Dear Katrine,

I am glad your physical pain is gone! But I understand you’re now forced to work a lot, to pay for your medical treatment. I do hope you won’t have to do it for much longer, and that you’ll be able to return to normal working hours.

Sleeping only 3-4 hours per night is a problem… it seems to be related to not being in a relationship, because earlier this year you were in a relationship, living with a man, and you could sleep normally. Perhaps it’s connected to you feeling anxious alone vs. more peaceful and content when in a relationship. Being single adds to your anxiety, which in turns causes problem with your sleep?

The feeling of being left out still hurts. I went home early from the staff party yesterdaylike i always do. Being in a party setting and everybody being drunk and a ting out is not my thing. It also makes me feel jeloux. Seeing my two friends cling to the guy i like for obvious reasons. But also seeing everybody having fun while drinking. It send me back to High school. Always feeling like the odd man out, and that I’m suposed to enjoy it. I just doesn’t.

You don’t need to enjoy wild parties with lots of drinking and loud music. I myself have never been a fan of such parties… I’ve tried it but it wasn’t for me. So I never really went, or went only a few times and then stopped.

But I see your problem – you crave to be included, to be accepted… and you are not getting that. Maybe sometimes you go to those parties in hope of some love and connection, but it doesn’t happen… In all honesty, one of the reasons it doesn’t happen is because people get drunk, and they cannot really connect in a meaningful way if they are drunk. They are not themselves. You couldn’t even connect with anyone meaningfully in such an atmosphere…

But you experience it differently – you feel hurt and rejected, because it triggers the old wound of rejection. Someone without this wound would say “Nah, I am not going to another party like this because this is total chaos, everybody’s drunk and I feel stupid watching others getting drunk. I’ll rather go to XY place, where there is no alcohol and I can talk to people and mingle.”

But I understand why you can’t say this, why it hurts to feel excluded, even from a bunch of drunk guys.

Because you feel not worthy enough, not good enough… And as I’ve said before, I think it all stems from your emotional neglect in childhood. You might have experienced exclusion more acutely in high school, because that’s when belonging to a peer group is super important to us. For me too, the first time I’ve experienced exclusion was in high school, not earlier. I felt ugly and boring, like no one wants to spend time with me because I am so uninteresting, I am so worthless really. That was my thinking back then…

Later I’ve realized that I felt so inferior compared to my peers because of my mother’s treatment of me. My mother’s severe criticism led me to feel worthless. For you, it’s probably your parents’ emotional neglect. They weren’t there for you, and so you concluded that you are worthless of their time and attention. That something is terribly wrong with you.

I guess we’ve talked already about the inner child healing, which you would need in order to get rid of the sense of worthlessness. Becoming a good parent to yourself, embracing that little girl that often felt alone and abandoned. That’s the ultimate cure, and it helped me as well…