mermaid11 said:
This thread has been wonderful so far but I must admit I'm a little upset right now. One member on here sent me a rather abusive message because I didn't reply to a message he sent me stating 'I clearly didn't give a f... About him', the content of the message was quite serious and I was still thinking of a response. As a result ive been added to his 'ignore' list and told not to post on his threads. I think there are a couple of people that need to realise its a forum and should not take the place of a therapist.
I think he jumped to conclusions that you didn't care about him due to your delay in responding. If we're not careful about things we can get caught up in stories that color our thoughts. But these stories aren't always the truth.
There are quite a few people I care about that I have not responded to immediately, for some of them it's been a long time. I have a couple reasons. One is that I don't feel like I have enough time to compose a proper, well-thought-out response. I don't like responding to messages when I feel rushed, because then sometimes I forget things or I just phrase my messages badly.
Another reason is that I am either angry, sad, anxious, or just overall upset about something, and I don't want to bring them down with my bad mood. Therefore, I wait until I am feeling better to respond. However, sometimes this can take days, weeks, months even (though I am trying to get back to all my messages TODAY!)
Either way, I don't like to respond when I feel I'm not able to give the message my undivided attention.
It's too bad what happened, Mermaid. This is exactly why people should be more patient with texting and messaging, and realize that there are many reasons why someone doesn't reply immediately. I try to remember this when I catch myself starting to worry about this same situation.