Barathemos : I know exactly how you feel, this is a really common problem and I am pleased that you have asked for advice.

I firmly believe that you can't have a relationship with someone if you can't speak openly and honestly to them - that is the relationship. Anything else is just a lovely extra.

So I would suggest that you think long an deep about who you really want to be with this current girl or your ex, and see what comes up, perhaps you would like to have both? or neither? I mean what do you feel you want, how realistic is this.

I sense as she broke up with you, you would not have wanted to have broken up so are still in love, I am curious therefore how quickly you started going out with someone else, but not just someone else but her best friend. No wonder she wants you back, some people are mimetic.

I think the best thing is to talk to your ex about why she broke up with you, you have nothing to lose and she wants you back. Be as open as you want about your feelings and how she hurt you. If you think that things are over, they are over, don't go back over old ground it will soon grind to a halt. But what about her best friend how did she come into the equation. She should be supporting her best friend no? How is that happening.

I do hop it all works out, if it does not, there is always someone else out there, this is a a learning experience, I should know I am still learning.

Please please please let me know how it goes for you.

Be well

Ok tots, I have a baby sister, she's really cute and one day I'll show you all a picture maybe, but she seems to not want any milk ever since she got over her first cold, we have to force feed her just so she doesn't starve, what would you suggest we do? (The doctor we tried, but he said she was "normal") She's 1 year and 2 months BTW

Totts : You seem to have experience in a lot of areas.  My two cats have somehow gotten fleas, and the mess is driving me and my husband batty. He doesn't want to spend a lot of money trying to fix the problem, and we don't have enough time to do much. What is the most cost efficient way to get rid of them?  They're absolutely awful right now.  I've been bathing the cats as often as I can, but it's just not enough.  And we can't afford to take them to the vet and have pest control come in.

Totts : *Sighs* I am fed up...depressed and lost motivation for somethings totts....I just brush is off and I am quiet about this. But yet, it doesn't do me any good. Though I feel I am doing what is best for me...; there are more layer of problems that keeps on piling on me from day to day. I can't even smile like I use to. Much less help people. As I need to help myself. I am really annoyed by this....

Cradily is love : I am sorry you have this situation be reassured the doctor says not to worry. I would suggest however, where finance and time permits you find another doctor to get a second opinion. Have you tried any alternatives to milk? Formula? Goats? Soy. I recall my nephew had the same problem but a psychiatrist said don't force feed the baby as it will cause too many problems with food in the long run. Is it time to get the baby onto some solids? perhaps that will sort things out. Obviously the baby has to eat to get nutrition, so I would weigh the baby daily and if the weight seriously starts to fall get to a doctor quick. Also make sure baby stays well hydrated, this is essential. Good luck and yes please send a picture.

Singelli : From what I know about cats and fleas, bathing them will do absolutely nothing, infact the fleas will enjoy feasting on a clean cat. But you will need to act fairly promptly as from what I know this problem is not going to go away and will potentially get worse and infect your carpets and soft furnishings. So before the lecture here is what you do:
1) Buy some spot on flea drops, they are really cheap online and you just spot it on between the cats shoulder blades. This can be a dual action with a wormer also.
2) Buy a good wormer, again can be dual action, this again is cheap online and push it gently down kitties throat(I have with my neigbours old wild cat) or crush into its favourite food when it is really hungry, but just mix it initially into a little bit of food so that it does not leave the active part of the meal at the bottom.
3) You must then treat your carpets and soft furnishings. A cheap quick way is a spray, put on a mask and use it all up across all your rooms and then go out the house for a well deserved coffee and a cake. A fogger will do much the same for you.

There you go total time in all about 30 mins tops, in most cases 15. Total cost $40 max and no vet or pest control needed.

Let me know how it goes.

Enitan: I am sorry, I though things were going really well or you. but this is not a judgement ups and downs are a normal normal normal points in life.

