the archived ultimatum, the digitised field notes of real boy alfie, the alfie analysis report, the consequences execution transparency report, and alfie's guide to saving himself
the archived ultimatum, the digitised field notes of real boy alfie, the alfie analysis report, the consequences execution transparency report, and alfie's guide to saving himself
note
in the analyses on this page, i split alfie into two distinct identities in order to process my feelings for alfie and his behaviour towards me without attacking alfie's core identity.
real boy alfie: alfie's soul (representing his inner child, alfie's true authentic self), the boy i met on princes pier and the boy i fell in love with. this version of alfie is soft and gentle.
mean boy alfie: alfie's facade (representing alfie's choice of being in the closet and pretending to be someone he is not), the boy who chose to hurt his own soul and me, the boy he loved. this version of alfie is avoidant and cowardly.
*this is further elaborated on under the current failure of mean boy alfie section of the alfie analysis report.
the archived ultimatum (18 february 2026) that led to the tombstone.
alfie, this is the final call for you to choose the right option. you have until 23 february 2026 11:59pm (melbourne time) or 8:59pm (singapore time) to find me. during the chinese new year, that day is 人日 (the day of humanity), so it's a symbolic day to see if you'll choose your humanity or your abuser. once that day passes, you will not have another chance. i am now prepared to intentionally react to either of your choices, to be mean boy alfie or real boy alfie. as an act of transparency, i will detail exactly what i will do if you pick either choice.
option 1: mean boy alfie
if you choose to stay silent, make excuses, or invoke more mean boy alfie shit by the deadline, i am functionally and mentally prepared to cut you out of my life because i will know that the real boy i love can no longer be saved, and that i tried my best till the very end.
my non-exhaustive list of actions to remove you from my life:
- i will update this website to become a digital tombstone for the boy i once loved, a monument of mean boy alfie's cowardice.
- i will cut off all points of contact you have with me by blocking your contact on imessage and whatsapp, etc., and deleting your contact off my phone.
- i will dispose of my physical tethers to you by trashing your school uniform i purchased (since you no longer provide comfort), my polaroid of you on the back of my phone (since i don't find value holding onto self-betraying people), and the ayrton senna cap i bought to remember you (since you didn't live up to your own role model's legacy).
- i will remove digital reminders of you by removing you from my apple watch watch face, taking you off the background of my macbook, removing my playlist for you from spotify and deleting my google drive folder i had for you.
- i will begin associating my love for real boy alfie to the cruel mean boy who chose to kill his inner child, preventing me from feeling any empathy, and starting the process of complete detachment and moving on from the boy who once felt like my soulmate.
i am not bluffing you, i don't need to. i have already prepared your digital tombstone which will become the homepage of this website if you choose to remain mean boy alfie. do not test me, alfie.
option 2: real boy alfie
if you choose to be real boy alfie, i will be here for you and i will fight alongside you through your struggles. i don't expect perfection, i just need to see that you are truly willing to try and be brave and acting with integrity. this option will not be easy to choose, and i fully anticipate that you will make mistakes. but when you try to act with integrity, you will always be safe with me and you will eventually be safe from your dad. i am the antithesis of your dad. i'm not asking you to change your whole life in one day, and i recognise that you are still currently tethered to your dad, and i know how to account for that.
i will detail my process below, but essentially i can help you heal using acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) by tailoring it to exactly who you are. i am not a licensed psychologist, but i am a psychology degree holder and i have studied and experienced ACT myself and i won't charge the boy that i love. this process will take years and requires full honesty, and you have to be willing to be brave. when we do this, it also helps to make the love between us feel less scary and discover why you feel a need to run away from that feeling.
the process of choosing real boy alfie that i will bring you through:
1. learning how to differentiate between who alfie really is versus who alfie is pretending to be.
2. figuring out why mean boy alfie developed and the benefits and costs of the facade.
3. discovering who real boy alfie is, his values and beliefs, and who he wants to be.
4. developing a stronger and healthier replacement to mean boy alfie that can act from integrity, protect his inner child, and is authentic, ie. brave boy alfie.
my non-exhaustive list of actions to add you into my life:
- i will create a safe space in my life for you.
- i will provide stable, consistent, and healthy love to you.
- i will teach you how to deal with your dad (and any other abusers you may have).
- i will support you through any tough situations you might have to deal with.
- i will adapt to include you into every other aspect of my life.
if the weight of choosing to be real boy alfie is making you freeze, i am giving you a low-friction way out. if you don't know what to say or how to find the 'perfect' words yet, send me one honest sentence: "i am scared, but i want to try to be real." that sentence alone is enough to stop the decommissioning protocol. it signals to me that real boy alfie can still be saved. anything else (silence, excuses, or more mean boy alfie bullshit) will be treated as a conscious choice for erasure.
i know this sounds loud, i know it feels like a threat, but look closely. your dad uses the power of fear to keep you small and in his control. i am using the power of the truth to let you earn total freedom. my intensity is the measure of how much i value your inner child. i am not punishing you. i am refusing to watch you drown without shouting.
i have made this option as easy to choose as i possibly can. if you still choose the other option, i know how to leave. i have already left melbourne for singapore, and this is the last time i will reach back across the ocean to see if the real boy i love wants to join me to grow. i am growing into my future and my heart is ready to move forward, with real boy alfie or without you entirely.
do not test me
if you want to test and see where my boundaries are, my advice is do not test me. now is not the time to experiment with me. you will not get away with mean boy alfie's behaviour, no matter how subtle. i have my bullshit detector ready to detect the integrity in any action you choose. if i detect that you are making half-hearted or dishonest attempts to connect or feign realness or authenticity, i will redirect your attempt as choosing to be mean boy alfie. i don't mind if you're scared, flawed, or lacking the right words, but i do not accept maybes. trust that i can detect your true integrity, and that there is no middle ground available here. i demand that you try to show up honestly with integrity if you want to be in my life, even if not perfectly. don't forget that i can interpret your actions easily because i see through you. you are an open book to me, and therefore you cannot lie to me. alfie, even giving you till the end of the 23rd is already extreme grace, i could have (and should have) cut you off the moment you sent your abuser my way.
conclusion
as i told you in january, i am open by design. however, i can control the access point and the people who are allowed to access me. if you choose to be mean boy alfie, your access will be permanently revoked. you have about 120 hours from when this post was published to choose the action you will enact. don't forget, silence = mean boy alfie, and that i only accept honest integrity. there will be no compromises on my end, because you have already made the situation life or death. i am not responsible for your actions, but i must give you the consequence of them, no matter if they are good or bad. mark my words, alfie. if the clock strikes 12am on the 24th (melbourne time) and i do not see an attempt of real integrity by you, i am ready to execute my planned actions. do not test me, alfie, do not test my integrity. now i will go silent and you get to pick your own destiny. i love you, real boy alfie, always :).
the digitised field notes of real boy alfie (19 december 2025) that keeps the boy i love alive inside me.
(written before i realised i loved alfie and before alfie's avoidance)
alfie — the pier boy
about a month ago, on 24 november, i was walking onto princes pier to catch the sunset, as i usually do. that day i was on my phone a little too much and had a bit of a headache. i was trying to figure out how to stimulate my brain without tech and like what i wanted to do in my final months in australia now that i had finished my uni degree and was feeling bored.
the first time i saw him
as i was walking my usual path from my car, doing a loop around the pier from the left side to the right before finding a place to sit and watch the sunset, there was a boy that caught my attention from quite a distance. he was fishing and moving around a lot, but what really caught my eye was how detailed he seemed in the way that he fished. i remember he was squatting by the edge of the pier, looking down and looking down at something. it was pretty unique behaviour that i hadn't seen anyone else do before, probably a sign that he was pretty observant. anyway i walked past him, sat where i usually sat, but the sun was too hot that day and i ended up moving to the opposite side where he was fishing. something about him tugged at my soul, he felt different in a good way. for the most part that evening, i was just observing him (and took a sneaky pic or two). i think he noticed me as well, like from the way he walked quite closely past me thrice. once when he was walking diagonally from the edge of the pier to his place on the bench (sorta subtly looking at me), and twice when he walked closely along the bench where i was, in which both times i moved my feet to give him space and he like flinched or recognised my movement/observation as well. anyway, we were both clearly paying attention to each other, despite me trying to be subtle and using my phone as a disguise. it felt like we were on the same wavelength. there weren't any words exchanged that day but it felt like there was a mutual understanding of something going on, something gentle and safe, where we both saw each other and how similar the type of boys we were. it was a type of resonance i hadn't felt in a long time (if ever), one i didn't expect to find on that pier that day. the subtle interactions we had that day were pretty special, and i couldn't stop thinking about it. he was helping me meet my need to feel seen.
the second time i saw him
the second time i saw him was on 3 december. my mum was with me at the pier for sunset that day. i was pretty overstimulated that day, too many people at princes pier, dealing with my mum and observing pier boy. to be honest, i wasn't expecting to see him ever again even though i wanted to. most people who fish there aren't regulars and i hadn't seen him before the original time. the energy was different this time and there was more distance, but i still noticed him even as i was lying down on the bench and watching the clouds. i noticed he left slightly earlier that day, and i watched him get on his bike and cycle off from the corner of my eye as i was trying to get the courage to say something. i was lowkey beating myself up for not talking to him that day, but i really wasn't in a good mental headspace. what i did do afterwards though, was to figure out how to naturally approach him in a genuine and unforced way. i realised that would have to be through sharing the pictures i got of him, which i felt were pretty good, might i add.
the third time i saw him
the third time i saw him was on 11 december. i brought my dad to the pier just past lunchtime. we were about to leave when right from the corner of my eye, i saw pier boy riding onto the pier on his bike, riding right past me. this was also unexpected. i didn't usually go there at that time, so i thought pier boy was mainly there during sunset. this time i was prepped and took my chance. i was kind of in a rush but i did manage to confirm that he was the right guy and we did chat briefly while i was finding my photos of him. i noticed that his accent seemed slightly different so i asked him if he was from the uk. he mentioned that he was from warrandyte but recently moved to port melbourne (near north port stadium), which explained why he was a new face on the pier. he asked if i had a photography account and i said that i just take photos for myself. he seemed to be alright and understanding of the fact that i had secretly taken photos of him. he didn't seem to mind at all, and he might've even already known that i did. he seemed to naturally account for my social anxiety about being honest about the pics in the way he sorta acknowledged and accepted it. it was like he knew that i was trying to say and he understood the context. when i found the photos we tried to do an airdrop but it didn't work so i ended up asking for his number. from the airdrop, i figured out that his name was alfie and now he sits as a contact on my phone :). once that was done, i had to return to my dad so the convo ended there, but it seemed to confirm the mutual resonance and softness between us.
