but i told them to relax and to keep it low key, i got one of them to walk in front of the club to see everything that was happening, my gf went home after a little while, but those guys remaind and i could see that they knew with pepole from my gf school and i saw a lot of my gf friends hang out with them. I didn’t knew who could it be, but i had an idea. All this time i asked pepole that i knew about this. I found out that these guys were really good friends with a girl from my gf class. So i had an a idea. Then one of my friends messaged that fake account and called her by her name and she got nervous and blocked him, then i messaged the account myself and called her by her name, she got angry and she confessed all of it but i don’t know if she did that just to throw me off. She confirmed i was jumped by those guys because of her, i told her that i would get revenge on her and she would get expelled from school after i tell my gf, she said that what makes me think that your gf would believe you and that she would make sure that she doesn’t. I tried to reach out to my gf but she didn’t wanna hear anything. Some people told me that they heard from those guys that jumped me, that their and that girls plan is know to do something to my gf, they wanna beat her up, get her drunk, drug her and all this type of stuff. I heard that and i reached out to my gf telling her all of those things but she didn’t want to believe me. I’ve talked to her recently, it was her birthday and i had a gift for her and i just wanted to give it to her but she cut me off, she doesn’t want to break no contact with me because she thinks im a bad person, that i will hurt her, that i will force her to get back together with me and all this shit people from around her got into her head. I texted her a message about more stuff and the fact that i just wanna give her the gift i have for her, i told her stuff about her family and all these wrong things that were happening and she didn’t wanna hear nothing from me, she said that this is all a scheme that i created.
I am very scared to lose her or for something to happen to her. I am scared of her being controlled by her friends to get into another relationship. I love her with all my heart and can’t live without her. I am on antidepressants, i am very stressed, i started to cough blood from my lungs, the past months have been so hard for me and this just done it all, at some point i made a goodbye video for all my loved ones because i had very dark thoughts. I dont know what to do, i did everything to win her back, to make her understand everything but nothing seems to work, i don’t know what to do….

My mom is a narcissist and I'm diagnosed with adhd
I was sitting in the garden with mum and sister We were just merely talking And all of a sudden my mother says, " you never speak good about people, you're always bitching about everyone. Just like everyone at your dad's family." And that just triggered me All this while I was talking bad about people(mostly our relatives and some of my friends) thinking she liked when I did that. She used to agree to it and mostly laugh it off And now we just had this extremely heated argument saying that I don't have good to say about people and I'm inherently a very bad person I disagreed with her, that she sees the world as she is. She says everyone thinks they're perfect and they always talk shit about people. And i just countered her with the logic that if you perceive that everyone in the world is the same, then the problem is in you, you think you're perfect and everyone is shit That triggered her and she started to shut me off and say, "yes, I'm the one who's wrong, you were only pointing out the drawbacks, I'm the one who's at fault, you are perfect" I said I never thought I'm perfect, and she just kept shutting me off completely and I saw no point in continuing a conversation with her Now I think I'm the bad guy, which I know isn't true I don't know if all I do is bitching about people, but I don't think that's true
It's just that most times I don't have the mental capacity to partake in conversations with friends And she ends up thinking that I bitch about them With all this overstimulation due to ADHD, I really can't be constantly on the phone with people. I really can't keep talking, it just drains me completely But it's just not how things are. I know her thoughts shouldn't matter, but I'm stuck in the house with her. I can't help but interact and get her things in my head. Even two days ago, she was completely off the rack bitching about my dad's side of the family to the point that I was feeling disgusted. I didn't say anything. She just kept yapping to the point that I was physically feeling revolted. She does do that a lot. I usually have a positive opinion about people and she's the one who keeps telling me things about the relatives
This is primarily a rant but I just had to vent it out somewhere or else I go crazy
TLDR: narc mom thinks i keep bitching about people

