Dear ninibee,

thank you for getting back to me about my question. Your original question, the title of your thread was “Am I too sensitive? Being blocked on Facebook?” Looking at all you wrote I don’t think so, but.

I think you have been lonely at college, and it hurts being lonely. Feeling excluded is very tough on social animals like us humans. It’s a cliché but true that thousands of years ago being excluded from a group meant mortal danger and our body still reacts accordingly. I would also assume that this wasn’t how you expected college to be like. So here is facebook guy, having it all with his group of close friends, posting about how he cares for people and at the same time treating you like this! How frustrating! So you lashed out, “do you realize you treat people like shit?” I think it wasn’t facebook guy in particular. It was him, his friends, your roommate, her friend club girl and all the other people who for some reason or another ignored you. You had enough and decided to take a stand. Which is great: no more just taking it, you were taking a stand, calling him out with (and here I am making an assumption) maybe also a vague idea of renegotiating the relationship “you say you care for people, why not –ME-?” makes sense to me. The thing is he too is a person, with a right to accept and reject people as he sees fit for himself. He can even avoid people he doesn’t feel comfortable with for some reason. And suddenly you realize you “made this 10x worse” for yourself. So taking a stand this time didn’t work. I would chalk it up to a learning experience. The intention was good (not taking everything) but maybe the approach can be improved upon.  You could think about what you would do different in a similar situation. Once you are done with that, no more staying awake about this.

In the meanwhile the situation changed and maybe facebook guy is not so important anymore anyway.  You wrote ”well, now what?” I would say take one step after another, nothing else to do. Figure it out one after another. Do you already have some plans?

As for therapy, I had those ”well, now what?” times too. Traditional talk therapy for me was all about talking about the past and it got me a bit further, but didn’t help in the present much. It was only with Cognitive behavioral therapy that I got real hands-on advice for the present, and that’s what I would advise for you too. Also different therapist can vary in quality and how they fit with different clients.

Full disclosure: I have my own thread on loneliness here, so when I give advice I feel a bit like a hypocrite. But thought I would write down my thoughts anyway.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Lara.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Lara.

Hi Janine,

You haven’t wasted my time, and there’s nothing to feel ashamed of.

When our goals are fuzzy and we find ourselves floating through life, we look for validation from others, and when we don’t get it we feel like failures. But when we’re motivated and inspired by our own personal dreams, working toward our own goals, we care less about what others think. By staying focused, making a little progress each day, we feel good about ourselves.

What are your goals? What are your dreams? Write them down.

When you wake each morning, decide on one thing that you will do that day to get closer to achieving one goal. Just one thing, and then commit to doing that one thing that day. When you go to sleep that night, you’ll feel better about yourself.

If you do this regularly, it will become a habit. It will change your life. You’ll see.

It feels good to be committed to achieving a goal. Try it. I believe in you, Janine.

B

Dear Janine:

The secret to mental health for all of us is to fit our thinking to reality. It is the principle behind Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: to correct our distorted thoughts and core beliefs and replace them with thoughts and core beliefs that are true to reality. I will be back to the computer in about 14 hours and reply to you further.

anita

Dear Janine:

Please read my post slowly and attentively. I want you to be calm enough as you read so that you will consider what I write to you.

You wrote yesterday: “I find being isolated and rejected by others puts me in an extraordinary self-destructive and depressive state, while in, there is no goal or hobby or interest that I care about”- this is your childhood social and emotional experience that you keep experiencing at the present, since your childhood and onward.

There is nothing unusual about what I just stated. All of us who had inadequate, disturbing childhood keep re-experiencing the same social and emotional experience of our childhood throughout our adulthood, no matter the changing external circumstances- until and if we heal enough so to understand what happened in our childhood and correct the false core beliefs that were Formed in our brains during those Formative Years of childhood.

As a child you were “isolated and rejected by others”, the others being your mother (and there was no one else in the household who befriended and accepted you, so to undo that isolation and rejection).

You wrote last year: “From a young age, I can remember hating my mother. I found her repulsive and often outright rejected her”-

– please pay attention to the following: I know for sure that a young child does not, can not, will not hate and reject her mother. It goes against nature: a young animal, like a young deer, depends on her mother for survival, food and protection, so the fawn (young deer) follows her mother wherever the mother goes, motivated by an emotion of need, a positive need for her mother. No way a fawn will hate her mother and walk away from her mother. We people are animals and operate by the same instincts. A young child experiences a very strong positive need for her mother, every single time. A young child will not say to herself: I don’t really need my mother, I have a trust fund that a lawyer will use to find me another home; or I don’t really need my mother because I think my aunt over there likes me enough and she will take care of me, or social services will find me a good foster home.

