Dear A:

First, I will summarize your post: You are a very young woman, 20 years old. Your parents divorced when you were 5. You feel unloved by  your parents, feeling “empty and like everybody takes something from me”.

You did not have a boyfriend yet and you don’t like people easily or quickly. You liked this girl, J,  quickly and she liked you too. The two of you met online, then in person and later travelled to Asia with J and with other friends, including M. You think that M has a magnetic personality and that people automatically like M. J and M got along so well during the trip and you felt jealous, abandoned. When you all returned to your country J and M continued communicating online. You felt angry, “like burning in my chest”.

M and J noticed your jealousy and later J told you that she changed her thoughts about you and that you wore her down. You wanted the friendship with J so much that you tried hard to repair it and succeeded. She told you that you are important to her.

But J is still talking to M online and you are “too obsessive about it”. You started to hate M and think “she takes away from me everybody”. You wrote: “my fear of losing J is too high… I have great connection with J and nobody else can. I want to be the one.” Then you found out that M and J will be meeting in person for two weeks and that makes you more anxious. You worry that the two of them will be best friends and that J will abandon you.

You asked how do you calm yourself, how do you stop hating M. You wrote: “I don’t want to be angry, anxious, jealous, depressed all the time because of this”.

Second, my understanding: you felt unloved by your parents, you wrote. You wanted them so desperately to pay attention to you, to see you, to notice you, to talk to you, to be important to them. But it wasn’t so. A great need was born then- to be important to someone. But the need was so great, that it was not only to be important to someone, but to be their One-and-Only, their number one. If you are their number one, then she (or he) will surely pay attention to you and finally you will get the attention you craved for so long.

You learned that this obsession, to be the one and only hurt your friendship with J. You repaired the friendship and do not want to damage it again. But you feel the same anxiety and anger as before, even more.

What can you do? – go back to the past, in your mind (in quality psychotherapy) and look at what happened there, how you were neglected then, how you felt then, how that craving was born. When you see the reality of then, and your feelings then, you will be able, over time, to separate the present from the past. Your jealousy, your anger, your anxiety will lessen and lessen.

In other words, as a child, you were injured, emotionally, over many years, not getting the attention you needed. That need for attention became very strong, a craving. To lessen the craving, got to heal that injury, that injury of neglect.

You are welcome to share here more about your thoughts and feelings, about my reply and about anything else.

anita