Dear Katrine,

I was just about to write to when you posted… I am so sorry that you were in extreme pain and that you needed expensive health treatment (if I understood well?). Are you getting better now?

You made a great summary of all the things you’ve learned from this experience. I guess it’s easy to forget that and focus on the negative – specially when you are in pain, not just emotional but also physical! Besides being in pain, you haven’t slept much for a month, you worked too much and you feel exhausted. I hope that you’re not in pain any longer and that you can finally get some proper rest.

In recent days you felt rejected by your colleagues, however in the meanwhile you’ve realized that there were times in the past when you cancelled plans with your friends because you thought they don’t like you. You pushed them away before they could do that to you:

Or all the times i cancelled plans with my friends because i was convinced that they didn’t really like me, even though they kept showing me that they did (self sabotaging behaviour, pushing away the people closets to me)

You also said that when you were suffering from depression, people eventually stopped asking you to go out with them, because you always said no:

I mean other people have done that to me before. Would have been nice to have been invited anyway. Like when i had a depression people stopped asking me cuz i always said no, but not being asked hurt a lot. Makes you feel like they don’t care.

So you can see that often it’s not that people don’t like you and want to exclude you, but that you feel not good enough and sort of exclude yourself first. You reject yourself (self-sabotage) before others can reject you.

It’s good that you see this pattern, which has been happening not just with the guys you liked, but also with your friends and colleagues. The pattern is: reject them before they can reject you.

Now that you see the behavior, you can work on changing it. But first, I think you should get plenty of rest if possible, before continuing working on your trauma response and other mental health topics. Will you have the opportunity to rest and relax in the following days?