Dear noname:

I am looking forward to reading your recent post attentively and replying to you when I am back to the computer in about 18 hours from now. I read very little of your post of a little while ago. “I hate myself so much..” you wrote; please think well of yourself! I do hope you feel better very soon.

anita

Dear noname:

I woke up this very early morning thinking about your post of yesterday. I asked myself what happened since two weeks ago when you felt pretty good. I thought that maybe you started feeling bad then panicked and felt worse. I thought that “Being better at accepting depression” may be about accepting the bad, sort of holding it in your hands, before it grows bigger, before it escalates into depression. Much like one is to do when feeling fear, before it escalates into a panic attack.

Following these thoughts I turned on the computer and spotted the word panic in your 8/27 post. Here it is italicized: “I’m doing well right now… more confident than ever.. I feel or the first time in my life that I love myself… I’m not panicking in the absence of intimacy as I have in the past.. Before when I disliked myself, the panic to find some kind of love and approval felt unbearable, as if I was separated from the pack and left to die. Now … I’m not panicking as much”

Notice your fear, “as if I was separated from the pack and let to die“- fear is very much part of your depression, sort of the primary feeling, the root feeling underneath the depression and it is the force that escalates the sadness/beginning depression into an overwhelming depression.

Yesterday you wrote: “Without any particular reason or event, I find myself slipping back into depression.. I have been feeling disconnected from people again… Specifically the friend I see the most I’ve come to realize  doesn’t ever ask about my life…he doesn’t even ask me how I’m doing when he sees me.”

I think the particular event that happened is that you had a thought about that friend, something like: he-doesn’t-ask-me-about-my-life, and that thought was associated with the fear of being separated from the pack and left to die. This fear was in  the center of the new storm.

Next came other thoughts and the escalation took place: “I think it’s exhausting for me pretending to be in a good mood for people… could mean I get kicked out of my program, so I have to be on guard….not raise any red flags about my ‘questionable character’ since I’m on thin ice .. for cussing out my supervisor twice”

See the escalation? It all started from a thought about your friend that activated your fear of being alone, of being separated from the pack and left to die (your dominant feeling-experience in childhood, the pack being your family).

As the escalation continued, thoughts about your work with the traumatized kids came into the storm and then you went back to the eye of the storm: “Lastly I’m just lonely”, the feeling-experience of separation.

I think that you need to learn to pay attention to separation-from-the-pack/loneliness thoughts occurring in your brain and hold them in awareness before they escalate into panic, before other thoughts rush in and are added to the mix with more fear, sadness, anger, desperation and so forth.

This is a separate issue from your obvious need for meaningful interactions. “interactions which reciprocate care and intimacy” on a regular basis for you, having such a reliable relationship is a long term goal, as I see it. The short term goal, what you can make progress at today and every day, is to avoid the escalation, as I suggested in the paragraph above.

anita

Dear noname:

I hope there is something more useful about my previous post, that not escalating practice, I think there is a lot there that can help you if you practice it.

Regarding the friend behind whom you live, part of the reason you are friends with him, or all of the reason is that you live behind his house and he promised you that he will not have other people rent that house in the next couple of years. This reminds me of when you shared, if I remember correctly, that you have to be in contact with your father because you use a car he loaned you, and that you have to be in contact with your mother because your sister lives there with her.

My experience is that unless and until  our past is resolved enough, we keep re-living it. Your alone life experience and the compromises you make (above paragraph) are the re-living of your childhood experience where you were indeed very much alone and miserable and you had to live with your parents just as you “have to” be in contact with your mother and your father and the man in the house in front.

anita

Dear noname:

Fear is the most powerful emotion there is, the most distressing. I believe I have experienced fear (and still do), no less than you have so far. When I communicate with you about fear, as I am doing right now, I am working on my own fear.

We misunderstand fear when we confuse the order of things: the emotion and the thoughts. We sometimes assume that we think a particular thing and then we feel fear, when in reality, first there was the fear. And then, to confuse things further, there is fear, then thoughts, then fear connected to the thoughts, and the condition of anxiety is established, unfortunately.

Going to the origin of things: you wrote, “my worst fear reactivated which is being alienated and completely alone”. This fear was already materialized, it already happened for you, in your early life, you were already alienated and alone enough to trigger the fear of death in you. We fear it getting worse, but in affect, it was already bad enough.

“Paradoxically when this fear of being alone is activated I tend to isolate from people”. It is not paradoxical when you look at the behavior of other social animals in nature, or even domestic dogs. When they feel that they are about to die, feeling sick, they do isolate themselves. We are social animals, so we do the same.

“I have to people please in a way to continue to get what I need until I can be 100% financially independent which is less than a year away”- not likely to happen: fear doesn’t go away when you make good money. After all, very wealthy people find their lives unbearable because of the same old same old fear.

It will help you to do what is scary for you to  do- to stop people pleasing, to stop betraying yourself because you fear that you can not survive without those other people, or that they will retaliate against you. Every time you betray yourself, that is, you submit to others because you fear them, you hate yourself more and the fear stays as strong as ever. It is now that you need to stop this behavior, not later.

When you build that pride in yourself, you will no longer feel that if a woman likes you, “there MUST be something wrong with them”. Instead, you will feel: oh, they noticed that I am likeable. I noticed too!

anita