Dank je wel! :-)

Dank je wel voor het lieve bericht! Ik ga soms naar de kinderboerderij, dat is volgens mij een beetje hetzelfde. Meestal probeer ik mijn neefje ofzo mee te nemen, maar soms ga ik ook gewoon. Dat is eigenlijk een beetje hetzelfde. :-)

Thank you for the kind message. It is good to hear that it is possible to have it great even after a miscarriage. I have had two miscarriages and two biochemical pregnancies. I did not really have time tomprocess this yet, as I had to continue treatment as my fertility is further declining due to my age. I think that might be part of the emotions as well.

It is difficult for me to not wager my personal happiness on it. I have a small nephew and when I take care of him, it just makes me very happy. It makes me feel like I would be as happy or even happier with my own child. Also, I was abused as a child and I feel that I did not have parents that really loved me. It feel unfair that I am not able to experience the mother/child bond from the perspectives of a child as well as that of a motger.

I also tried to take care of my younger siblings when I was a child. I was able to provide them with some of the emotional support my parents failed to provide, but because I was too young myself I always felt like I was not able to give them what they need. I am an adult now and I feel like I am capable now of providing children with a safe and warm environment. And I feel like I have all this love to give, but there is no child to give it to. I do not know where to put it.

I don’t know. Having a child will not fix all of this and a child does not exist to fix this or to make me happy. However, it could have been an area of my life that could have been beautiful and where I might have been able to give something and be valuable. And instead, this also does not work out and is another thing that goes on the pile of things that have failed in my life.

I agree that staking my life’s success on it is not a good idea. But I am not sure what else I have left. I am trying to become a writer and I am writing down all my experiences from my youth and with my sister who passed away and my fertility treatments, and so on. Maybe it can help some people who experience the same things. I think that might be fulfilling maybe and a way to create something positive out of the things that feel negative now.

Sad and empty. I love kids. I had fertility treatments for years, but that did not work out. I will start IVF again in a couple of days. Hopefully it will work this time. It is one of my last chances.

I would like to adopt or have foster kids. However, I suffer from PTSD and in my country it is very difficult to adopt or foster if you have a background with mental illness. Even though my psychologist and the people in my environment all say that they think I would be able to do it and my partner does not have any mental illness, my chances are very low.

To be honest, looking any further than the next IVF makes me panic. I do not know how to live with not having kids and how to deal with that. I had a lot of bad stuff happen to me. Having children would be something I believe would have made me very happy. It feels like I failed at life. However, I just turned 40, so I know I need to give up at some point.

I have hyperphantasia according to these kinds of tests (although I am not sure how accurate they are). In any case, the ball was white with a green glow it was smooth and looked like plastic but no seams where the halves were joined, male, like a large blue bird I saw in a cartoon, a bit larger than a baseball, the table was a very long rectangle shape. It was also white. The ball was pushed very hard from one end of the table to the other and then it bounced on the wall, the floor and the ceiling. The room was a bit small, with only a very small window rectangular window. It was black behind the window. The room was also rectangle shaped, with concrete grey walls. It was a bit dark, but there was some artificial light from a lamp. The bird acted very cartoonish when pushing the ball. I think that is all.

( ͡°❥ ͡°)

The oldest church was built around 1200, on the remains of an older church from the 7th century and you can go below ground to view those. We also have some Roman ruins from a castellum build around the year 47 you can also go and view.

Edit: The castellum is gone, but there are just some walls and stones.

To be honest, I was thinking about the man who was trying to show me his penis when I was hiking in the woods a couple of weeks ago, when I heard this question. He was white. Actually all men that harassed me were white, thinking about it now.

Racist stereotypes are a real issue and I am not trying to deny that. And if women needed to imagine some hypothetical situation when thinking about dangerous men, you might be right. However, I think you might be underestimating the number of women who have been harassed, or worse. Most women do not need to imagine, they can just remember.

Apparently, it is not true

Thank you so much. The kind reactions really help me feeling better about it. I really hope it helps someone!

Thank you! That is very kind.

I hired the personal trainer too. I just kept thinking I was doing something wrong and I should just follow his schedule. So I did exactly what he said, and that did not work either. I even did worse on the stamina test after training with him for a while than on the test at the start. That is when I quit.

Ihave tried bicycling and I had similar issues with that. But maybe I did not keep enough to my own pace. That was back when I did not understand how it worked and just tried a schedule to build up stamina. You are exactly right, it should not be about performance. Maybe I should try it again with my new mindset. Thanks!

Swimming does work if I go slow! So, I am in the lane with the elderly and just go slowly back and forth. The physiotherapist did tell me I should not go into water that is too cold, because my stress might increase from that as well. So, I found somewhere to swim when the water is warm. I try to do it once a week.

Thank you so much! I am very lucky with where I live. There are lots of beautiful forests here!

Yes, my first psychologist really was terrible. She really made things worse. She just always made me feel like I just should try harder and like a failure. That was the opposite of what I needed.