I want to know what you think about this extract from a transcript taken from Frankl’s advice to Anna, a 19-year old art student who displays severe symptoms of incipient schizophrenia. She considers herself as being confused and asks for help.
Patient: What is going on within me?
Frankl: Don’t brood over yourself. Don’t inquire into the source of your trouble. Leave this to us doctors. We will steer and pilot you through the crisis. Well, isn’t there a goal beckoning you – say, an artistic assignment?
Patient: But this inner turmoil ….
Frankl: Don’t watch your inner turmoil, but turn your gaze to what is waiting for you. What counts is not what lurks in the depths, but what waits in the future, waits to be actualized by you….
Patient: But what is the origin of my trouble?
Frankl: Don’t focus on questions like this. Whatever the pathological process underlying your psychological affliction may be, we will cure you. Therefore, don’t be concerned with the strange feelings haunting you. Ignore them until we make you get rid of them. Don’t watch them. Don’t fight them. Imagine, there are about a dozen great things, works which wait to be created by Anna, and there is no one who could achieve and accomplish it but Anna. No one could replace her in this assignment. They will be your creations, and if you don’t create them, they will remain uncreated forever…
Patient: Doctor, I believe in what you say. It is a message which makes me happy.
Please let me know what you think about this, what is your goal? Focus on this, never beat yourself up or ever apologise for being who you are and be annoyed by your 'downs' this is normal. Life is a wheel on a circle. What is your motivators? You have thoughts but you are not your thoughts. You have feelings but you are not your feelings. You are a conscious being of pure enlightenment, no wonder we get down for identifying with things we are not. Always help others and we are helping ourselves. Selfish people lead unhappy lives.

Totts : My mom and her dad are going steady with her, she eats yes, but she still relies on milk, yeah we've tried others, formula's way too expensive though, she doesn't enjoy sour flavors, so soy is out, and she has a tree nut allergy, so almonds are also out, and goat milk had the same effect as cow, she's eating and drinking water, but we still have to force feed her food and milk, and finally no another doctor is completely out of the question, the one we have is a cheap one by medicaid.

Cradily is love : I am sorry things have been so difficult for you, how has it been going, all this must be putting quite a strain on your mom and dad and family also. How are you doing?

Totts : Thank you....that was inspiring to read, and was helpful in a way. ^-^

Since Totts is going to be unavailable for a while, this will be temporarily closed.

Will reopen when she has time to start this up again.

We are back in business and I am expecting this time of year to be a busy year as we run up to Christmas, so please post here any thing you would like help and advice on. We are here happy and ready for you.

Hey your back? You need to be more consistent, but anyway glad you appear to be around more these days recently as I need your help.

I can't overcome my fear of tests, literally I can't breath and think I am just going to fail and then that would be disasterous as I know that if I fail then I wont pass and then I wont get my certificate and then I wont get work and then I will starve.

My god I am so full of fears, or amI just panicking?

jinkies1 : jinkies1 : I am sorry I went away and let you down or disappointed you in some way, that did not seem fine to you. I appreciate what you say about consistency.

Tests are and can be very stressful things indeed and totally make one angry and tearful likewise. Let us be a bit more honest about this and take the shame out of tests for not being that when we feel this way. We must get this out in the open, there is no shame.

I recommend that you breath deeply to help with your panicking, feel the breath enter your longs slowly and let the breath out slowly. Do this 10 times. If you are stressed repeat and repeat again. It is better to breath than feel stressed, it wont make your situation any better if you stress and obsess but breathing will help much.

You are panicking and that indicates that your fight or flight reaction has been activated. You can run but you can also fight, problem is there are no saber tooth tigers anymore and your fear is of the test yet to your body it feels the same. Again breathing will help.

Try to do more exercise, eat well and sleep well. Laugh a lot more about things anything, laughter reduces stress.

You are catastrophising a bit, but that is normal, but it is not healthy for your body. Focus on small goals and manageable ones.

On an existential note, it is more important that you begin to take control of stress than the test. The stress will be there whether you pass or not and become rich, poor or not. Stress is a normal part of life and will always be present. So you can be a happy poor person or a rich unhappy person, which one would you want to be, choose.