a few days after i got his number, i wanted to make an instagram post of some of my favourite memories in aus to mark my graduation from unimelb. i wanted to include a picture of him because he represented something special to me: to be seen and understood while fully being myself. he meant something to me, a sense of ease and comfort in belonging that i rarely felt. so despite not yet knowing him very well, i wanted to include him in the post to remind myself that gentle and soft boys exist out there who i didn't need to perform for to be seen and cared for. just something to keep my hopes up as i mentally prepare to leave melbourne and move to a new country again. anyways, i asked for consent since i didn't know him very well, and he didn't mind, but two things stood out. one, i was kinda overthinking about how to phrase the message i wanted to send him so i was asking chatgpt to improve my phrasing for me. i was originally going to ask "do you mind..." but chatgpt asked me to switch to "would it be okay..." for a more positive framing, and alfie got back saying that he didn't mind, answering in the exact way that i was originally thinking. that was crazy. the second thing was how long he took to respond (2 whole days) which really elevated the self-doubt and anxiety i was feeling. now i didn't think that i had asked a question that was out of line of trying to force a convo or anything unreasonable or emotionally loaded? maybe potentially, but an easy yes/no answer, so i didn't think he'd take so long. he also didn't mention his instagram account :(. it just highlighted the differences between our in-person and text interactions, and also my insecurities when it comes to being seen or cared for. he responded after i thought that he wouldn't, so there's that.
the fourth time i saw him
the next day, 17 december, i saw him for the fourth time at the pier around sunset. he always fishes at around the same area, facing the crane at station pier, so i saw him from afar as i was walking in. he was further inside that day and he looked so good against the sun. i wished i had gotten a photo of him, it would've been so good. anyways, i walked up to him to say hi and we ended up chatting for a whole hour, until he had to go home. now i know basic details about him, like that he's 17 and in year 11 (turning year 12 next year) studying pretty art-centric subjects like product design at aquinas college i think (somewhere near ringwood). he mentioned that he was italian-australian, and that he's mainly travelled to new caledonia (via a cruise from station pier) and noosa/sunshine coast. i asked him about his fishing, and he mentioned how he's fished up and down the piers in port melbourne and even down in portsea/blairgowrie (mornington peninsula), and how he likes to swim and fish while in the water himself. he also mentioned liking true crime shows based around aussie stories (like underbelly and chopper). he seemed very geographically aware (even more than me actually), a very smart and observant person who's very aware but also very quiet and distinct otherwise. i do find him fascinating and interesting, very curious person. i feel like we got along pretty damn well.
i talked about myself too. he seemed pretty impressed that i graduated from unimelb. he asked about my day and i was telling him about going to scienceworks and the ngv with nick and zelphyn earlier in the day. when we were talking about education, he mentioned how how he felt that aussies were really undisciplined, which made me chuckle. i told him about how intense education in singapore was and how i didn't feel like i fit in there, he had no comment about that. i mentioned about nick wearing a keith harring shirt despite being straight and how we saw an artwork by harring at the ngv, so i teased nick about his sexuality and for appropriating gay culture. i didn't explain it very well but he seemed to understand and he chuckled. we also talked about traveling and work and stuff. he seemed pretty impressed about how extensively i've travelled within aus and globally. every state and mainland territory in aus and 25 countries globally. he said he worked at skewer'd, a greek restaurant in port melbourne, and was surprised that i didn't work. i told him that i was lucky to have parents that paid for my education for me and how i wanted to focus on studying while i could. i was also talking to him about how i wanted to travel to new places like montreal and dublin to find a new place to live. he seemed to quite like the idea of dublin. he mentioned that he wanted to go to prague one day. he also asked me where in aus had the nicest people, i said port macquarie, nsw. he wasn't expecting that, he didn't even know where that was, which was kinda funny. and near the end of the convo, we talked about getting our driver's licenses. he's on his Ls with 150 hours, and i was telling him about driving schools in singapore and how expensive they were. he told me about how easy it was to fib the hours recorded on the app for learners, it just needed parental signoff. he said it was better in singapore. what stood out to me in our interaction was that when he started to get ready to pack and i asked him if he was about to go, the way he went about responding to me managed to simultaneously reassure me and my social anxiety and explain his thought process. so he was like yeah we can keep chatting while he packed and i could come with him, and telling me about how he liked to get home before it was dark. it was a really small act, but he managed to naturally make me feel okay about him leaving. i don't feel that way very often. i mean, everything here is what i can remember, mostly not in order, but it does show how easily the convo flowed and how much we talked about in an hour.
as he got on his bike, i started walking towards the other side of the pier to see the sun and i was smiling so hard i couldn't control it. talking to him made me feel so happy. since he mentioned going down the coast for christmas break, i might not see him for a bit, but i did text him right after asking about when he works so i could come by and say hi. it's been days and he hasn't responded so we shall see. i really hope i get to see him again soon :).
the alfie analysis report that breaks down the current coward in melbourne.
sections: mean boy alfie's choices, what alfie chose to lose, what alfie could have gained, other notable mean boy dates, apple watch observations, what was alfie trying to avoid?, the current failure of mean boy alfie, dissecting alfie's father: the abuser, alfie as a singular experience, the illusion of choicelessness, my future and alfie, conclusion.
mean boy alfie's choices
situations where mean boy alfie acted with avoidance that harmed this soul-level connection.
1. 5 january 2026
situation: i sent alfie a series of texts where i asked alfie for clarity and communication, and started to unconsciously circle around the idea of love.
alfie's choice: alfie shut down the situation through soft rejection and distancing, without acknowledging the topics i had brought up.
my response: i sent a 😔 reaction, and spent the following week processing alfie's rejection, my own emotions and connecting the dots. i began to realise that what i felt for alfie was actually love.
2. 14 january 2026
situation: after processing, i wrote and sent alfie a love letter in the form of a website as a response to alfie's rejection.
alfie's choice: alfie attempted to control my autonomy and agency by demanding that i take my website down, making requests that contradicted past agreements and asked for confirmation and no contact simultaneously. alfie chose not to acknowledge the content of the love letter, and did not deny love, queerness or attraction on his end.
my response: i took down the website before restoring it 24 hours later without telling alfie. i acknowledged his request that contradicted past agreements but did not follow through. i did not respond to his simultaneous request for confirmation and no contact. i noticed alfie trying to avoid his feelings and my awareness. i concluded that alfie had overstepped his authority and did not have the right to control my actions or how i process my feelings for him.
3. 10 february 2026
situation: after almost a month of posting updates to the website, i posted that i was moving out of my apartment and was about to sell my car imminently. alfie chose to show up at princes pier during sunset (when i usually visit) at his typical spot. i spotted alfie from afar and took a photo. i walked up to alfie, stood next to him for a couple of seconds, and asked if i could say hi.
alfie's choice: alfie chose to respond with "no actually because you are really weird and i am actually going to leave and if you [don't leave me alone(?)] i will call the police", attempting to hurt my feelings.
my response: i responded with a very skeptical okay. i was somewhat hurt by alfie's words but recognised it as a sign of avoidance and him trying to push me away. i concluded that alfie had likely read my updates for him that i did not tell him about, and had put himself in my vicinity to see me when he still had the opportunity (but he would likely refuse to acknowledge it due to his avoidance). i theorised that alfie might have actually missed me.
4. 14-15 february 2026
situation: i sent a valentines day message containing the sleepytime episode of bluey at 12:01am, and an all expense paid invitation for him to accompany me and a mate to the airport as i moved out of australia.
alfie's choice: alfie chose to avoid responding to my text message himself, rather using his parents to threaten me with police action. alfie sent his father (his abuser) to harass and deal with me while i was moving my stuff onto the street and waiting for my didi.
my response: i understood my rights and the law, as the age of consent in victoria was 16 (alfie was 17), and recognised that police action was an empty threat. alfie's father failed to achieve his goal of frightening or controlling me as i saw straight through his performance. i associated his father's abusive behaviour to an adult toddler having a temper tantrum in the middle of collins street. with my mate as a witness of alfie's father's abusive behaviour towards me, i saw that i had a genuine situation where i could make a police report. i chose not to do so as i was not interested in participating in or wasting my time on the brancatella's pointless drama. i realised alfie had chosen to send his abuser my way as a likely result of avoidant panic, an ultimate act of betrayal to the soul-level connection between us. i observed the similarities between alfie's behaviour and his father's. i concluded that i had been too soft in my approach towards alfie's avoidant behaviour that led to his level of disrespect towards me, and that alfie was being a coward by hiding behind empty police threats and his abuser (a dad who displayed a lack of emotional maturity). i began to separate alfie's identity into the present unhealthy behaviour (mean boy alfie) and the inner child i interacted with prior to alfie's emerging avoidance (real boy alfie).
5. 18-23 february 2026
situation: after i processed how deep alfie's betrayal was to me and his inner child, i used my updates to alfie to berate alfie's avoidance and published an ultimatum. alfie's avoidant choices had pushed the current connection capacity to the limit, forcing me to require fundamental change or begin dismantling. i gave alfie over 5 full days to respond to my ultimatum.
alfie's choice: alfie chose to remain silent throughout and as the deadline passed. this was a conscious choice as silence was clearly framed in the ultimatum as him choosing to kill his inner child and choosing his abuser with his continued avoidance.
my response: i received alfie's signal that i could no longer save his inner child. i concluded that alfie had chosen to lose something incalculable that day, his inner child and the boy that loves him fully. on the other hand, i recognised that i am now free to thrive as my integrity saved me from the harm of alfie's avoidant choices. i realised that i am now safe from the coward that alfie rene brancatella chose to be in this decision. i reflectively enacted the consequences that i detailed in the ultimatum, and detailed that process in the consequences execution transparency report. i created closure for myself and moved on from alfie.
what alfie chose to lose
what alfie could have gained
acceptance and commitment therapy resources + completed personal examples
my archive of real boy alfie events is handwritten in my journal and digitally available above.
other notable mean boy dates
14 december 2025 (i texted alfie if i could post a photo of him on insta, alfie allowed me to but he took 2 days to respond, foreshadowing avoidance).