I was actually much too harsh on myself. I am trying tor learn to be more kind to myself and to take how I feel seriously. It is difficult if you are not used to it, but that helps me really well. My physiotherapist keeps telling me that I only have to do things I want. This sounds like a very basic thing, but it is quite new to me to ask myself “do I want this?” instead of just pushing myself because I think I should.

I am glad exercise works fine you. I think it works for most people. However, I have never in my life felt good after exercise. So, I think that is the difference.

If it helps for you, definitely start doing it again. Maybe you can be kind to yourself too and see how you can make your life easier in another way to have more room mentally to get yourself to start.

Exercising just does not work for everyone. If your stress levels are extreme, it might not benefit you. You might need to find another way to reduce stress first.

Yes, I agree! My physiotherapist explained to me that this can have to do with your level of stress. If it is already extreme, your body cannot deal with with the extra increase in stress that running creates. Pushing yourself can in that case further disregulate your nervous system and walking is better.

Could be the case that your stress levels are too high for exercise to benefit you. Moving, like walking, is fine in those cases. But anything that gets your stress levels up, like weight lifting or running might feel like torture and not provide benefits afterwards. You have psychosomatic therapist who might be able to help with this.

I had the same experience. I think exercise works for a lot of people, but not for everyone. The people who it does not work for het pressured into doing it anyway, which is harmful. In my case, my stress levels were consistently extreme and exercise would put it into an even higher zone where my body was unable to deal with it. All the pressuring me into exercising really harmed me. It took me years until a specialist explained this to me and all this time I felt like a failure and I tortured myself with exercise.

No, not at all. It made things worse. I really think it is very good that many people benefit from exercise. However, it can in some cases also harm your mental health. I think it is important for people to know this. The benefits of exercise are so well known, that the people who it is harmful for often are pressured into exercising anyway and made to feel like a failure if it does not benefit them. It took me a long time and a lot of pain to find this out. I want to tell my story in case someone is in the same boat as me.

Years ago I was feeling so bad I could not get out of bed for a couple of months. The psychologist I was seeing kept pressuring me to exercise. So, I tried it and I hated it. I really had a lot of trouble even doing the smallest things, like making food for myself or go to the supermarket. It all seemed like an impossible task. Now I had to spend the little energy I had to regulate myself to go to the gym or to run.

When I was exercising, it felt like genuine torture. I just hated every second. Afterwards, I would just feel extra tired and very sad about the pain Inhad been in and anxious about having to go again next time.

I was too timid to really stand up for myself and I did not want to fail at yet another thing. I thought it was just my fault and I just was too lazy and should be harder on myself. So, I tried to keep going, even though I could not sleep the night before and I went there crying. When I said something about it, the psychologist kept pressuring me to do it like it was some magic fix for everything. I just needed to do it often enough.

On my way to the gym, I started to wish more and more that I would be in an accident and get wounded so I did not have to go anymore. One time, on my way to the gym, I tripped and fell. I had a big bruise on my knee, but it was not bad enough to not have to exercise anymore. So, I sat on my knee on the bruise the whole night in the hope that it would get worse. It hurt, but it was not nearly as bad as exercising. When I told my psychologist she said that she could not help me if I self-harmed and I should go somewhere else. However, I was not self-harming to harm myself. I was actually protecting myself against something that was bad for me. I could not explain that at the time.

Years later, I went to a psychosomatic physiotherapist. In the years in between, I got the advise to exercise for my mental health numerous times. Each time I tried it, I failed. No matter how much I tried, it keep feeling like torture, my mood got worse and physically I did not improve at all. I always kept thinking that it was my fault and just not trying hard enough.

So, when I went to the new physiotherapist, I started out with telling him that I knew I should exercise and that I was stupid foe not doing so. He immediately stopped me and told me I should not exercise at all. He explained to me that when you exercise, your stress levels go up temporarily and then they go down and usually lower than they were before you started exercising. That is why most people benefit from stress reduction after exercise.

However, in my case, my stress levels were extremely high, all the time. They were so high that if I started to exercise, they would be pushed up above the maximum that my body was able to handle (he drew a chart where the line hit the top of the chart). So, for my body, exercise did not feel like a temporary increase in stress that would go down after a while, it felt like an extreme emergency situation that it could not adapt to. This would further disregulate my stress system. That is why it felt like torture, and why my mood got worse and why I did not have any physical improvement from exercise.

He told me moving was good to calm my nervous system. So, slow walking in the forest and things like that. And just quit as soon as I did not feel like it, or it gave me stress and just try some other time when I felt like it again. And that worked like a charm. I walk now for 4 to 6 hours a week and it calms me down. I do not have to push myself. I just feel like doing it and if I don’t, I just won’t go.

So, the point is that exercise can be great to help with stress, if your stress is maybe at 70% or 80%. However, if your stress level is consistently at 95% then it is harmful and you should not do it. (Mindfulness probably will not help either in that case btw.) If exercise keeps feeling like torture and it does not help you, do not feel like a failure and keep torturing yourself. It is not your fault if it does not work for you! Go to a psychosomatic therapist instead that has expertise in stress management. They might be able to help you.

He looks eel!