Choice is empowering and with it comes responsibility. So choose to not be stressed how? By saying I am feeling stressed, but I am not stressed, I am much more than that I am a body who is aware it is stressed. This disidentification exercise will help you to become an observing I rather than taken as a whole.

Good luck with the test, let me know how it goes, I will be thinking of you.

Totts, hi, how are you?

I have been concerned about you since we last spoke and can see you have been quite busy on the site making lots of threads, I hope that does not wind people up as you are such a great member. But I did see lots of people stick up for you!

Is everything well with you are Christmas approaches so fast!

How are you going to spend Christmas anyways? With friends and family or alone, but I hope not alone.

I wish you a good Christmas and your mood improves, you always seem to take everything people say on vizzed so personal and invest so much in this site, but then that's because I guess you care so much.

So I hope you are well and everything is good.

Totts, how can my trusted friend that I have feelings for her? I have been friends with her for about 9 years and for about the last 3 or 4, we've been quite close. I don't know if she has the same feelings and the fear of rejection is scaring the hell out of me. I don't know how our friendship could keep up if she says no.  Any advice will do. 

pkmntrainer2013 : Thank you for taking the time to write to us about this.

What you raise is an important question and I am really pleased that you took the courage to write as I know that this is something that many of us will experience also, this advice alone may be interesting.

But I hear your difficulty and confusion over rejection feelings and my advice further is to speak to her about this and say exactly what you told me.

This will resolve everything one way or another.

I am not saying just drop a bomb on her, like I love you, but to take the time to explain what you said to me.

Good luck, and thank you for writing here.

I will be thinking of you over this time.

Thanks for the advice Totts. I won't be able to talk to her until Tuesday at the earliest,  but I'll follow your advice. Many thanks and happy new year. 

Totts : Hello Totts, I am having problems on Monday's also, that is in another thread, but I want to know how I can sort out my life so that I have less arguments, I am always finding I rush in and say the wrong thing to my sister and then she hates me for the whole day.

I am also angry with my friend as he says I dont spend enough time with him, even though we are talking or on meeting up almost everyday. I dont get it and when I say this he says I have changed and hardened?

pkmntrainer2013 : How is it going and the new year treating you?

jinkies1 : Before arguing with someone, listen to what the they have to say; if you need to leave the room, breath in and out slowly 10 times each day and ground yourself; feel your feet on the floor and relax your muscles; hopefully the anger will have passed by then.

You are a very nice person for offering to help. I am not 100 percent sure as to if any advice would help, but I can't help but take up the opportunity to share, now that someone is willing to listen. Warning though: I haven't had anyone to talk to in a long time, so I have a lot to say.

A few years ago, I met the man of my dreams and fell in love. He is one of the sweetest, kindest, bravest people I have ever met. His family, on the other hand, are some the saddest, cruelest people I have ever met. A little over a year ago, my darling told me that his mother was breaking up with her husband because he was mad at how she would constantly cheat on him. (And brag about it) Since the house they lived in was "too painful for her to stay in", (memories I guess?) they were moving into a new house across the street. Then, she can't afford a new place so then they got back together but they already had someone buying the old place and the new place they had chosen got too expensive so they had to move far away to an apartment. Of these two's four children, one was caught using meth in the house and as such was thrown out to the streets. My darling love, who has never done anything, was told that he would receive the same treatment if he did not pay a rather large sum of money monthly to help pay for the apartment's rent. He had no way of paying and was terrified. So I chose to move in with him. I loved him enough that he was not going to have to face this struggle on his own. It was tough leaving my friends and everything I had known behind to a place where I had never even visited before, and it was even harder when I had a difficult time finding work. But I did it! I found a job that was close by, I worked hard, and together we earned enough to pay the rent to his family.

A few months in I discovered something important: His parents hated me. I often would try to talk to them and they would flat out ignore me. Anything I did, no matter how small would cause them to yell at my darling to make sure I changed what I did--an action that would have been so much easier if they had just talked to me! What was even more bizarre to me though was that they didn't seem to keen about my darling either. He would do whatever they asked, and still they would do nothing but yell at him. For the tiniest things, too. Instead of asking him to say, set up the wireless they would yell at him because he didn't set up the wireless after so long (because he was at work when they first bought the router). They treated their meth using son (who never stopped, mind you) better than him, having a huge celebration with steak and crab and shrimp because he got a job at big lots (Also, they let him live rent-free with them so guess what he got to use his money on?) while my darling got a promotion at his job and was doing something that he actually enjoyed for the first time in years and their response was "Well since you're being paid more, you can pay for a higher rent right?"

