@son_of_bob Miguel made a pertinent point here. You don’t need to singularly focus on this particular issue, because you may not be fully able to eradicate it(the effect the trauma had on you). So don’t lose your sight on the larger issue, that is, keep your sights on freedom rather than your freedom from your emotions regarding this. When you attain freedom, all the niggling issue will automatically fall away.
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Ok, so sort of over-parenting if that makes sense.
I think I have always had a sort of scientific approach to this. I try and gather evidence as to their degree of autonomy and ability to guide themselves through situations and I try not to think in absolutes. Though that responsibility feeling is obviously there, for me maybe it manifests with a degree of over-protectiveness, more so than my parents ever did, I guess.
Right and your sensitivity to suffering might be undermining your children’s ability to deal with suffering perhaps?
In fact without all those beliefs around how bad physical suffering is, their experience of suffering might be much minimised, by lacking that overwhelming affective element that you describe in yourself.
As an example to this, when I was quite young (around 10 I think), I lived in Poland and childhood was a lot different there, less constraints in general. My parents allowed me to play in the forests doing whatever the hell I wanted with my friends until late hours of the night.
One day as a result of this I fell of a tree I was jumping onto and very badly broke my arm, when I got up from the fall it was mangled and looked like an S 
Yet is was all good, I am fine and personally I do not hold my parents responsible at all for this.
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This is a really good question. It stumped me for sure lol.
I mean I have these moments in my own life, of not doing what is necessary to make my own situation better. Which in hindsight seems so dumb. I want to protect them from having to make the same mistakes as me. But you are right, ultimately I am not the arbiter of their experiences. I don’t have a say in what they will do or how they will live their life especially once they are an adult.
That if they lead to a life of suffering, I feel a sense then that I have failed as a parent. There is a belief that it is my job to protect them.
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No worries about spamming me @Kub933 lol.
This is interesting to here. This is what happened to my other friend who is depressed. He experienced depression and anxiety before me. His grandparent and aunty both died of cancer and then it just because some terrible obsession for him. He was obsessed he had cancer or was ill or dying. He would constantly go to the doctor because it gave him emotional relief to be told he was ok.
I don’t think I was of much help as a friend to be honest. I would try and distract him and cheer him up and make him laugh. Ultimately, I was out of my depth, we all were as a group of friends.
When I first began to experience anxiety and depression after my accident he said to me he was happy, not that I am suffering, but that I might finally understand him better.
It is weird state, this hypervigilance.
Yes I actually experience this hypervigilance as this dark aura that my mum exists in and radiates. Any conversation eventually turns to disease and death, everything she does is about keeping healthy and away from disease and death. I can feel this ‘place’ in her and it is a very dark place, I kind of picked it up from her like second hand smoke haha.
There is a world outside of that place though, I think she is slowly climbing out of it, I feel like for me it has largely faded now and is now seen for what it was.
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And @son_of_bob, this friend that became hyper vigilant is the one that eventually drank himself to death?
Yes! This is what I meant by the belief that “life sucks”. Which is a bit laconic 
. But what I’m getting at isn’t that ‘suffering sucks’ – which it does, it’s true, a fact, not a belief. Rather it’s the belief that you must suffer, i.e. that life is such that suffering is inevitable. This is what the false premise is.
Also there is a distinction to be drawn between physical suffering and emotional suffering. Physical “suffering” is inevitable to a degree. Not everyone gets cancer but… we all get old, more aches and pains, likely to get hurt in some way or the other, etc. But the physical pain is separate from emotional suffering. There is a belief that emotional suffering must inevitably follow from physical pain. Of course it does naturally arise as a result… but it is not inevitable. This, too, is a false premise. This is of course not to minimize the physical pain that many people undergo.
Also it is fantastically great to read your posts here, I am enjoying it a lot.
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Wow, I can see myself doing this. Steering conversations to tragedy. My first full time job involved processing medical data. So many different stories of injuries, disease, it is like it all etched into my brain deeply. I too was getting too much second hand smoke 
For me, all of this anxiety was experienced with much greater intensity so I know I am beginning to climb out of it too, though it may not sound like it from these posts, subjectively I can assure you all it has been all experienced with greater intensity than is the case now.
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No, it was not. However, this friend too has a drinking problem. Multiple hospital admissions, near death experiences (ITU/ICU admissions) and he was the one I always thought was going to die first. My other friend who died, would drink every day but not in a manner that seemed out of control.
Right I see, of course I am going by limited information so some of this could be off. However on the surface this demonstrates the terrible irony and madness of what is happening here, for your friends and it seems yourself also.
That a otherwise healthy person, out of a fear of possible ‘physical suffering’ will create such emotional/mental suffering that they end up either actually killing the body or coming close to it.
The question is who is the evil one here? Is it the universe with it’s ‘physical suffering’ or is it the ‘me’ that is prepared to kill this body to avoid self inflicted suffering.