17 december 2025 (i texted alfie to ask when he usually worked so i could come by to say hi, alfie did not respond).
27 december 2025 (i texted alfie to ask to meet or call to ask for communication, alfie declined).
31 december 2025 (i texted alfie a spotify link to "i thought i saw your face again" by she and him, alfie read but did not respond).
1 january 2026 (i texted alfie that i missed him and asked when he'd be back, alfie did not respond).
apple watch observations
hilariously enough, i received a notification from my apple watch one week after i published this tombstone that my average resting heart rate had fallen by 9 beats per minute (bpm) since the ultimatum deadline passed. more surprising was that the period of time where my watch detected my abnormal average almost perfectly correlated with when alfie's avoidance first began to be exhibited to the day i cut his avoidance off. prior to alfie's avoidance and after it, my average was and is consistently at 65 bpm, my baseline average. during alfie's avoidance (29 december 2025 to 24 february 2026 according to my watch), my average was at 74 bpm, a significant sustained increase. to me, this indicates that my body was already aware of alfie's avoidance behaviour from the moment it first began to seep into this connection. it also, unexpectedly, shows that the nervous system syncing/co-regulation i experienced with alfie (even in his avoidance) is physiologically observable. my body just understood and connected with alfie's that well, which matches my cognitive experience with alfie. my theory is that my body was physically experiencing the same avoidance and internal panic that alfie was experiencing (shared empathic resonance), i just knew alfie's state. this is why alfie feels like an open book to me, and that's why this connection mattered so much, and why cutting off alfie's avoidance had such a positive effect on me. i take this data as me making the right choice to refuse accepting alfie's avoidance.
additionally, i was also looking further back to the day we met, to the exact time actually, and i realised that my apple watch actually recorded my heart rate through those first few moments. when i first saw alfie on the pier, my attention felt really drawn to him in a way that made me feel flustered and nervous. when i realised that i loved alfie, i also realised how that exact feeling i experienced was actually love at first sight. it felt like anxiety but slightly different in a way i had never experienced before. anyways, i first saw alfie at about 7:14pm on 24 november 2025. when looking at my apple watch data, my heart rate began to spike at 7:14pm. my heart rate went from 97 bpm before i saw him and spiked to roughly 115 to 125 bpm for the following 5 minutes. that is a significant spike, with a sustained increase of about 20 to 25 bpm. the data matches how i remembered feeling in that moment and all of my nervousness, and why i felt like my internal world shook from the way i was so drawn to him. i walked away from alfie for a bit before i came back and my heart rate settled as i sat and watched alfie fish, with my heart rate settling at an 80 to 100 bpm range. this was the biological data of the nervous system syncing i felt, and how i felt connected to the same frequency as alfie, even before i consciously understood it. all of this data on its own can't prove anything, but when it is paired with the context of the situations, photographic evidence, time stamps, nervous system memory, and my awareness, the data does work to support the fact that i did find alfie to be a really important boy to me from the moment i met him. my body showed so many signs that alfie mattered, and my heart rate data is just one of the multiple different forms of data that show that. and as such, when i wrote about loving alfie with every cell in my body, i wasn't kidding. i really do feel love for alfie in my body and it shows up in all sorts of different involuntary primal ways that i had never experienced before. that's why alfie is so uniquely different to me, and why i care about him so much. i know he felt it too. it is disappointing that despite all of this, he ended up choosing to avoid me.
what was alfie trying to avoid?
in the world of avoidant behaviour (like alfie's own behaviour), what goes unsaid is often more telling than what is said. this is because if the person is running away from their own feelings, they actively suppress their ability to communicate clearly. often, a lack of denial is the biggest sign that something was true for the person avoiding. this is because truthful denial is a very easy solution to make situations go away, unless the person avoiding knows that it would be lying if they denied it. so what was alfie not denying? tellingly, alfie never denied feeling the resonance that i was describing. alfie never said that he didn't love me, that he wasn't queer, or that he didn't miss me. rather what alfie named was discomfort and weirdness, which is him actually describing how he feels about himself, even if it was projected onto me. discomfort is often a somatic sign of intense feelings being suppressed by avoidance, as both the high level of mental effort required to suppress emotions and the unprocessed emotional energy itself lead to physiological responses. alfie's body needed to express the emotions he was trying to avoid, so it came out as discomfort. as for weirdness, i mean alfie was struggling to accept himself, and given our similarities, it makes sense that how he felt about himself was projected onto me (even though i didn't deserve to be disrespected nor did i rely on alfie for validation). and besides, what's wrong with being weird? my weirdness is literally just part of who i am, and that's why i understand alfie so well. it's a shared weirdness. "normal" people structurally don't understand me and they don't need to. how can people who do not understand me accurately value me? look at everything i've done, they were done my own way with my values and integrity. it's a personalised approach to a personalised connection.
so why was alfie trying to avoid and suppress? my experience with my own avoidance, alfie's avoidance and his dad suggested alfie was constrained by a lack of self-acceptance, internalised homophobia, a culture of toxic masculinity, a lack of emotional safety/maturity/clarity, frequent exposure to harm (eg. unhealthy control and manipulation), and internalised shame, just to name a few. this is in addition to feeling cultural pressure that discourages and minimises the way that alfie feels emotions. this suggests that alfie is currently (at the very least) in the closet, fearful of his father, and in an incompatible environment (both at home and in his day-to-day environment), none of which is particularly shocking. alfie's avoidance is an unhealthy survival mechanism that emerged to be able to survive the hostile environment of his home, but it came at the cost of losing his own identity and losing the boy that loved him fully. this indicates that alfie actually needs to leave his home at the first opportunity to save himself, and that long-term he also needs to move internationally because a culture that embraces tall poppy syndrome (like in australia and new zealand) will continue to actively harm alfie.
the current failure of mean boy alfie
mean boy alfie is a version of alfie that developed with the goal of protecting his inner child, real boy alfie. to do this, mean boy alfie relies on avoidance, which contradictorily betrays the version of himself that he was supposed to protect. therefore, at the current moment, mean boy alfie is actively failing his original purpose. alfie's father and my own brother act as symbols of what happens when that mean boy fails and overtakes the real boy worth protecting. as for me, i realised that i had control over the different versions of myself, how they each function, and what their purposes are. in this situation, i see three versions of myself: real boy kevin, mean boy kevin, and brave boy kevin. real boy kevin is the one feeling the resonance with real boy alfie. mean boy kevin is the one dealing with mean boy alfie's avoidance and protecting real boy kevin, recognising his past self in mean boy alfie. brave boy kevin is the one overseeing everything with bravery and courage (kind of like ayrton senna, alfie's role model), ensuring that every part of kevin acts in alignment with his overall integrity, values and beliefs, and making sure that mean boy kevin does not act out of line but targets with precision. brave boy kevin recognises that there isn't an equivalent brave boy alfie right now. however, no matter how many versions of kevin exist, one fact stays constant: every version of kevin loves every version of alfie, but that does not mean kevin accepts alfie's avoidance.
dissecting alfie's father: the abuser
i would be ignoring a significant factor if i did not discuss alfie's father when i am analysing alfie and his avoidance. i had the pleasure of observing the traumatic experiences that alfie likely faces at home alone in the middle of collins street for the world to see. alfie's dad even came to me, and oh i know he gave his all in that performance. should i feel honoured? i managed to get a middle aged man to drive all the way to the cbd to expose his emotional immaturity for the world to see and for me to observe, and yet alfie's father failed to achieve any of his objectives. i'm being somewhat sarcastic, but i am truly amused by his irrational behaviour and fragile masculinity. i have had experience dealing with abusers in the form of my older brother. he was worse to me than alfie's dad because he would actually be physically violent, to the point where i have called the police on him multiple times. at least to me, i could feel that alfie's father wasn't going to hurt me physically. it's hard to describe the feeling in words, but it's a sense that his harassment and attempt to intimidate didn't have a kick to it, like alfie's father was too emotionally all over the place. this is why i describe alfie's father as an adult toddler throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of collins street. when an adult toddler throws a temper tantrum, one should not escalate or give in, rather one should just give them nothing to fight with. this was me just nodding along, saying plain statements such as "right" or "okay", answering rationally while refusing to give in and without trying to unnecessarily trigger him. at some point alfie's dad ran out of empty threats to make. he name-called, threw the empty threat of the police around, feigned physical threats in his volume and posture, and he eventually realised that i had given him nothing to work with. i mean, what is there to say to someone who is desperately trying to get you to be afraid of them when you find them to be a minor inconvenience? if anything, alfie's father's extreme behaviour showed that i clearly had an enormous leverage over the brancatella household. i wasn't really afraid of alfie's father and i was more observing him as a psychologist would than a victim of emotional abuse. meeting alfie's father really helped me connect the dots on why alfie had been behaving the way he did. there were so many links between alfie's avoidance and his father's behaviour. it even helped me realise exactly why i connected with alfie on the soul level, we were the same type of boys dealing with the same type of abuse in the same type of environment. damn. no wonder we understood each other so well. as i was flying back to singapore i also began to recognise the level of alfie's betrayal to himself and to me in the way he tried to send his abuser my way to sort his problems for him. alfie had tried to hide behind his abuser to deflect accountability without technically lying and it backfired big time. if anything, meeting alfie's father pushed me to be more direct with the truth because clearly alfie was terrified of what i had to say yet apparently also hooked on it. while not an experience i would be looking forward for, there is a kind of fascination that i have when i am given the opportunity to collect data that i can analyse. alfie's dad was, unexpectedly, the perfect candidate for that.