No, a young child strongly and positively needs her mother, aka loves her mother completely and intensely, born to love her mother.

What really happened is that you loved your mother but your mother hated you. It is your mother that found you repulsive and it is she who rejected  you.

What I wrote above would be a core belief that is true to reality.

Your false core belief, one that is not true to reality, is that from a young age you hated, were repulsed by and rejected your mother.

Pay attention to this: because you don’t believe, or you don’t see that it is your mother who hated/ was repulsed by/ rejected you, you believe that everyone else in your current life hates you, is repulsed by you and rejects you.

You keep seeing your mother’s behavior in everyone else in your life.

Now, here is a complication: some people in your life, like your ex boyfriend really did hate you etc. because his behavior shows that. And your ex roommate in the dormitories who unlocked the door, then locked  it while you were right behind her, she too hated you.

Your ex boyfriend’s hateful/ rejecting behavior has to do with who  he is, there really are rude and abusive people  in the world, after all. Your ex roommate, maybe she was also rude and abusive, and maybe she was reacting to you being rude to her first. I don’t know.

Back to your core belief that it was you who hated and rejected your mother at a young age- another complication: you did reject her, felt repulsed by her and rejected her at an older age, after she hated you, after she expressed being repulsed by you, and after she rejected you many, many times over a period of years.

You’ve been confusing your later childhood emotions with your early childhood emotions.

One more complication (I know you don’t need any more complications, but I am pointing it so that maybe, just maybe, if you do take your time to read all this, and re-read it over many days, if you do, it may help you): you still love your mother under the hate. And you loved her all through the years, in between the times you hated her and underneath, all along.

When your mother accused you of you being cruel to her (“She would tell me.. that her heart was broken by my cruelty to her”), you believed her, you believed that you were cruel to her, but reality was that you were angry with her because she was cruel to you. Because you believed you were cruel to your own mother, you also believed that you deserved her hate/ repulsion/rejection of you.

And part of you did know that she is the one who hurt you, and you told her that, but her response “was always something like ‘I hurt you? You hurt me! You need to stop hurting me'”- she made it impossible for you to be sure that indeed she was the one who hurt you because she denied it.

Regarding your most recent post: you had a job offer that was impossible to take on and maintain for most people, 12 hour shifts, taking care of three mentally disabled women. You let your employer know you (understandably) can’t do  it and they fired you- this is not an indication that you were worthy of being fired (being worthy of being hated/repulsed/rejected). It is an indication that your employer had other options,  other people to hire who will do the 12 hour shifts, so they were not motivated to work with you and accommodate you.

And regarding your friend whom you met in the summer of 2018 (“I met him summer of 2018”) and who recently blocked you, for crying out loud, this must be the man you shared about in your June 2019 thread: “He lied constantly… He masturbated to other women and told me about it. He told me I wasn’t turning him on and that he had to  imagine other women” etc. This man repulses me, how rude and cruel! Really, you should not be in any relationship with this person, friendship or otherwise.

Back to your core beliefs and thoughts: change them so that they are true to reality, and your healing will be made possible. I am here to help  you in the context of this thread any way I can, and for as long as you want me in your thread.

anita

Dear Janine:

I just re-read your last post to me: “I am curious what you mean about thinking fitting reality. I am not sure how to do that or what it would mean to do it”. I want to answer your question specifically:

If you change your false core beliefs that it was you who rejected your mother, that you are the one who hurt her, and therefore you deserve to be hated, repulsed by and rejected by people, and adopt true core beliefs, that she is the one who rejected you, not because you were worthy of being rejected, but because she was a rejecting person, nothing to do with you- then the following will happen:

1. You will no longer suffer believing that you are trapped in a world that will hate you and reject you forevermore. You will experience calm knowing you were nothing but a good,  loving and lovable child, and that you still are a good,  loving and lovable person.

2. You will no longer accept, tolerate, and try to change people who really are cruel to you: your mother, this ex-boyfriend turned friend, etc.

3. You will be able to evaluate people accurately and to figure out who really is rude and cruel to you and who is decent, and therefore who to get close to and who to keep out of your life.

4. You will be less and less angry at people because you will trust yourself to know who you should keep out of your life (#3), so you will be less ready to fight anyone and everyone, you will be able to relax in the company of selected individuals, and have healthy relationships with some people.

5. No longer very angry, calm and trusting yourself, you will find the motivation to develop your life, career wise, hobbies, friends, and whatnot.

* a note for you: if you want to work with me on your core beliefs, please start a new thread with an appropriate title so that you and I can communicate there. Here on this thread, you can continue to communicate with other members (I  want you to keep your communication with me separate at this  point so to avoid confusion).

anita