Dear noname:

You are welcome. “I have the.. skills and can’t find a good enough ‘why’ to use them”-

– we are born with emotion regulation skills, such as crying- crying lessens strong emotion. Crying is an inborn emotion regulation skill. Every person, no matter his/ her mental pathology has good moments. Every person, at times, is calm and regulated. Similarly, in the past, you felt calm and regulated here and there, and when introduced to learned skills such as reality testing, distress tolerance, radical acceptance and mindfulness awareness- at times when you were not too overwhelmed with emotion ,you were able to practice these and felt regulated.

I think that the problem is that you have very little experience practicing these skills on a regular basis, every day, and therefore, too often you get emotionally overwhelmed. The more overwhelmed you get, the more difficult it is to regulate, sometimes it may be impossible. You have to regulate on a regular basis, so that eventually  your baseline of emotion is lower and you no longer get overwhelmed.

“What exactly do you understand about lacking motivation? From my understanding humans always have motivation, just that it may be blocked by other things on our minds or hearts”- I think that you are motivated to have a relationship with a woman but you are  blocked by fear and the anger that closely follows the fear. You are blocked otherwise because you repeatedly failed to succeed in your attempts to (1)regulate your emotions, (2) to choose thoughtfully instead of impulsively, ex., you aimed at taking it slowly with a woman, and you failed, again and again.

Repeated failures to have control over your behavior and therefore, over your life is scary and very frustrating, and no surprise it kills the motivation to try again. I’ve known this great frustration all to well, personally. It is necessary for mental health for a person to have confidence in his/ her ability to exercise basic control over one’s behavior, to trust oneself this way.

anita