looking back at that experience with alfie's dad now, i do wonder why he felt so threatened by me. why did this middle aged man think it would be necessary to drive 20 minutes out of his way to "teach me a lesson" when he could've just had a chill sunday morning? i do honestly think that alfie's dad needed a show of force to try and maintain the shaky foundations of his unhealthy power and control that he had over alfie. whether conscious or not, alfie's father likely recognised that what i have been writing to alfie has the power to deinfluence alfie from the unhealthy narrative alfie's father was so desperately trying to maintain. alfie's father probably went home after failing to shake me to announce a success that never happened, and yet i am here deconstructing him. i do think that alfie's father found it important to maintain his control over alfie because he unhealthily uses alfie as a form of validation for himself. what i mean by this is that through his power and control, alfie's father likely feels that he can decide who alfie is regardless of who real boy alfie really is and alfie will feel pressured to comply to maintain safety with his father. alfie's father doesn't see who alfie truly is, and worse of all, he doesn't care. alfie's father probably also uses his power and control to maintain a self-image that allows him to align with a very fragile and toxic version of masculinity that is performative. i could clearly tell that alfie's father is nowhere near as threatening as he was pretending to be because how little control he had over his anger. his behaviour was the result of being emotionally stunted, not someone who actually held power. alfie's father attempted to abuse a projected form of power that he didn't even have, but that fails when the "opponent" is someone who actually holds the power to see through him. i probably threatened alfie's father's self-image by suggesting that his son wasn't actually all that straight or alpha male/macho/tough nut/whatever that he insists alfie must be. very importantly, i don't think that the power and control that alfie's father had was used to benefit alfie, rather it was used to benefit alfie's father at the expense of the boy i love. this means that alfie is getting the shit end of the deal when he complies with his father, because alfie's value is being actively siphoned off of him to feed the ego of the original coward. i can't speak for why alfie's father became the way that he did, but it does not excuse the way he treats alfie or the way he had treated me. the same accountability i'm holding alfie to can also be applied to his father. i do think that alfie's father's behaviour demonstrates a deep level of cowardice. his "love" for alfie is a very manipulative and maladaptive form of control that alfie needs to understand and see through to actually protect real boy alfie. obviously alfie's father didn't physically hit me when he came to find me, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me if domestic violence was something that alfie was a victim of. i would be completely unshocked if it came to light that, in private, alfie's father had been physically abusing alfie from young. it would be equally unsurprising if alfie's mum has been enabling her husband and getting alfie to comply and stay silent. that's literally how my mum used to get me to harm myself in order to maintain a false sense of peace. alfie needs to realise that his father is not an eternal or undefeatable threat and that there are healthy ways out, he is not doomed for the rest of his life because of his dad, and that there are healthy ways to be a man that don't involve fear, intimidation and ambiguity. looking at alfie's dad from afar, all i see is a massive failure of a human who refuses to grow up, sort of reminds me of my older brother actually. alfie's father has actually majorly failed his own son. not just majorly actually, but totally. he should be ashamed of calling himself alfie's dad, as he introduced himself to me. i would be embarrassed to have a father like that, just as i am embarrassed to have an older brother like alfie's dad. alfie should not repeat his father's mistake, alfie should not doom himself to that level of irrationality and immaturity, but it's up to alfie to decide his destiny.
obviously i feel a lot of empathy for the boy that i love, but i will say that this still does not excuse mean boy alfie's avoidance. it would be unfair and cruel for me to hold alfie responsible for the environment he grew up in, something he could not control, so i don't. i blame alfie's parents. this said, alfie still demonstrated an ability to show up, and that makes alfie accountable for his own self-betraying actions. my stance does not change, regardless of whether it is applied to alfie or his father. similarly, neither alfie nor his father have any sort of leverage or power over me. quite ironically, it does feel like i have power over them, yet i choose not to abuse it because of my integrity. alfie's father massively underestimated me. alfie's father thought i was like everyone else, that i would bow down to his pathetic temper tantrum in order to maintain a shaky form of peace built on silence and avoidance, but alfie's father was wrong. i am the exception, i am the tall poppy that refuses to be cut down. i am not a product of tall poppy syndrome nor am i a product of toxic masculinity, rather i am my own person who relies on my own observations and intuition because i have grown up with people worse than him. i am a domestic abuse survivor that survived and thrived. i stand as proof that alfie can thrive in the face of his father, because i am literally supporting my success by writing such a detailed analysis about his own father. alfie's father has massive structural flaws, and that was why he was so blind to my internal strength. i have my integrity, which is why i thrive in the face of cowards and abusers. alfie's father uses blackmail and the police to frighten because he himself has secrets he wants to hide. i have nothing to hide and am happy to expose just how unhealthy his behaviour is because i live honestly. living honestly is my greatest asset. fear and intimidation can never beat integrity, because having true integrity means that there is nothing to fear. maybe that's why so many people look up to ayrton senna, alfie, and maybe that's why you do too. avoidance is not integrity, it leads to self-betrayal and enables the people who leech off your beauty and value, alfie. your dad is not scary. you don't need to be afraid, alfie, you just need to be smart. he's not smart. he's just a massive failure. i am proud that you managed to survive to this day, alfie, i know how hard that has been. now you need to start thriving instead of dying.
alfie as a singular experience
avoidance is something i am very accustomed to. i see it in my past experiences, the people around me, strangers online, and alfie. however, alfie is a very special boy in the story of my life, and that is why i spend so much time understanding and analysing him. real boy alfie represents a lot of firsts in my life, while mean boy alfie marks the lasts. alfie represents the first person i ever fell in love with, the first person who made me feel seen and understood, the first person my nervous system recognised, the first person that managed to ease my anxiety, the first person who could mirror me, the first person that validated my way of existence, the first person who i saw as a counterpart. alfie is the first person that felt uniquely special for me, and that's why i made sure i understood him properly, documented him thoroughly, processed him meticulously, loved him unconditionally, interacted with him authentically, and protected him aggressively (even from his mean boy self). however, alfie is not without his flaws, just as i have my own flaws. alfie's biggest flaw in this connection was the cowardice of the mean boy, his avoidance, a flaw i used to have as well. alfie represents the last time i tolerate avoidance and cowardice, the last time i carry the weight of a mutual connection on my own, the last time i enable unhealthy self-betraying behaviour, the last time i give unboundaried grace, and the last time i allow behaviour that goes against my values of emotional maturity and communication in my connections. alfie is the last person who gets to be so uniquely influential in the way i foundationally understand love, even though that understanding i built is significantly healthier than his avoidance. alfie is a boy that is integral to the foundation of the way i love people, and what i accept from those who love me. alfie cannot be replaced or removed from my history. alfie is single handedly the most important person i met during my uni years in melbourne (and potentially my life, but i can't be 100% sure). and alfie is all of this for me whether he likes it or not.
because i met alfie, i have experiential evidence that fundamentally counters my old self-limiting beliefs that kept me stuck. i no longer believe that i am subpar and not a good person, that i don't get to be happy around boys because i am queer and like boys, that i am bad or hypersexual for feeling attracted to boys, that i am not worthy of loving boys or being loved by boys, that i can't pull boys or know how to be intimate with boys, that i don't deserve closer relationships with boys, or that i can't put myself out there with boys. i have been proving myself wrong when i love alfie, which is honestly the best thing i have been doing for myself. now i have other self-limiting beliefs that will get worked on as i go through new experiences, beliefs that alfie didn't really help me with. for example, how i still don't feel allowed to express love, that boys will leave me when i tell them i love them or express fondness, that boys won't stay when they truly see me and understand me, that i don't get to be met in the same way i show up for others. these are no longer stuck points about my self-worth, rather that i don't yet have the experiences to prove them wrong so it's just missing data for now. i know what i deserve now, and i see it in the way i have been loving and caring for real boy alfie. i love myself now in the same way that i love alfie's soul, unconditionally till the day i die.
the illusion of choicelessness
i was thinking about call me by your name, the movie that meeting alfie reminded me of, and especially how the ending of that movie goes. in the earlier stages of the movie, elio and oliver both separately hook up with girls as a way to mask their desire for each other. they obviously end up having a queer summer romance before oliver returns back home to america. the movie ends with oliver telling elio that he's marrying a girl and this breaks elio's heart, leading to the ending scene where elio's crying by the fire realising that his first true love is gone. i can't speak for the characters to say if they both were only attracted to boys, but the movie does portray the connection between them as the most significant for both of them. however, how the story panned out was not inevitable, nor was there no realistic other option. there was always a different choice. for example, it was a choice that they chose to hook up with girls while feeling attraction for boys. it's not necessarily a bad thing for discovering one's own sexuality if they truly thought they might like girls, but it was unhealthy when that is used to perform heteronormativity or suppressing and hiding true desires. this always felt very icky to me, that they chose to hook up with girls, because it went against the way my integrity works and i feel the self-harm. the choice that oliver made to marry a girl back home, however, was something i just could not get behind. oliver knew that there was a boy in italy that he loved and that he could build a future with him, yet he chose to marry someone who wasn't portrayed to have carried the same significance. this is often portrayed as the inevitability of reality but really it's a choice of betrayal, both to oliver himself and to elio. oliver harmed the connection through his choices, even if he thinks that he might have had to have a wife to conform to heteronormative environments. it always irked me that call me by your name ends that way, and i now realise that it's due to the fact that oliver chose performance over his true self. oliver had the knowledge to make an informed, healthy, identity-aligned choice, and did the opposite, and that's why i don't feel aligned with him. elio never had to get his heart broken, yet oliver broke it anyway.
so why am i writing about a movie when i'm analysing alfie? it's because alfie currently mirrors oliver. just as the movie portrays how a heteronormative world makes it seem like there is no choice but to be straight or perform straightness, alfie portrays how growing up in an abusive and likely homophobic household makes it seem like there is no choice but to comply and perform straightness. alfie may pressure himself to get with a girl even if he knows he is drawn to boys, but i know that the thought of me will probably haunt him if he does that. i find it really icky to even consider that possibility for alfie here, and that's because my integrity really does not like it based on the way i understand alfie. alfie would really be failing himself and his role model here. i can't say for sure if alfie does not like girls, but he has not shown signs of actually liking girls, even in his straight-passing behaviour. in reality though, alfie actually has a choice, and that choice doesn't need to be icky. sure he can (and probably would) argue that he was scared, fearful, and traumatised due to factors beyond his own control (and yes he would be right), but that does not change the fact that alfie chose to be mean or to abandon himself. mean boy alfie would likely argue saying that he had no choice but to avoid the connection between the both of us to protect himself, but he himself already demonstrated that he even had the ability to show up and protect me (and therefore himself), thereby demonstrating that there were actually other options. alfie didn't have a choice when it came to how he was treated by the people who were supposed to love him and protect him, but he had autonomy over the way he treated himself and the way he treated me.
