#actually loved

Ahh no these are all good questions and I’m really glad you like the au!!

So the cheating au began with one post that I’ll link when I get it (it should be the first post in the tag but that’s always hit and miss) (should also be in the “Kit’s silly lil AUs” tag but that’s ALSO hit and miss sometimes)

But the post was basically: obi-wan and Satine throw a very elaborate and fancy fundraising ball that Padmé drags Anakin to. Anakin is very out of place and goes to skulk in the corner. When a man comes to stand next to him, Anakin opens his big mouth and is like “haha look at this place it’s so needlessly fancy and huge and over the top, the senator must be overcompensating huh” and obi-wan is like “I can assure you I’m not” and anakin is like 😳😳😳

…and after a night of casual flirting from obi-wan and flustered rebuttals Anakin who isn’t as uninterested as he wants to be, obi-wan shows up at anakin’s space art gallery a few days later, gets a private tour, and sucks anakin’s dick in an unused room

Which sort of jumpstarts the affair if not the love, but it’s sort of implied that Anakin was dissatisfied with some aspects of his relationship with Padmé (how public it was, how much of his time he has to spend going to her things and caring about her career)

I have been thinking about how apologies have gone wrong in my life.

For me.

If your apology focuses on information about how you are suffering because you have wronged me. Especially if it highlights thought processes that are bad for you, that are maladapative, that say bad things about you and the world. If you are weeping tears of guilt and sorrow, saying hateful things about yourself, etc

This is bad for me.

This is bad for me. This is probably making the situation worse for me. You might even be making me angrier. One part of me will be feeling powerful empathetic distress and a strong desire to help you and will interpret this as you needing care and restoration, I will feel pressured to drop it and let it go, even if I feel like you don't actually understand where I am coming from or how to avoid hurting me again, which is what i am really looking for to feel safe in situations again.

I want you to care, but mostly I want to fix the problem. I want you to understand my emotions and perspective and think they are a valid way to think, acknowledge pain, and then I want the thing to stop happening.

Unfortunately, people who have been in various types of abusive or religious situations are literally trained to do the self flagellation. LIke, it's the knee jerk, go to response to avoid further punishment.

So it comes up a lot. This is a pattern that comes up a lot.

And then I am madder, and they are more locked into their trauma memory of fawning and self loathing, because they are more threatened, but when they are in a threat or trauma response space, I feel even more locked into a caretaker mode where my needs can't get met.

So then my behavior gets weirder, because on the one hand, I am trying to take care of them, but I really fucking resent having to keep everything smooth and chill when you were the one who hurt me, and so none of your fucking apologies mean anything at that point.

And especially if a big part of the issue is feeling like there's an imbalance in who is taking care of whom in the relationship, then it feels like you are doing the thing, again, that I was already complaining about.

But from your perspective, I bet I am getting more and more impossible to please, scarier and meaner, especially if you have been trained to hurt yourself or center your badness to seek forgiveness.

How much self flagellation is required?

None. none. the right amount is none.

actually I really want you to stop thinking about you and how you feel and what you did altogether for a little while, and make it about me.

yup you fucked up people do that, I just need it to get fixed I just need to try to find a better way I just need to feel taken care of and important, I would like to talk about my emotions and have you validate them and try active lsitening, I just need to try to improve the situation, the entire utility of all your bad feeling is how it motivates you to take care of my hurt and prevent doing it any more and I don't want you to feel any more than that at all

any more than that you feel is not only for me

I don't want you to feel bad!

If we are in this kind of situation, then I care enough about you that I don't fucking want you to feel bad about you!

I told you that you hurt me because I want to repair our relationship!

I might want you to feel sorry for me and say, oh, poor myth, let's do something super nice for them like take them out for an agua fresca or help them fill out paperwork, next time we play a game we will let them pick, or something else that makes this up to them

that's it, that's the sum total of the bad I want you to feel.

I never want you to torment yourself

we are both fighting the voice in your head that says you are unlovable

And I was realizing that this has come up in at least 4 different important relationships in my life.

Like, this most recent time feels like the first time I was ever able to get caught in this loop and then actually get out of it.

Like, I am fairly certain that 4 different people might read this post and think I am vagueposting about them. If that's you, I love you. Please don't feel bad about yourself for apologizing wrong. Hope this doesn't trigger anything.

I just.

Am I the weird one? Is this a weird thing to want? Is this obscure? Am I getting something wrong here?

Because I have been saying to myself, this happens because I hang out with traumatized people and systems, and I am being pretty normal in what I want, and everyone else is traumatized, but

Whenever I am like, I am the healthy one, everyone else is traumatized, that's a bad sign, I think. Like I get to feel all noble and like I am doing this right, but. Fuck, it's causing so many problems.

that's why.