Dear Stacy:

You are welcome. I wish your employers guaranteed that you get a significant raise in the next fiscal year (instead of trying “to reevaluate the raise/ promotion in the next fiscal year”), or better still, that they offered you that raise right away. It may be profitable for them to pay more to a specialist they know and trust than to hire new person, and then another new person, etc., given the high turnover. Is there a way for you to arrange for a significant raise for yourself as a condition for taking the full time job?

“One of my biggest desires in a relationship is just simply being seen and made to feel like I’m special. My dad never paid attention to me and I never even really talked to him. He wasn’t mean to me, just absent. When I got his attention, it made me nervous and like I really had to perform to keep it up. But the attention was fleeting”-

– like it said in the online source I quoted from yesterday, a child learns: a chair is something you sit on,  a school bus is something that takes me to school, and I am…, in your case, I am someone who does not deserve attention because I am not special. If I get any attention, I have to work hard to keep it, but no matter what, any bit of attention will disappear fast!

“That would be a dream come true for me to no longer feel so controlled by what he thinks of me. It’s such an emotional and mental cage to be in”-

-You felt special with your ex at times, for a while, a kind of special that you didn’t feel before, so your feeling of Special is tightly connected to him and what he thinks about you. It is as if he is keeping your Special in a cage, under lock and key, and he is the only one who can bring your Special back to you.

Going back to your Sept 6 original post (3 months and 6 days ago), it is easy to see that he made you feel Special right from the start: “When we met on Hinge, HE asked me what my intentions were from the get go about 2-3 days into talking as he started flirting with me. The pacing felt right and I had never had a guy actually want to go ahead and address motives, intentions with me…  He expressed on many occasions how thankful he was and lucky to have me in his life“-

– notice you typed HE in capital letters. He is The One, and Only One with a key to your Special, to your sense of worth, or esteem. But you did not bask in a euphoric warmth of Specialness day in and day out, throughout the relationship: you felt that he didn’t contact you enough in-between meetings and you were stressed about it, he told you this or that and it worried you, etc. It was more like you having a taste of Special with him, but not even close to having enough of it to satisfy your three-decades-long hunger for Special.

“This relationship made me feel seen and special“, you wrote back in September, but it was not an ongoing, trustworthy kind of feeling-seen-and-special, it was only a taste of it.

On Sept 10,  I wrote to you: “You’ve been giving him too much power over how you feel about yourself, power he didn’t earn and does not deserve: WHO is he to determine your worth? What did he do to deserve this power?… What did he DO to have this power to determine your worth..? He is just a guy you knew nothing about a year ago. It doesn’t really matter what he thinks, what he meant when he said this or that.. except that it matters to you because you give him power that he does not deserve”-

– He gave you a taste of Special, that’s what he did. And he is the only source of this taste that you know about. It is not only the words he uttered that gave you this taste, it is also his privileged and educated family background, and it is also about the way he delivered the words he uttered, something about his style, his mannerism, his way of looking into himself- to an extent- that touched your heart and gave you that taste of Special.

Back to your post of early this morning: “I can easily get men to find me intriguing or interesting to talk to at first, and then once they meet me in real life, or spend so many months together, they always start losing interest. It’s very difficult to not internalize this pattern of men repeatedly being so enthusiastic about me and so wanting to love and invest in me and then completely exiting the picture. It’s draining and makes me feel crazy. It’s what we’ve talked about here: this theme of inconsistency with the people closest to me.“-

– I am imagining that I am a man your age and I meet you, a very soon (in four days) 32-year-old woman, and she gives me a lot of positive attention (like that which you gave your ex). I imagine that I feel very good about it and want more of it. I feel important and I like it. But then I realize that I feel too important to her, that any word I say, any silence in between words, anything minor about what I say and do, is MAJOR to her, as in any word I say can make or break her.. I have too much power, I start feeling uncomfortable, so I withdraw.

Could this be an explanation to the pattern/ theme you mentioned above?

anita