It’s been a very intense few weeks in my own dalet amot.

First, and Baruch Hashem, foremost, I have a new grandson, and a daughter who’s moved in with me for a few weeks, while she’s finding her feet as a new mum.

My washing mountain over Succot grew to such disturbing proportions I had to start washing more of the baby stuff, and then adding some other stuff in there, too. Our environments affect our state of mind (and vice-versa), so while my office is clogged full of drying washing and other bits of furniture that we moved out of the guest room to give my daughter more space, my head is also feeling more than a little jammed-up.

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Apart from all the ‘peace in our time’ baloney, since I finished saying the Rav’s 40 days of 7 Tikkun Haklalis, lots and lots of very old ‘issues’ have started to come unstuck in my own dalet amot, particularly around the subject of being bullied and manipulated.

While it’s for sure very good, it’s also been quite challenging to navigate.

And even harder to write about.

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But it came to my this morning to put something down about what I’ll call ‘1-D relationships’.

It’s all these ‘relationships’ which are punctuated by emojis and GIFs, but lacking real content, real emotional connection, a real soul dimension.

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One of the things I realised last week, is that most people are scared of coming out of the ‘1 D model’ of relating to themselves, because the truth the soul whispers at you can be so powerful, it can turn your whole life upside-down.

Who wants to have to deal with the fall-out of finally understanding that cherished ‘friend’ is actually not so good for you after all? Or, of realising that a family member has been bullying you out of your felt experiences and soul-space since you were tiny? Or, that you are living a Truman Show-style scripted experience, were everything is being arranged and choreographed to create a fake reality where what we really feel, what our soul really wants, who we really are, is drowned in a lake of ‘fakeness’ and emojis?

That’s a very big mountain to climb.

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Last week, I deleted myself out of my siblings’ Whatsapp group, that I got added to against my will last year by The Vaccinator, once I had to get Whatsapp for university.

I didn’t feel I could protest. I felt it would cause a big issue, if I said no, I don’t want to spend my time and energy engaging in 1-D relationships where you can say any disgusting thing you want as long as you punctuate it with a spinning heart gif…

To cut a very long story very short, last week I finally realised that being in that group with The Vaccinator tripped me into a year-long flashback, where I felt inextricably anxious, panicky, in danger, worthless, helpless – i.e. my inner child started ringing the alarm bells very loudly, that something bad was going on.

Last week, I finally got the message.

I deleted myself out of the group, I blocked The Vaccinator, also on email, and I made a promise to myself that with God’s help, I am not going to be bullied again without standing up for myself.

(Standing up for myself is what triggered the exchange on Whatsapp that finally proved The Vaccinator is still as toxic as he ever was, and it was time to admit the reality that the relationship is broken beyond any attempt to fix it. At least, by me.)

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This week – I am feeling pretty fragile, to be honest.

But also way more hopeful, that I can finally move out of ‘The Vaccinator’s’ version of my family’s Truman Show, where he cast me in a role and a persona that was actually just a projection of his own issues and bad middot.

I am not going to go into all this here, but if you are interested, look up ‘Golden Child’ and ‘Scapegoat’, and then guess which part I got assigned by The Vaccinator.

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In the meantime, all this has also triggered off a lot of pondering about the nature of relationships generally, in 2025.

I understand that people keep things ‘1-D’, because going deeper than that usually leads to uncovering some really yucky bad middot and ‘soul truths’ that most people don’t want to have to deal with.

This is a generation where we are down here to finally finish those tikkunim where we just kept kicking the can farther down the road, in a previous incarnation.

Probably, that’s why so many people are just so messed-up, that toxic narcissist traits are ‘the norm’, for most people today.

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The solution, the antidote, is Rebbe Nachman’s advice.

And particularly, the advice to do hitbodedut for an hour every single day, and to reconnect to the soul, to ourselves, and to come out of the Truman Show fake-reality that’s being created for us anew every single day.

I can honestly say that regular hitbodedut is the single best thing I ever did for myself, to stop living in the 1-D ‘reality’, and to move into a healthy, full-spectrum relationship with my soul and with God, where I can acknowledge my bad middot honestly – but even more importantly, understand how stuffed-full of good middot I also am.

Because in The Vaccinator’s version of fake-reality, my good middot don’t exist.

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The Rav said that saying 40 days x 7 Tikkun Haklalis would transform our sins into merits.

It is no exaggeration to say that is literally the process I have been experiencing the last few weeks, as so many of the issues and difficulties I got blamed for as the family’s main ‘Scapegoat’ have been dissolving and turned around, as I finally understand that the version of ‘reality’ I grew up with for decades was false, from its inception.

It’s liberating. It’s hope-inducing. And it’s also pretty scary.

Even when you know you’ve been living in the Truman Show, stepping through the door to the real world waiting outside can be a very daunting and lonely experience.

The 1-D people can’t follow you into that real place.

But at this stage, I can no longer continue to stay in the Truman Show, even on Whatsapp, even for a day, or an hour.

That’s what my soul has been whispering to me for a year, already. And finally, after doing the 40 x 7 TKs, I could hear what it was telling me.