These people are one twirly mustache away from being cartoonishly evil. But wait, it gets better.

So somewhere around six months pass, and we can't afford the new lease. The lady says that we are going to have to move, but she keeps looking at places during times when we tell her we have to work. We let them all know that my darling and I want to see the places too, but she lets us know that she wouldn't pick a crappy place. She was charging us more anyway, so it obviously must be good because we are being charged more! Moving day comes around, the place is tiny. We can barely fit all our stuff in the closet--but lucky for me I manage to find a free cupboard on the side of the road that we can fit all our clothes into. The family refers to all our stuff as "Basura" as we move. I later learn that this means garbage. She also forgot to tell us that the place is infested with roaches. You cannot go to the bathroom, or grab some food or relax in your own bed without finding a few guests--and she knew full well that they were here before we moved in! It takes almost a week to get her to change her mind to let us pay our previous rent.

Months pass. Almost every week the parents have an argument, to the point where sleeping sometimes is nearly impossible without white noise websites like rainymood. The dad is back on meth and losing weight by the day. The mom is going to clubs and shopping for more women to "have fun" with. The younger son is smoking cannabis almost every day to the point that we are almost evicted (TWICE!) . And the most frustrating of all, they still treat their eldest son (my beloved) like he was the one ruining their lives. They  I have warmed up to them enough that they will talk to me, but they will still tell anything important to my darling instead of telling me (even it's as simple as 'we are paying the rent this week'). I feel that they see my place in this home is the nagging little devil on my sweetheart's shoulder that plants seeds of trouble just to make others squirm and should be ignored and shamed. They insult me on my weight and my clothing when I am as far as the next room. Everything that is ever a mess is our fault. Who cares that we weren't even in the house that day, we made the mess and had to clean it up. And every time I tried to speak my mind I am yelled at and shut up. (Yelling has a very bad effect on me. Childhood. You know the spiel.)

So we get the news that my darling's mother is losing her job. She is getting laid off. She decided to buy a house while she still had a high paying job and she wanted to break the lease we were on early. We didn't want to do it. We weren't prepared to leave in March, we were prepared to leave in June. But she was willing to take us in, and even though this place was going to be really far from where we work, it'll be cheaper than what the bay area would give us. So we were forced to pay a thousand dollars to break the lease. The people who owned the apartment said that we are forced to stay until someone took the place up. Even after we paid the thousand dollars for some reason. I was worried for a little bit, especially after she suddenly went "Never mind, we're staying to the full lease" and then "Never mind, I'm moving and only taking (youngest sister) and you are on your own" but my darling was loyal to his family saying that they had never abandoned him, always fed him, and gave him a home so I shouldn't worry.

Upon the day that it was announced that they had found a place and were going to be getting it, my darling's mother wanted to know if we were going to finally make a decision and move in with her in the new house, because if we didn't give her an answer then she wouldn't have the time to put an ad out to rent the room. I (through my boyfriend who was telling me this because she still doesn't talk to me about important things) said that I would like to see the room before we made a decision of where we were going to live. He passed the message along and returned with the message of "We are not allowed to look at the place. The girls (younger sisters and her) all found the place to be great and we have nothing to worry about" to which my darling asked "Wait, we aren't allowed to look at the place but you and the girls are?" And her reply was "Well we don't have to please (me) anyway."

I felt like nothing. Never before had I realized just how worthless I was in their eyes. I wanted to run, but it was like midnight and my darling wouldn't let me go outside at such a late hour because we have a less than ideal neighborhood , so I just curled up and cried. I cried for about ten minutes before calming down. My sweet love who had been holding me the whole time told me that his mother had looked at his tax information and laughed in his face at the mere idea of him and I living on his own. And then he said, "want to prove her wrong?"