This is pretty mind-blowing to contemplate.
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True dat, as the kids of the London suburbs would say. I get what you mean now. I didn’t see it at first. Weird, emotions can cause such a lack of clarity to thought.
What I have just noticed actually, it is not just this feeling that it sucks and the resentment but that this ties into a belief I have that life is against me. The universe is against me. I was doing so well with AF when I got run over, back to uni, 2 good part time jobs, physically my fittest, money saved in the bank then boom I had this accident and just seem to crumble. The universe chose me to suffer.
I finally got better, 2018 to 2019 back into AF practice better, starting to have more EE’s. Then suddenly 2020 covid hit, so many uncertainties, stressors and challenges. I got through them though.
I finally came off my meds, doing well. A few months off my meds I was with my mum and she tripped on a lump of concrete on the ground outside and split her head open, I could see into her head! It really triggered me, reminded me of my own accident. It took 2 hours for an ambulance to come. It was horrible. She was ok thankfully, just needed stitches but no fracture or internal bleed. It was such an intense challenge again.
There is this intense feeling/belief the universe is against me. One way I have recently tried to turn it on its head, is that all of these experiences gave me serendipitous opportunities to explore the human condition and test the method in the marketplace.
I am getting myself back to a better baseline each day.
These odd beliefs still linger though.
Thanks, I have read your posts for years back on the old forums too and you have often provided great posts so thanks for your contributions too. Thanks to everyone in this post and on the forum. It has proven immensely beneficial.
I always thought you would be one of the next people to be free. I was a hidden background character that never interacted with anybody on these forums. Sometimes it seems like I know some of you all because I have been reading your posts for so long lol.
It is crazy right. It is like slow suicide.
Me too haha. And I have given others this impression too, including Vineeto 
. But apparently none of that translates into actually self-immolating lol. Who could’ve figured ??
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that’s quite a few smacks in the face.
You may find this interesting. When I read what you wrote here my first thought was that ah, I haven’t had any such serious setback in my life, so I’ve been lucky/can’t relate, etc… … and then I remembered that my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV gall bladder cancer 2 years ago and passed away last year.
It was awful, of course. Particularly, finding out, and the last few months, and of course the loss that followed after and the grieving etc. But because I was feeling good (generally good mood) when reading your post… it did not come to mind at first. People reading this may see it come off as uncaring towards my late mother but it isn’t anything of the sort. It’s just that the fact that it happened - and an awful thing it was and is - doesn’t feed into a feeling that the world is against me and that ‘life sucks’…
So here I am , not actually free but still a walking example of the effectiveness that the actualism method and everything facilitating it can have!
Yes my mother’s illness and passing was exactly this. I did not know before how deep grief can be. It is a core part of the human condition. And not shying away from it, allowed me to understand it fully. It came to a head when I was feeling awful about it one day, I saw I was angry, deeply angry, pissed at the universe… and then I wondered ok, what specifically am I angry about? And then I saw I was angry at the fact that things continue to happen, and that it doesn’t seem to affect almost anybody in the slightest, this terrible thing that happened. How can the universe keep going when such an awful thing happened? I wanted everything to pause, to slowly swirl to a halt and everybody and everything in the universe to bow before ‘me’ in the center, everyone to worship ‘my’ intense grieving, the deep unfairness of it all, and to recognize it… and once I allowed that vision and feeling to fully happen, the depth of the grieving disappeared for me. There is not this anchor or undercurrent of it that was there before. And no anger about it anymore. Of course the universe goes on… how could it be any other way?
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Can you explain more about this please Kiman ?
I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear. What is it that you find unclear?
If everything is subservient to life, then things will automatically take care of themselves. Just that we don’t let that happen because our emotions decide what’s important. Here, the fear of guilt and the self-flagellation that surrounds it which makes guilt painful can make sonofbob stick to his idea of what responsibility is–sticking to it validates his ideas–and not confront the guilt.
There could also be emotional beliefs that can make him cling to what’s important, like what a good father means; what a good human means, what worthy father means; what gives him self-esteem; whether being a good father feeds his worthiness; whether he critically judges people who don’t fit into his ideas thereby feeding his being a better human, which inturn bites him from back because if he tries to not conform to his own ideas which he uses to judge others it’ll create a painful cognitive dissonance, so he’ll avoid that pain by not straying off from his conceptions; whether he is deriving meaning from parenthood and made it his centre of life because it’s easier than looking into one’s own unhappiness and facing difficult emotions…you get the drift right?
Not so odd. Considering these experiences to be traumatic & for them to create suffering is completely normal. What would be odd, would be to become free of them!
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This friend who died, he had exchanges with Richard on the old forum. I couldn’t remember which respondent number he was so i went through all the respondents until something seemed familiar.
I am pretty sure my friend was Respondent 110.
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