My ex(w34) of 2.5 years left me due to my depression, citing her desire to have children and her inability to imagine doing so with me. We had recently moved in together, but then she got cold feet and wanted to "open the relationship". However, polygamy is personally a very complicated concept for me. I fell into a deep depression but, with therapy and support from friends, I managed to regain my mental stability. After about four months of no contact, she reached out to me multiple times to inquire about my well-being. She also spoke to old friends behind my back to gather more information about my mental state and past. Then, I discovered the worst: Shortly after our breakup, she started a romantic relationship with one of my close friends whom she had contacted for information about me. She tried to apologize, but also admitted they were still seeing each other. Of course, after a breakup, everyone is free to do as they please. Call me old-fashioned, but they could have at least told me beforehand that something was developing, instead of keeping it a secret for such a long time. I find it appalling that some of my friends knew about it but remained silent. However, I must also admit that I had already distanced myself from these people in my city for quite some time… This particular friend had not contacted me since the breakup, until recently when he sent me a letter that I can't quite decipher. It reads more like an attempt at justification and feeling of obligation than a sincere apology.
„Finally, I'm writing to you. I wanted to reach out weeks ago, but I couldn't find the right words or the peace of mind. I've also been through a breakup, with lots of communication and emotional conversations. There hasn't been much time or energy left for anything else. First and foremost, I hope you're doing alright, despite everything. I hope you're staying positive and that the situation isn't too much of a burden. I don't know if you need to talk, if you have questions, or if something's weighing on your mind. If so, please know you can reach out to me anytime, in whatever way you prefer. You can write, call, or we can meet up. Personally, I think it would be helpful for us to talk. Let's do that when you're ready. The offer stands. It's also very important to me that you don't feel pushed out of our shared circle of friends. I know from the past few years that many of those relationships haven't been easy for you. I don't want to make them more complicated. I believe we can manage future get-togethers, but if that feels difficult anytime soon, please let me know. We'll find a solution. I'd rather step back than create another obstacle. We were once good friends, though we've hardly seen each other lately. Still, I'm glad we can look each other in the eye when we meet. The past should hold its value, even if the present is different. I hope you can share this sentiment, even though you're probably feeling sad, angry, or disappointed – likely all at once. Life goes on, relationships shift. Sometimes fate decides, sometimes we do. This new situation is no different. A few months ago, I wouldn't have imagined we'd all be here. Along the way, I made my own choices, sometimes passively, sometimes actively. You can blame me for that. I just want you to know that despite all the good things, it wasn't an easy path, because you were often on my mind. I'm sorry you're suffering. These decisions have nothing to do with a lack of respect for you or what our friendship once was. I hope you understand.“
He assumes I was suffering, which is partly true, but I don't see any insight, responsibility, or genuine remorse in his letter. I'm deeply disappointed. Even though he's offered to talk, I'm not ready to contact him yet. It feels incredibly hard to forgive him.
Tldr: My ex left me and quickly started dating my close friend. My friend recently apologized, but it felt insincere. I'm hurt and unsure whether or how to forgive.

am very attached to a toxic friend I have had most of my life. I grew up with my mom and I only saw my father a few days a month. I was never close with family members because they either suffered from mental issues or drug abuse on both sides so I was kept away for safety reasons. I remember having self harm thoughts around second grade and would imagine hurting others or I would hurt myself. I met my friend in early grade school and had to be her friend. At the time, girls were not into video games or nerdy subjects, so to find another girl that liked similar things was a bonus. We both had troubled families and liked similar things. We began obsessively writing rp (roleplay) where we could be our own characters and have perfect lives with these characters we loved and be together. I noticed how much she loved her male fantasy characters, so I started having a sexual relationship in late grade school with her. We were the same age and kept it a secret. I'm not sure why because I'm not gay but i think I just wanted to feel loved snd important to someone. Even if I had to pretend to be someone else. We stayed friend a long time until a death in her family drove her to drop me as a friend. While she spiraled out of control with her life she would often be my friend just to drop me again. Any time she had a boy friend or a friend she seemed to forget about me. She would show little to no interest in my life. She did not come to my wedding, she did not come to my baby shower, etc. Through most of this we keep rping. Though we do not get along in real life, she acts completely different in rp. In rp she is the perfect friend I want but in real life she can't. I do everything for her. I give her anything she wants and visit her constantly but she never returns it to me. She can't act loving or caring towards me but in rp she can. We both thrive and live off rp to stay calm in life because that's how we grew up, but rp is almost a tease to me We fight so much because I do all the work in the friendship that she insults me etc but she never quits rp. Is this a form of control? I've told her that I love her and care about her very much but I don't think she feels the same about me. I'm in a relationship now and have weird reaction to having sex. Whenever I have sex with my boyfriend it's fine and normal but when it's over I break down and cry because my brain likes to remind me.of when i was young and intimate with my friend just to know they never cared about me. I know this is a lot but I did my best to make this as short as possible. This issue bothers me everyday for other 10 years. I constantly cry and hate myself and even hinted suicide to her and it dosnt bother her. I am constantly stoned so I can try and ignore how hurt I am from her. My boyfriend thinks I view her as a much better person than who she really is because I want a friend.