alfie picked the option to abandon the most beautiful part of himself and the boy that loves him fully in order to please the people who don't actually care or understand alfie. not just that, but alfie is literally giving himself up so that his father can siphon off alfie's value to feed his own cowardice. this is why i can say that alfie deserves no empathy for his choice. because alfie can say that he needs to maintain safety with his dad (which i agree), but he didn't need to hurt himself or me in the process. at this point, it seems like i am more aligned to ayrton senna than alfie is to his literal role model despite the fact that i didn't even know about senna prior to meeting alfie. boy- i'm not even familiar with f1. however, based on how i understand ayrton senna, senna has the integrity, bravery and grit that alfie seems to look up to, yet alfie is currently failing his very own role model. i saw how alfie switched out his ayrton senna cap for a bland white hat to secretly see me that last time on the pier. i have a live photo of the moment he saw me, i have a record of the way his posture changed, alfie is too clear to me and that's why i say that alfie failed himself. i made it as easy as i possibly could for alfie to switch to a healthier path, and he chose cowardice instead. that's why i can be so transparent, why i can thrive while alfie suffers in the stupidity of his own choice, and why i ditched the breathing coward for the real boy alfie in my heart. i don't wonder if i should have said anything extra or did something differently, because i know i said everything i needed to say and did everything i felt like i needed to do. you won't catch me on websites where people say things that they never got to send. those websites are for people who didn't communicate when they had the chance to, and that fundamentally goes against my requirement of clear communication. alfie is a boy who is more in control than he thinks he is, and he made a fully preventable mistake here in this connection with himself and i. i want alfie to have a beautiful life, but how alfie proceeds on from here is up to alfie because only alfie controls his own destiny, not me, not ayrton senna, and certainly not his dad/abuser.
my future and alfie
i am aware that i am rare in the sense that i've grown up being traumatised, yet i was able to preserve my inner child and be more aware than the people i am around. my inner child was a version of myself that i was very disconnected from until the past 2 years, and being able to rediscover my true self through my own reflections and experiences with alfie has allowed me to feel a sense of safety and stability in a way that is not dependent on external sources (like alfie). i am now able to protect my inner child healthily while also being able to live freely and authentically. this is why i never attack alfie's identity, because i know just how hard it is to make it to the other side in environments that actively discourage our form of presence. this was a big reason why i moved out of australia and why i made sure i did my best to give alfie a way out and support him. now that support is me keeping his inner child safe in my heart as he sorts himself out. if alfie fails to make it to the other side and becomes a sad irrational man like his father, i have my internalised version of real boy alfie so i thrive. if alfie does make it out on the other side and becomes the brave boy i know he is capable of, i thrive because the boy that i love managed to be resuscitated. and maybe when that happens, the boy that i love will find a way back to me. i won't bet on any specific outcome though, because i still thrive no matter what.
as for myself, i now know exactly who i am when i love a boy, and eventually i will fully figure out who i am when i am healthily loved by another boy. for the first time in ages, my romantic future looks bright. i know what i will and won't accept from partners, i know how to show up healthily, and i know how to recognise the value of others and my own self-worth. i realised just how much value i had in the way i saw myself in alfie and the way that i showed up with alfie. this is why i don't regret meeting alfie, loving him, choosing him or wishing to change anything, because i have come out on the other side of my experience of first true love as someone who has grown so much. so much that, for the first time ever, i feel confident about myself and ready to have a proper partner in my life. a partner who can meet me where i am. alfie as he is currently behaving has no place in that life, but the version of alfie that i love does, and he stays with me throughout said life. and so now i get to live my life again, without concerning myself over someone else's avoidance. i get to be open and myself again as i go and explore the world to find the people and places that align with me, so that i can have the kind of life that i never imagined was possible when i was alfie's age. i'm pretty much sorted right now, i'm not gonna lie. as for alfie, i can't predict alfie's future, but he's got quite a bit more shit to go through and i know he has the ability to survive through it. however, whether he chooses to make good choices though, is alfie's decision to make. i can only trust in alfie's soul.
conclusion
alfie only has himself to blame for the way this connection fractured and ended. it was not inevitable. i am not trying to avoid taking accountability for my own actions, rather i am outlining that the end of this connection is a direct consequence of alfie's actions. on my side, all i wanted was to love a boy and be loved by a boy. the love was evidently mutual (even if alfie doesn't want to acknowledge it), but the difference was that i chose alfie every time while alfie chose to run away repeatedly.
while i understand how growing up with emotionally immature and unavailable parents like his father has impacted alfie, it is not my job to absorb the harm alfie was inflicting onto me even if i can handle it. i grew up in similar conditions to alfie's, but i did not push my trauma onto him. in this connection, i did my best to show up openly, honestly, and cleanly from a place of integrity. alfie chose avoidance, a lack of communication, unhealthy control and betrayal. i cannot control alfie's actions.
i am personally lucky that i am ahead of the same developmental arc that alfie is on and can see and handle everything that alfie's avoidance threw my way, even though i did not deserve it. alfie is also lucky that he found a boy that understood him fully, loved him fully, and loved him healthily. i have also observed that i currently value alfie's self-worth more than he does himself as reflected in our contrasting behaviour. it is not my job to convince alfie of his own self-worth, but i have been treating him as a boy with immense value and high unrealised potential.
everything that alfie has done in this connection is something i have done when i was younger, and therefore i can map out alfie's behaviour cleanly while preventing self-harm. the shared understanding and similarities between both of us was literally the foundation of our soul-level connection, and i find it a pity that alfie chose to throw it away.
alfie has clearly been under the influence of someone who benefits from his silence and compliance. alfie's abuser, his father, has been using his own son to feed his own ego and cowardice at the expense of the boy i love. it is the ultimate failure of a father, and is something that keeps alfie held back. alfie's father is someone who is emotionally stunted and refuses to grow, and he's illustrated that for the world to see. alfie's father is the original coward and the original failure, but this does not excuse alfie's own cowardice and avoidance.
i have mentally saved and modeled alfie's inner child (from before the avoidance) in my internal world so that my disappointment in alfie's behaviour does not impact my self-concept. this is the only way i can healthily process this connection that benefits my growth and prevents tainting my love for alfie's inner child, real boy alfie. at the same time, this also ensures that i can take a defensive stance to protect alfie's identity, value, and self-worth while taking an offensive stance on his harmful behaviour to send the message that his avoidant behaviour is completely unacceptable.
alfie once told me that he lacked the capacity to continue this connection. alfie was wrong. alfie did not lack the capacity. alfie demonstrated his capacity and ability to love in the way he originally connected with me at the pier. rather, alfie lacked the bravery and courage to hold the connection. that is the fundamental reason why alfie was being so avoidant as i left and why i specifically choose to call alfie a coward. i stayed for as long as i did because i saw alfie’s true self and i loved what i saw. alfie’s avoidance can’t delete that, just as how he can’t control my actions, or block my awareness. alfie is someone i understand, whether he likes it or not.
i would have rather used my awareness to build a constructively beautiful connection between both alfie and i, but alfie chose to demonstrate his cowardice so i documented that instead. mate, our nervous systems have already connected, that can’t be undone. alfie can try to forget this website, but it’s too easy to remember the url. it's literally [his name].[my name][the last 2 digits of my birth year].com. does mean boy alfie not like i’ve had to say? i don’t like writing about the failure of the boy that i love either, but he chose this narrative through his own actions. it's incredibly mind-numbing to continually document the same repeated failure over and over again. girl- please give me something more original for a change, something that's not just more avoidance or excuses. avoidance is so bland and unoriginal, particularly compared to the boy i originally fell in love with.
i am not a perfect boy, but i am a boy that will love real boy alfie as best as i can, always. i want alfie to be truly happy one day, whether that is with me or not. therefore, i chose to leave him at this point in time out of integrity, self-respect and self-protection, and also because this is the best way i can healthily love alfie in the current moment. in my eulogy, i vowed to love alfie's inner child till the day that i die, and i intend to uphold that promise. alfie is never truly alone so long as i am alive.
alfie, i didn't deserve to be treated this way by you. i love you so deeply and you should have at the very least treated me with respect and kindness. you actually demonstrated that you knew exactly how to treat me kindly, how to regulate my anxiety. you once loved me and comforted me so perfectly in a way that can't be taught or explained, you seemed to understand how i felt without words, and then you chose to betray what you saw in me. now i'm leaving your avoidant behaviour before it actually harms me, and i'm keeping your soul in my heart so i can thrive.
putting avoidance to the side, i want alfie to know that i want him to be happy and have a fulfilling life that isn't constrained by the people who have hurt him. i hope that alfie becomes the brave boy i know he can be, that he follows in the footsteps of his role model, and that he knows he is already loved for being his true self that he is currently hiding. and when he achieves that, all alfie needs to know is that i am forever proud of him, even if i never get to see the brave boy alfie i know i'll love. we were two boys on princes pier, falling in love for the first time, together <3. i love you, my sweet boy :).
the consequences execution transparency report that acts as my integrity check.
sections: consequences in action, transparency in intentionality.
consequences in action
updating this website to become a digital tombstone for real boy alfie and a monument of mean boy alfie's cowardice.
✅ updated with distinct pages for somatic processing (tombstone, eulogy) and cognitive processing (ultimatum, field notes, alfie analysis report, transparency report, survival guide), grammar and spelling checks, and website validation testing (minor edits may occur as errors arise).
blocking alfie's points of contact to me, and deleting alfie's contact off my phone.
✅ blocked conscious points of contact on imessage and whatsapp specifically to prevent communication with mean boy alfie, contact deleted.
disposing physical tethers to alfie by trashing purchased school uniform, polaroid of alfie, and the ayrton senna cap.
❌ rescinded to prevent self-harm, physical tethers redirected to honour real boy alfie in my heart rather than enable mean boy alfie in melbourne.
removing digital reminders of alfie through apple watch watch face, macbook background, spotify playlist and google drive folder.
✅ mean boy alfie removed from apple watch and macbook to reduce unhealthy exposure.
❌ spotify playlist and google drive folder privatised (videos remain accessible) to prevent self-erasure and redirected to real boy alfie in my heart.
associating love for real boy alfie to mean boy alfie, preventing empathy, and processing complete detachment and moving on from alfie.
✅ completed detachment and moving on from mean boy alfie, empathy for the coward in melbourne is cut off.
❌ love for real boy alfie redirected internally and to personal self-worth to prevent unhealthy emotional suppression and enact vow to love real boy alfie till the day i die.
