When I logged into an old email address to search for some old emails, I was confident what I would find. I told that man to stop emailing me. But did I?
One thing that has helped me as I process my past is to learn about threat responses like the fawn response--it is actually a way our bodies/brains keep us safe from predators! Your emotions/memories are real, and your emails sound like a really good example of what fawning looks like. Patriarchal and hierarchal societies really love the fawn response so many people (especially those socialized as female) are trained to have this type of response (instead of fight/flight/freeze). The older I get the less I am able to fawn and the more I can engage with other responses like fight (and it feels pretty good!)
I second the recognition of this as a fawn response. As someone who spent my life engaging in the (heavily socially conditioned into me) fawn response, and then was blamed for my own abuses because I didn't fight back soon enough or hard enough, I am hit hard when I see a fawn response and see someone in any way feeling bad about it. I am still struggling so hard with the messaging--from people who were supposed to help and protect me no less--that I brought it on myself by being an easy target and I must have liked or wanted it, that I have mostly withdrawn from human interaction entirely, for years now. The only people I even still speak to--or have spoken to--are a very small handful of humans that have lived in the same house as me at one point or another since I have been an adult. I avoid talking to new people at all costs beyond required interactions in a workplace or for services. A couple of attempts at dating fizzled out quickly and I have abandoned that entirely.
Funny story, though: many of the same people who said I was a willing participant, complicit in, asking for, or made myself an easy target for abuse, got really upset when I engaged a fight response instead. Really upset. I am AFAB nonbinary, and I went from being so infantilized that I was told I deserved the all boundary violations that traumatized me and they were warranted because of my too soft fawning, to being called the bully for fighting because I was tired of being blamed for my own abuse. I was changing my appearance from more socially recognized feminine to more masculine around the time of the changing from fawning to fighting back, and I wonder how that played a role in how neither response was acceptable and no matter what I did in response to abuse was wrong and my fault and me being the problem.
I've had a few similar experiences, where I remembered with certainty having responded to someone or something in a certain way, only to find out later that my memory of it was not accurate. My sense is that my shifted memory is due to something similar to what you describe here: from a distance in time, filtered through a considerable amount of growth and healing, I've forgotten to some degree who I was then, and I remember a response that is in line with how I would likely respond to feeling that way now. It makes sense in a weird way, because of how our memories work. We tend to believe memories are like video recordings of the events in our lives, but they are actually highly subjective interpretations, and they aren't static; every time we remember a thing, we write it back into our memory based on how/what about it we brought to mind in present time. Memories shift, and as we change over time, so does our interpretation of things we think we are remembering in a literal, factual way. It's not at all surprising that your memory of those emails appears to be based more on how you would respond now, than on how you did back then, especially since you were responding in a way that was based on a survival/coping skills, and not the way you apparently would have wanted to respond if you felt safe to do so. It can really be mind blowing sometimes to realize how much healing and growth can impact our memories of who/how we were long ago. It sounds, though, like the information you gained by discovering the discrepancy is illuminating and important to your self-inquiry.
One thing that has helped me as I process my past is to learn about threat responses like the fawn response--it is actually a way our bodies/brains keep us safe from predators! Your emotions/memories are real, and your emails sound like a really good example of what fawning looks like. Patriarchal and hierarchal societies really love the fawn response so many people (especially those socialized as female) are trained to have this type of response (instead of fight/flight/freeze). The older I get the less I am able to fawn and the more I can engage with other responses like fight (and it feels pretty good!)
I second the recognition of this as a fawn response. As someone who spent my life engaging in the (heavily socially conditioned into me) fawn response, and then was blamed for my own abuses because I didn't fight back soon enough or hard enough, I am hit hard when I see a fawn response and see someone in any way feeling bad about it. I am still struggling so hard with the messaging--from people who were supposed to help and protect me no less--that I brought it on myself by being an easy target and I must have liked or wanted it, that I have mostly withdrawn from human interaction entirely, for years now. The only people I even still speak to--or have spoken to--are a very small handful of humans that have lived in the same house as me at one point or another since I have been an adult. I avoid talking to new people at all costs beyond required interactions in a workplace or for services. A couple of attempts at dating fizzled out quickly and I have abandoned that entirely.
Funny story, though: many of the same people who said I was a willing participant, complicit in, asking for, or made myself an easy target for abuse, got really upset when I engaged a fight response instead. Really upset. I am AFAB nonbinary, and I went from being so infantilized that I was told I deserved the all boundary violations that traumatized me and they were warranted because of my too soft fawning, to being called the bully for fighting because I was tired of being blamed for my own abuse. I was changing my appearance from more socially recognized feminine to more masculine around the time of the changing from fawning to fighting back, and I wonder how that played a role in how neither response was acceptable and no matter what I did in response to abuse was wrong and my fault and me being the problem.
I've had a few similar experiences, where I remembered with certainty having responded to someone or something in a certain way, only to find out later that my memory of it was not accurate. My sense is that my shifted memory is due to something similar to what you describe here: from a distance in time, filtered through a considerable amount of growth and healing, I've forgotten to some degree who I was then, and I remember a response that is in line with how I would likely respond to feeling that way now. It makes sense in a weird way, because of how our memories work. We tend to believe memories are like video recordings of the events in our lives, but they are actually highly subjective interpretations, and they aren't static; every time we remember a thing, we write it back into our memory based on how/what about it we brought to mind in present time. Memories shift, and as we change over time, so does our interpretation of things we think we are remembering in a literal, factual way. It's not at all surprising that your memory of those emails appears to be based more on how you would respond now, than on how you did back then, especially since you were responding in a way that was based on a survival/coping skills, and not the way you apparently would have wanted to respond if you felt safe to do so. It can really be mind blowing sometimes to realize how much healing and growth can impact our memories of who/how we were long ago. It sounds, though, like the information you gained by discovering the discrepancy is illuminating and important to your self-inquiry.