We ran downstairs and chased her to her car (she was heading out to a bar) and told her that we did not want to live in the house with her. That we were going to find a place on our own. She said "Great! I'll go make an ad for the spare room then."

Feeling good, we went to sleep smiling.

The next day, my darling texts me to let me know that his mother has been leaving him voice mails and texts all day about how furious she is with us. That we dropped her at the last minute and that we abandoned her, breaking our promises to help her pay for this house.

We never said that we were going to move with her.

We didn't want to break the lease early.

We only paid the fee because we had no other choice.

She treats the both of us coldly for the next few weeks. She snaps at us, anything we do wrong is suddenly a huge deal. A ride home from work that she offered is us taking advantage of her kindness. But I don't let it get me down. My mama and her man said that they were going to be giving us their tax returns since they don't need it, and since they are going to be selling the family farm (literally. It is a farm.) they were going to give us money so rent in the bay area will not be an issue.

Last night, she told us that she heard that we were looking for a "bachelor" which I guess means a studio or one bedroom place. She asked how much we were looking for, and I said "about 900 a month". She tells us then that we are not allowed to look for a place anymore. It is two weeks until we have to start paying the rent on the place and two weeks until she starts her mortgage payments. We are going to 'have the whole place to ourselves' and also be sharing the house with the youngest son who is now also taking up meth. (like his dad) The reasoning is that if we were to move into a place that we want then she would have to pay for the apartment herself and she cannot do that and pay for the mortgage.

We explain this is not fair. We can't pay so high a fee and that if I did get help from my family we would no longer be able to afford to save up for the first deposit and rent for a new place. Her response was "You have no choice." and she laughed at us. Literally. Right in our faces. She said that if we didn't pay, not only would she not pay the bill but also since my darling is listed on the contract (she put him on there) his credit was going to be awful because he had zero credit until this point. There was no reasoning with her.

I cried again. This time, my crying was loud. And angry. I cried for two hours. This whole thing was her fault! We didn't want to move! We didn't want to go to her stupid house! It's not our fault that you took a gamble assuming that someone would take up the place and no one had! It's not our fault that she picked a place for us to move into that was so shabby looking that when people drive up to look at the place as soon as they see the neighborhood they leave! We pay our rent on time, and we paid the stupid 1000 dollars to cover the breaking of the contract! There is no reason for her to trap us like this!

My crying was so loud and so long that the moment that I finally calmed down enough that my beloved could walk to the bathroom she was waiting by the door and as soon as he came out he pulled him into her room for a talk that I when I knocked was not allowed to join in on. When he left the room after an hour he had been convinced to live out the rest of the lease peacefully. We are still stuck with the kid who loves drugs, and his sister (who smokes pot constantly) might be joining us too. He managed to bring the price down to our rent but we are still not allowed to find a place for ourselves until after the lease is up OR someone who walks in (which will be happening at any time, day or night) loves the place and chooses to take it. That is, unless we want to pay rent for two apartments for four months. But don't worry! She said that we will be given the first month free so we can find a place for ourselves when we move into the house that we aren't allowed to look at after the lease is up.

The biggest thing is that it's not the threat of bad credit that is hard for my sweet love. He just loves his mom too much to force her to pay for a mortgage and the rent on a place that isn't even being used. Even if it is her own fault.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and I haven't had a decent night's sleep in ages. I can't rest. I am afraid of the future when I will come home and throw up every night at the smell of drugs. Home is supposed to be the place you go to escape the crazies of the world. A sanctuary. What hurts the most is that we almost had a home. A real sanctuary. And now, we don't. Is there an iced version of sleepy time tea? It's too warm this time of year for the regular kind.

AnotherInuFan : Writing this out is one form of therapy that will help you get perspective on things this is exactly what you have started doing.

I encourage everyone to write out everything, what ever comes to mind, and most importantly your feelings.

Keep writing it out, journal, a dairy, a vizzed page a day and you will find things will start to change and you will get a new perspective on things.

Please feel free to join us again.