*consequences ultimately executed based on integrity reflection and ethical considerations.
transparency in intentionality
my intention with the digital tombstone, eulogy, and all my in-depth analysis on alfie serves both myself and alfie. for me, it's a way to allow me to process and externalise the pain, harm and trauma that alfie caused into a format that allows me to conduct psychological organisation and thorough analysis that prevents my avoidance and anxiety from being triggered. for alfie, it is intended to show him the consequences of his actions, and hold him accountable in a way that he cannot try to avoid. it is not punishment, it is honesty and integrity where i return to him all of his pain that he has been relying on me to carry with his silence. i have done this in a way that is painfully direct and honest, describing things as how my nervous system literally processes them (eg. the loss of the boy i love as the death of a loved one). i have even used symbols from alfie's life, such as his dad/abuser and ayrton senna, to make my point because i know that it targets alfie directly. every word, idea, symbol, etc., that i choose is conscious to make my point. every attack that i make on alfie's avoidance is meant to hit precisely where he needs to hurt, not the parts that deserve love and care. i love alfie fully and have been very clear about it, even if his avoidance prevents him from seeing it.
i know that alfie has been visiting this website because he admitted to it in his panic. alfie has been trying to pressure me to take this website down and using his dad to attempt to frighten me into submission, but this website lives on. i think alfie is scared of what i have to say because the things i've been talking about are the exact things he has been trying to avoid. i'm not going to enable alfie's avoidance because it goes against my own values of emotional maturity and communication. when i write so thoroughly in depth about alfie, i do think that i make alfie feel terrified in the sense that it's like i'm seeing into him. this is intentional. i want alfie to realise that his avoidant behaviour does not work with me. in fact, i despise alfie's avoidance so much that i'm trying to force his avoidance to crash. i am very aware of how alfie would likely read the text that i have written about him and how much his avoidance hates it. i am destroying the very ambiguity that alfie's avoidance gave me, and i know his avoidance despises me for corrupting that false sense of safety that it thrives on. alfie's avoidance is what makes his silence such a cowardly move. i think that while his avoidance is active, alfie might feel discomfort, overwhelm, powerlessness, panic, fear, etc. i am basically attempting to jam alfie's ability to operate with avoidance. alfie's avoidance might try to dismiss me, deny me, or attempt to invalidate me, but once alfie knows what is happening, he can no longer go back to blissful ignorance. my words are going to be here whether alfie tries to hide or not. as such, i want alfie's internal systems to reboot because it gives him a chance to reevaluate his choices. it allows for the other parts of alfie to take control from his avoidance. alfie seriously can't go down this path any further. it is legitimately concerning from a psychological perspective. ultimately, i can only take the risks (kind of like ayrton senna!!) and hope they work, rather than harming alfie instead. it seems contradictory that i risk harming the boy that i love when i want him to thrive, but the extreme sort of avoidance alfie is currently exhibiting needs to be dealt with using an extreme form of attack. alfie needs to lose himself, lose me, lose his false sense of safety, lose his ego, lose his external validation, etc., so that it hurts more to stay stationary in his avoidance than to actually do the work to grow. i want alfie to regain his sense of autonomy and agency so that he becomes the protagonist in his own life, otherwise alfie will become a useless knob that acts as a side character in the lives of others.
i want to be clear that i do all of this not for my benefit but for his own. right now, i don't really want to talk to alfie because the level of disrespect and betrayal i experienced from him is above and beyond my level of tolerance. i have more than enough capacity to deal with an angry alfie or his emotionally immature dad, but i'm choosing my peace over unnecessary trauma. however, this website clearly leaves a pathway for alfie if his integrity ever comes back and he wants to find me again some day, even if this was not my original intention. it is a natural pathway formed by my integrity, so i see no point in interfering with it, but it does force accountability if used. that said, because i no longer depend on alfie for anything (not even validation), i don't require alfie's presence in my life. this is why i can leave, and why i possess my power. but despite this, i still love alfie, because the love is integrity based, not outcome dependent. i do want alfie to succeed, because i know he can. i hope that this website can provide alfie with a map to get past his avoidance, break alfie's father's control over him, and allow him to reconnect with his inner child again someday. as much as i can, i have been targeting the weak spots of alfie's fear and avoidance and i hope it works. as i said in the conclusion of my alfie analysis report, i do want alfie to be truly happy one day and have a fulfilling life that isn't constrained by the people who have hurt him. this website is my way of giving him that chance, but whether he takes it or not is entirely dependent on alfie, and alfie alone. i wish alfie could feel how much happiness i want for him, see the depths of my love for him, and understand how much i care about his well-being, even as i take a mean boy stance in response to his mean boy avoidance. i love you, my sweet boy :).
alfie's guide to saving himself
sections: transparency disclaimer (post and pre-acceptance), preface, 1. the first steps (a. self-honesty, b. shame, c. avoidance, d. the first checkpoint, e. reviewing the shame-avoidance loop, f. contradictions), 2. values and beliefs (a. who is alfie?, b. consistency, c. goals, d. beliefs, e. reviewing reality).
transparency disclaimer (post-acceptance)
do whatever you want alfie, this guide will be here for you if you ever want to use it.
transparency disclaimer (pre-acceptance)
before starting this guide, i need to be really honest with the fact that i don't really want to write this section for the coward in melbourne. i really don't. writing stuff this in-depth is tiring and i have a life outside of his failure to live. however, my integrity demands that i provide the coward a way out so that the coward has a chance of redeeming himself. i also know that the coward is in a state of paralysis, which i don't have much sympathy or empathy for, but my integrity requires that i be ethical. as such, i write this guide out of love for my sweet boy and for the externalisation of my disappointment of the failure of the current coward. as i wrote earlier, my integrity has left a natural pathway between myself and the coward. therefore, this guide will outline the conditions necessary for that coward to turn into someone who can walk that pathway back to his true self, and by extension to me as well. this guide is not an answer key, but guidance in terms of where to head towards. the current coward needs to figure out how to turn the guidance provided into concrete action if he so chooses to follow the guide. regardless though, the situation is currently win-win for myself. i win if alfie chooses to use the guide to save himself, and i still win if alfie does not (since he would be proving my judgement of him and my decision to move on to be correct). that said, if alfie wants to find a way back to himself, he probably needs to follow this path. there is no shortcut to redemption. regardless though, i'm moving on to finding new boys to love in the meantime anyway. therefore, this is a product solely of my integrity, not longing or desperation for a failure of a coward, because why would i be clamouring for a boy who is currently choosing to be so incredibly unappealing and unoriginal? right, that's enough from mean boy kev, now real boy kev and brave boy kev will take over.
preface
before we begin, i think it's important to keep our expectations in mind, for the both of us.
for you, alfie rene brancatella, this guide is meant to point you in the right direction. this does not mean that i do your work for you, but rather that i explain what is happening and how to work on it so that you can actually begin saving yourself. you are responsible for your own healing, and i can give you tools to help you in that process. following this guide requires you to change, and that may often look like setbacks before it looks like progress. you can choose whether or not to follow the guidance, but it is here for you. while i do understand what is going on with you, i am not an impartial narrator. this means that what i say is not always objectively correct or backed up with psychological research, but my words are tailored to help you specifically. this also means that this guide cannot be fully utilised by anyone other than you because the context will differ. because you are responsible for your own healing, i may choose to withhold some information and conclusions that i have reached about you based on my understanding of you because you need to reach a conclusion yourself to fully appreciate the process. an example would be fully explaining why you are beautiful and valuable in my eyes. i can't tell you this fully right now (outside of what i have already said) without it impacting your healing process, so i won't. as for concepts and theories, i will try my best to use psychological theories that are relevant for us and, where needed, i will highlight specific concepts that i understand based on my own history of trauma and avoidance.
for me, kevin li bang huang, this guide is meant to illustrate how much i have learned from my own process of healing from my own trauma. as much as i miss the boy i fell in love with, this guide is not intended to force him to come back. rather, this guide is meant to help you to develop your emotional maturity and regain your autonomy so that you can make choices independently and reconnect with your true identity. whether this leads you back to me is beyond my control, and neither will i be aware of my then-current condition if you do re-enter my life. i want you to have a happy life that is not constrained by the people who have hurt you, and i truly mean this. when i put the hours of work in to write this, i do it in honour and loyalty to the boy i love. this does not mean i will accept excuses, nor will i accept harmful behaviour. i truly do not know what to expect at the moment but i will do the best i can, and that's all i can do.
together, if you choose to do the work, we are trying to help you get in control of your own trauma and emotions so that you are in control of your own life, rather than your emotions or other external influences. if you can do so, you can turn your current "weakness" into your superpower, and your trauma built awareness into a rare and powerful ability. this gives you real power, power that can defeat your abuser any day, power built on integrity. we want you to heal and to grow in the best version of yourself, because we love you. i love you, and probably deep down you also love your true self.
1. the first steps
a. self-honesty
before you are able to do anything, you first need to start by being honest with yourself. at this stage, we aren't targeting behaviour or anything external that the world can see yet. to start saving yourself, you need to start internally and it needs to be small. we are working up against a lot of deep trauma here, so we need to start on a baseline of self-honesty. self-honesty is the act of telling yourself the truth of what happened objectively, without including information that is subjective.
let's start with an example from january 2026 when i was following a dark vw that my heart and intuition thinks was you driving. that day, i was driving back early from princes pier and i was following behind a dark vw with an L plate that i seemed to associate with you for whatever reason. if that was you, your behaviour at the roundabout near station pier was observed and noted. we shall use that situation as the example.
objective statement: i abruptly dashed out at a roundabout when i should have given way to an oncoming car.
regardless of how you might have perceived that situation, i was there and i observed erratic and unsafe driving behaviour from the vw, so don't argue with me. notice how this statement does not include subjective information or excuses. it does not say anything like oh i dashed out because my dad was pressuring me to cut the other driver off, or i was stressed, or i was a dick for doing that, or the other driver was going so slowly so it's fine. what objectively happened was that you should've given way but instead you abruptly and unexpectedly entered the roundabout.
let's now use an example that occurred between us.
objective statement: on 10 february 2026, i saw kevin at the pier and told him he was weird.
notice how this statement doesn't include things like well kevin shouldn't have asked me if he could say hi, or kevin was in fact weird, or i was scared/anxious/nervous/etc so it's okay. you said what you said, whether you like it or not. self-honesty is about acknowledging what happened, whether you like it or not, without overdramatising or undermining what really happened.
you need to be able to see what truly happened first before all the excuses and subjective emotions get in the way. this is important because you currently are struggling to even see what actually happened without shutting down and avoiding. your brain is so quickly associating the situation with shame and negativity that it shuts down. this immediate overwhelm of emotions is essentially a fog that blocks your ability to see, therefore what we are trying to do is to remember what actually happened before the fog sets in so that you at least have some (metaphorical) spatial awareness. therefore, we need to start with you being honest with yourself before we can even begin to work on your avoidance. we need to interrupt the automatic pattern of your avoidance. you cannot start healing from trauma if you can't even see what the trauma is doing to you.
when you are honest with yourself about what actually happened, it actually allows you to start naming your feelings. even if you don't actually know what your own exact feelings are, you now possess a third-person point of view that gives you a space to theorise and explore. suddenly it's not you, alfie rene brancatella, being observed but rather you observing. you now have the space to wonder what feelings are involved without it being a judgement on yourself. this is very important because by being able to honestly theorise what feelings may arise, you can then apply your curiosity and discoveries to understand your feelings better. it's like you're watching the clouds move from afar rather than being in the midst of the clouds. now let's apply this to the previous examples. we will need to ask ourselves: if i saw this happening in front of me, how would i feel?
objective situation: a car abruptly dashed out at a roundabout when they should have given way to an oncoming car.
my feelings: stressed, tense, scared, relieved nothing happened.
objective situation: i overheard someone call another guy weird on the pier.
my feelings: shock, confusion, sympathy, curiosity.
notice how the feelings do not assign blame? they don't say one person was bad, neither do they take a side. it's literally just how someone who has no stakes might feel about a situation. once you have this information, then you reapply it to yourself.
objective situation: on 10 february 2026, i saw kevin at the pier and told him he was weird.
my neutral feelings: shock, confusion, sympathy, curiosity.
my personal feelings: regret, shame, pain, guilt.
it will take time for you to start being able to identify your personal feelings, but notice how we have started to separate neutral feelings from charged personal feelings? there are overlaps between both, but by taking out the neutral feelings, suddenly the pain of your feelings as a whole doesn't seem as intense anymore because some of it has been untangled and taken out. it becomes slightly less overwhelming. this process is called cognitive defusion. once you are able to do this, then we can start looking at the feelings that feel difficult to manage. as we learn to separate our neutral feelings from those that feel charged and personal, we will start to notice that those charged feelings aren't usually proper feelings, rather they are feelings born out of negative beliefs we have about ourselves, feelings like shame.
b. shame
trauma survivors often feel shame when they think they do something wrong, even if they have not done so or have tried their best. this is the result of lived experiences that have conditioned you to associate failure with unworthiness. failure itself is not inherently bad. no one is ever perfect, and this means that you will always make mistakes even when you try your best. but that last part is particularly important, failure is not inherently bad if you are truly trying your best. often people who grew up with trauma from young or emotionally immature parents get scolded or punished for things that they shouldn't have.
a personal example is when i forget to turn off the a/c when i leave the house. it's an honest mistake. but if my mum finds out, she will tell me off for ages about how wasteful i am and how i am so irresponsible and ungrateful and how her friends' kids don't do this sort of this and what not, basically a never-ending spiral of shaming. notice how this is a negative feedback loop (we'll get into this later). it also doesn't offer solutions to solve the current issue at hand. and notice the disparity between the mistake and the punishment.
the action: leaving the a/c on when i am not at home.
the intention: unintentional, i forgot to turn it off.
the real cost: a few dollars in electricity, and harming the environment with unnecessary energy usage.
the imposed punishment: being scolded for the fact that i made an honest mistake, having my mistake associated with the flaws of who i am, being told that i am a bad person who is wasteful, irresponsible, and ungrateful, being compared to an unknown/unfair standard (my mum's projection of her friend's kids), not given understanding.
the final result: i feel deeply ashamed because i have been trained to associate a mistake or failure of action and behaviour with a fundamental failure of identity and self-worth.
the disparity: notice how drastic the difference is between the actual cost and the punishment received. notice how unfair it is that my identity is being attacked over the loss of a few dollars. an appropriate and sufficient punishment could have been having to pay $5 each time i was caught forgetting to turn the a/c off. this is sufficient to cover the real cost, create a sting that teaches me my lesson, and prevent me from repeating my mistake. an attack on my fundamental identity was completely unnecessary here.
so far, i have not yet defined what shame is, so let's do that now. shame is the result of negative self-evaluation, where you feel like you are inherently flawed, unworthy or insufficient. shame is often painful and subconscious, often being triggered when an event reflects evidence of your negative beliefs about yourself. shame is more than just feeling guilty. guilt is associated with feeling bad for a specific action, while shame is feeling bad about your entire self. it results in you hiding your behaviour from others (secrecy) and can lead to severe psychological distress.
shame is not always bad though, often when a situation arises and shame is triggered, it highlights that there is a part of yourself that needs love and attention. the shame involved in the example is an unhealthy form, however healthy levels of shame fosters empathy and encourages healthy behavioural changes.
let's now look at an example that occurred between us.
the action: on 10 february 2026, i saw kevin at the pier and told him he was weird.
the intention: intentional, i was trying to push kevin away because i felt afraid but i also didn't intend to be so mean.
the real cost: i feel regret and guilt over what i said. kevin is hurt by my words, embraces weirdness as part of his identity, and uses the word "weird" to trigger me.
the healthy signal: i feel shame here because i hurt the boy that i love because i was scared. the shame is telling me that i should not have said that. why did i say that about him? why does weirdness feel so scary to me? how can i change my actions next time so that i don't say something that feels as shameful?
notice how this example no longer associates shame with you objectively being a bad person, or conclusions that makes assumptions about your fundamental identity. it shifts the conclusion gained through shame from i am an awful person who never deserves to be loved ever again to i need to figure out why i feel so scared so that i don't hurt the people that i love. this is called cognitive reframing. we are shifting your perspective from the negative framing that you have been taught by your parents growing up to a more neutral or positive framing that makes the pain less intolerable. when the pain becomes more manageable, you no longer feel as overwhelmed, which means that you don't shut down as often. if we use the earlier metaphor of the fog, it's like we now have a flashlight that shines through the fog. yes the fog is still thick, but now we can see further, we are less stuck. when you pair this with self-honesty, suddenly you are able to see what actually happened, name how you feel, make the shame you feel from the situation more manageable, and gain the ability to navigate the situation. this means that you don't have to run away from your feelings as badly anymore.
c. avoidance
avoidance arises when running away from your feelings feels easier than actually confronting them. it feels easy and comfortable. the logic of avoidance is if i just ignore my feelings and run away from them then i don't have to do anything. notice the contradiction in that statement, you choose to run away from your emotions yet you don't feel like you are doing anything. it feels easy and comfortable in the moment because you don't feel like you are actually doing anything, so it doesn't feel like pressure. but avoidance is manipulative, because those emotions that you are running away from build up to create another form of pressure, a much more destructive kind. but the thing is that avoidance doesn't come from nowhere, it's a response to the fact that your brain has shut down. so this begs the question why is my brain shutting down to begin with?
let's look at a new example now.
the situation: kevin called me a coward and a loser. he would rather love a version of me in his head rather than me as i am right now.
my thoughts: i don't like that kevin gave me these labels. it makes me feel ashamed and guilty. i don't know how to prove him wrong. i feel like i am powerless, worthless and a failure.
my response: i stay silent. i avoid kevin. i secretly check the website he made for me.
notice how your response (silence) actually confirms the labels i gave you? by avoiding, you are effectively choosing to make your feelings of shame and guilt even more intense, especially as your secret checking indicates that you have a vested interest in me. you can argue that since you do still check this website, even in secret, that you are not fully avoiding me. however, this half-avoidance is actually the most dangerous form of avoidance. you feel like you are making progress by reading what is written, yet you are avoiding doing the actual work you need to do, and saying what you need to say. so why does this situation make your brain shut down? when i call you a coward and a loser, it triggers too much shame for you to tolerate. and when the shame overspills, your brain shuts down to try to protect your ego. any movement on your end will likely lead to ego death, the total collapse of your ego. in order to prevent this, your brain tries to find the easiest way to remove the stimulus, ie. avoidance. avoidance is the brain's way of playing dead so that the attacker, ie. me, goes away. yet notice one thing, the brain is working on an assumption that ego death is an event that needs to be avoided at all costs. however, when the internal processes of your survival mechanism is built on very toxic and unhealthy foundations, it actually inhibits your survival in the long-term.
earlier i said that avoidance relieves pressure in one area but builds up a different, more destructive form of pressure elsewhere. that is the cost of using avoidance to survive. but what exactly is that cost? every time you play dead to avoid the attacker (the truth), you are training your brain that the truth is something you cannot survive. this turns independent moments of avoidance into a lifetime of paralysis. it is not a series of isolated choices, but a closed negative feedback loop, that makes it harder to survive. the emotions you avoid don't actually go away, they run wild because you are too scared to look at them. this means that they actually gain more control over you. the problem is that right now, you have avoided so much that your emotions have a stranglehold on you, therefore there needs to be a form of cognitive reset, which appears in the form of ego death here.
d. the first checkpoint
here's the thing though, ego death is not a bad thing. currently you use avoidance as a shield to feel safe. the problem is that by protecting yourself from ego death, you are actually trapping yourself with the shame that you don't deserve. in order to make it out on the other side of this section, you need to stop fearing the death of your ego, because the person who dies isn't you, it's the cowardice that your dad built to benefit off of you. this is truly the hardest part of this chapter, because i am basically asking you to trust that things will be okay on the other side of the death of your mask. i know it feels like an abyss, but on the other side of this section stands your true self and i. we both love you, and we both feel your pain too. when you make it out of here, you are finally free internally. you will no longer be stuck in your mind. you can finally take action. you can finally be present. and when this happens, you will have invalidated this tombstone. you will have proven me wrong. you will have proven that you are not a coward, or a loser, or boy who is unappealing and unoriginal. i love you and i believe in you :).
e. reviewing the shame-avoidance loop
everything that we've looked at thus far has actually been elements of one massive negative feedback loop, what i'll call the shame-avoidance loop. this is the reason why they are all interconnected, and why the strategies i have introduced target every step of the loop.
the shame-avoidance loop
1. a situation occurs (alfie is mean to kevin).
⬇️
2. shame triggers automatically.
⬇️
3. brain shuts down to protect ego from shame.
⬇️
4. avoidance used to find comfort.
(and the cycle repeats)
how we have targeted the shame-avoidance loop
1. a situation occurs (alfie is mean to kevin).
⬇️ - self-honesty and cognitive defusion
2. shame triggers (less than previously).
⬇️ - cognitive reframing
3. brain shuts down to protect ego (less likely to shut down, less of a point to protect ego).
⬇️ - ego death
4. avoidance used to find comfort (no longer necessary, no more toxic ego)(replaced with presence).
(cycle becomes weaker)
*between 1. and 2.: self-honesty - see and acknowledge what happened before all of the emotions get in the way. cognitive defusion - creates buffer zone between self and emotions/beliefs/conclusions.
*between 2. and 3.: cognitive reframing - shame ≠ i am objectively a bad person, shame = there is an area of my identity that needs love and attention. this makes pain more tolerable while reducing attack on identity.
*between 3. and 4.: ego death - clears out the toxic and unhealthy foundation developed by your dad to leech off you so that you can build your own version that supports you.
*between 4. and 1.: the cycle is weaker when a new triggering situation occurs.
*it is important to note that recalling memories in the brain does often feel like re-experiencing the same event again, and given the level of rumination that is involved in avoidance, thinking of memories is where avoidance is trained.
now that we can see the loop as a whole and we have used different ways of breaking apart different situations in order to analyse them, we can now form one consistent approach to dealing with difficult situations. in the self-honesty section, we learned how to state objective statements and how to separate neutral feelings from personal feelings. in the shame section, we learned how to identify actions, intentions, real costs, imposed punishments, the disparity between cost and punishment, and the healthy signal. in the avoidance section, we learned how avoidance manipulatively traps you and how we need ego death to remove that foundation. when we merge all of these separate forms of analysis into one, we get the abc approach.
the abc approach makes each level of processing a situation clear and visible to us. it does so by separating our reaction to a situation into A - activating event, B - beliefs and stuck points, and C - consequence. by doing this, we get to observe how we react to triggering situations so that we can learn how to do better next time. this is the empty abc worksheet, and this is my personal worksheet that i responded to back in 2023 when i was first learning how to make friends with straight boys. i will discuss this example with you here to illustrate the process.
for context, i had just started uni and there was a straight guy who i got along with quite well. his name was harry and he lived out west near essendon. he was my first straight male friend in years, like a proper friend, so it was really scary for me and nerve-wracking. i had all of these feelings that i had suppressed resurfacing, like wanting to be close with someone, wanting to feel loved, and wanting to feel included with other boys. i was a mess lmao. at that point, i wasn't sure how i felt about him other than that i cared desperately. i even thought that i had a crush on him at one point even though i knew he was straight. regardless though, my emotions were all so overwhelming and intense, and i think i had a whole week of anxiety attacks where i could barely get out of bed. imagine all of that just because i wanted to befriend a straight boy. but ultimately, i had very little faith in myself (or that boys would even like spending time with me) and was constantly afraid that i would do something wrong, so i spent 6 whole months working on my feelings about harry with my therapist. one of the things we did was this worksheet, which was very helpful for me.
A (activating event): i see harry online on instagram.
B (beliefs and stuck points): why isn't he texting me? he doesn't want to be friends with me. i am not worth being friends with. i'm not worthwhile.
C (consequences): i feel anxious, scared, worthless, sad, and shame.
are my thoughts in part B helpful? absolutely not, because they are not true.
what can i tell myself on future occasions? just because people in the past have ignored me, it does not mean that harry is ignoring me now. my worth is not contingent on others being in contact with me. i'm interesting, have a lot of stories and experiences, and i'm funny.
i'll break down each section and show you how the concepts we have discussed show up in the abc worksheet. self-honesty shows up in part A, so that we can create an objective statement of the activating event. cognitive defusion applies in part B and C, because if a third person had such thoughts and beliefs in part B, then the resulting emotions in part C seem like a logical consequence. the charged personal beliefs/feelings (part B) are now separated from the neutral feelings (part C). cognitive reframing occurs in the two follow-up questions, which turns the negative beliefs of part B into something more constructive and realistic. all of these elements together work to start rebuilding a new healthy foundation to replace the old toxic foundation destroyed during ego death. this is why ego death is so crucially important. if you want to have a happy life, then you need a stable foundation. and in order to build a stable foundation, you need to clear out the toxic and fragile foundation. you can't skip the first checkpoint in the process of becoming a happy alfie, and so it's a challenge you need to conquer.
f. contradictions
throughout this process (and probably throughout the entire website), you will likely experience this thing called cognitive dissonance. cognitive dissonance is where having two or more contradictory beliefs, values, attitudes, etc., causes mental discomfort because there is a conflict between your actions and your beliefs. personally, i call this discomfort icky or ickiness.
for you, alfie, how this might show up is "i love kevin" and "i treated kevin meanly", or "i like being understood" and "i pushed away the boy who understood me", or "i feel scared that kevin can see me" and "i secretly read his website for me", or "i miss kevin" and "i sent my dad to hurt him", or "i want to tell kevin how i feel" and "i am currently silent".
you see, the thing is that both of the contrasting facts can be true and they don't need to cancel each other out. it's not about forcing one truth or the other to prevail, rather it's learning how to be okay with the fact that both facts just are what they are. this doesn't mean you can't course-correct things that are occurring in the present, such as your silence, but that there are just going to be situations where you simply cannot change what has already happened. now i will show you the contradictions i have exhibited to you and how i can be so okay with holding both conflicting truths.
for me, kevin, i experience many conflicting thoughts in relation to you. how this shows up for me is "i love alfie" and "i hate alfie's avoidance", and "i love alfie till the day i die" and "i want to find a new boy that will love me the way i deserve to be loved", and "i miss alfie" and "i find this basic ass straight white boy making sign language videos on tiktok so freaking cute and attractive", and "i want to talk to alfie" and "i refuse to talk to a person who is currently exhibiting harmful behaviour", and "i am done cognitively processing alfie" and "i am currently writing a whole ass survival guide for alfie".
the reason why i choose to live with both truths simultaneously is because i don't need to avoid or suppress one or the other. i don't actually feel any mental discomfort because my thoughts only appear to conflict, but there is no actual conflict between my actions and my beliefs. this means that i'm not experiencing true cognitive dissonance. like looking at all of these statements, it shows me that i do consistently reflect the fact that i love you, yet this doesn't change the fact that i do still feel physically attracted to other boys, or that i want a better future for myself, or that i enforce my boundaries. for example, many people think that you must only have eyes for your partner otherwise you aren't loyal, but that is simply not true. humans are too complex for such a simplistic narrative. i can be loyal to the boy i love and also love someone else. this is because my love for you doesn't end if i love another boy, rather they will just sit side by side, complementing each other. like look at my actions. i have simultaneously cut you off from known forms of direct communication with me, yet i have also written over 30,000 words about you on this website since the ultimatum passed, ie. i love you and i will set boundaries. i no longer experience cognitive dissonance because i have already changed my behaviour in order to be able to support both simultaneous truths, and i did this healthily which is why it doesn't break me. what i did is called integration.
so why am i pointing this out to you? i point this out because you are going to face a lot of contradictions as you start healing and growing and you will need to come to terms with the fact that it's normal and that there are healthy ways to deal with it. you are going to see a lot of contradictions between your current behaviour and who you think you are or want to be, and it's going to be difficult but it's necessary to become a brave boy. when you can do this, when you can integrate, you gain a superpower that most people simply cannot handle. you get to be strong and powerful in a way that no one can take away from you.
think about when your dad is angry, throwing simultaneous truths at him will absolutely confuse him. imagine if you said, "i love you, dad, but you are awful", he would be so caught off guard. the reason your dad can control you is because he forces you to choose one truth. if you choose both, he loses his grip. this is why i say he is defeatable. i mean, in this chapter alone, i have already provided you with the basic tools of how to deal with your dad, and this is just the beginning. can you even imagine how good things can get? in the next chapter, we will begin to consciously rebuild your foundations from the ground up as we figure out who you are and who you want to be together. i love you, alfie, my sweet boy :).
ps. everything past this chapter is actually pretty chill and fun, and i honestly didn't expect to be able to provide you a way to save yourself in just 1 chapter. i have a full mind map in my head about how to write the entire guide, and then as i wrote chapter 1 and a couple of sections of chapter 2, i realised that the way for you to revive yourself was actually really simple. once you know about the shame-avoidance loop and the psychological processes to interrupt it, there's not much else to do other than implement it. i'm personally surprised chapter 1 was sufficient but yeah, it's not easy to do but the process itself is actually very simple indeed. i love you and i believe in you, alfie, my sweet boy :).
*helpful links
*do not proceed past chapter 1 if you have not completed the first checkpoint. everything past here requires a clean slate so that we can build a new foundation together. doing the work while the slate is still dirty invalidates its effectiveness.
2. values and beliefs
a. who is alfie?
when we were looking at the shame-avoidance loop, we turned taught unhealthy framings into healthy signals. in those healthy signals, curiosity had space to grow. we started asking why we were doing the things that we were doing. in the previous section, we didn't discuss those thoughts yet, but now we will now turn that curiosity into self-discovery. once you are able to see yourself without shutting down or avoiding, we can finally ask the question: who is alfie?
so far, the idea of alfie rene brancatella seems to be defined by external sources, be it by me (kevin) or your abuser (your dad). however, neither of us live in your body or your brain, only you do. for the most part, i do understand who you are because of the similarities we share, but that doesn't mean that i am 100% accurate, nor do i get to dictate who you are and who you become. i can only understand you through the data i have about you. at the end of the day, you need to decide who you are, not who your dad wants you to be nor who i want you to be. therefore, before we can proceed any further, we need to build a baseline of identity. this builds on the baseline of self-honesty. think of these as different ingredients mixed together to build a healthy foundation. in order to reduce the feeling of shame, your actions need to start aligning with who you are. you can't do this without knowing who you are. so now that we can see things, let's use that vision to figure out who you are.
b. consistency, c. goals
sections b and c are completed but unreleased, and heavily refers to the values and goals worksheet. i provide examples using my own responses from 2023 (consistency), 2023 (values + goals), 2024 (values + goals), and 2026 (full worksheet).
d. beliefs, e. reviewing reality
sections d and e are unwritten, but i had intended to refer to the positive qualities worksheet (unfortunately i didn't save my own response because i felt like it was very cringe back then) and my own stuck point log (which is less a worksheet and more of a word document list of negative beliefs my therapist worked with me to jot down and work on).
*i've decided that i'm going to stop writing since you already have everything you need to save yourself. i want to have more energy in other areas of my life, like traveling and finding my kind of boys. i don't think there's much else for me to say right now, and so i'm going to sign off. i love you, my sweet boy :).