Dear Z:

In about 2013 (at 22 years old), while attending college, you met and became friends with a guy (I’ll refer to him as G) and a girl (I’ll refer to her as L), the three of you were friends. In about 2016, you graduated college, moved two hours away from the two friends, but remained in regular contact with the two, and you visited them occasionally.

At first, you had a small crush on G, but that small crush “snowballed into full-blown feelings”, the two of you had “a ton of long intimate late night talks and things like that”, you “really connected with him… fantasized about a whole future.. together.. really, really wanted to be with this person”.

But he “seemed very interested in (L)..  spent tons of time with (L)”, and when you visited G and L, you felt like “a third wheel”, but still had fun with the two of them. Even with the distance, you still thought of your relationship with G as being special, “the intimate talks, the super sentimental way that he would compliment me sometimes, quiet moments where it was just us and we would lay on the ground and stargaze, one time we very briefly drunk-kissed at a party”.

In late November 2018, you stayed in G’s apartment, and the two of you “cuddled pretty intimately for a long time”, your hopes were up. But the day after he seemed somewhat distanced. Soon afterwards, another friend told you that G “had long-time feelings for (L).. who recently expressed some back”, and that the two of them have been “kind of hanging for a  month or two”. As a result of this new information, you felt “awful and stupid.. selfish and a little childish.. like an idiot”, not knowing how you can “keep being friends with both of them and act like a normal person… I’m not sure how much I really mattered to him or if I was mostly just a backup friend for when (L) is busy”.

“All I want is to feel loved and desired and I’ve just never had a lot of luck in that department”, including in a four year relationship you previously had, “even that felt empty, like the other person wasn’t fully into me… I just want to know why I’m not enough”., you wrote in December 13, 2018.

A day later, you had a talk with G, and “Ultimately.. he said that he would rather keep being friends and didn’t share the same feelings I did. We agreed being friends was best and we’re gonna have some space for a while”. You also shared that you tend to put others before yourself, that as a child, you were “emotionally parentified.. had feelings of responsibility towards others”, suppressed your own feelings, and suffered “some emotional abuse/ neglect”. While in college you attended counseling for a year and a half.

Three months later, in January 2019, you shared that you “crave intimacy, yet.. afraid of it”, you mentioned “emotional walls”, that you were scared “that stating my needs will chase people away” and you shared that after the New Year, G was distant again, stopped messaging you and liking your posts, you felt “more disconnected from the friend group than ever”, the friend group that included G and L. You felt at a loss, and upset at G  for cuddling you that night while “he knew that he liked (L) and didn’t view me that way”, and that you were doubly upset that he distanced himself from you after saying that “he didn’t want to lose how close were were”.

You shared that you “don’t really have a social life outside of this friend group”, and your family, and that you started to refocus on your career goals, and decided to move”, but didn’t know how to proceed regarding the friend group.

Two months later, in March 2019, you shared that you babysat your two year old niece every weekday, that your mother “suffers from mental illness and just needs a lot of extra help”, that you often act “as her rock”, trying to “push her towards professional help but.. can’t exactly force her”. You were still in contact with your friend group, viewing G as a person who “led me on for an ego boost and then rejected me in favor of someone else”. You shared that you have “chronic depression”, and you drink alcohol “to drive those feelings away”.

“I want to shake off the crap and just put my head down and do something with my life. But I’m so tired all of the time that I can barely even sit up at my desk… I just want love. Not necessarily romantic… I fantasize about that a lot”.

In April 2019 you shared that your “closest friend of several years betrayed” your trust and “acted really nasty” to you, and that the friendship has been reduced to formalities. You shared that you are “still so hurt”, tired of (G?) affecting my life each day.. thinking about this over and over… waiting for an apology that will probably never come”.

A year and seven months later, November 2020 (29 years old), you shared that you have “said some stupid or rude stuff, and burnt a lot of bridges by just pushing people away”, and feel “a lot of guilt and anxiety about it to this day”. You shared about the 4 year relationship you mentioned earlier, the one that “felt empty, like the other person wasn’t fully into me”, that you broke up with her because “she was getting really toxic, maybe even abusive” in the last year of the relationship, criticized you constantly, badmouthed you on public social media platforms for at least 1.5 years after you broke up with her, and that you are still scared of her. Regarding G, you shared that after him being rude to you and distant , you sent him one last Christmas message 11 months ago, to which he replied “a little formally”. You shared that some time before that, L blocked you after she painted to other people in the friends group as a “scary” person, but reached out to you a year later but you didn’t want to reconcile with her because she and G “badmouth a lot of people behind their backs.. rip and mock people they called their friends, who really didn’t do anything to them, and when they were buddies to their faces”, and you are “still scared of both of them”.

You shared that back in college a girl talked about how at bars, she pretended to be a lesbian so to get guys go away from her. You identified yourself as a lesbian at the time, and “complained about it on twitter”, and even though you didn’t mention her name in your complaints, she responded with aggressive text messages to you. Somehow (as a result of your complaints and “a lot of people.. trash her behind her back”?), “she was branded a homophobe and it ruined her social life for the remainder of college”. Looking back, you “still feel gross about having been in the center of all of that”, suggesting you feel guilty about it.

You shared that you blocked people “because I just felt annoyed by them or didn’t want to talk anymore and I was usually being egged on by someone else on the side”, you mentioned someone making an inappropriate joke about your dead dog, which ruined that friendship two years ago.

You plan to use social media to get your creative career off the ground, and you are afraid that all the animosity that happened on social media between you and other people will hurt your career. “Even though I always had  my reasons for arguing with people.. the longer that list gets the less credible I seem and the less I can justify it to myself… I have so many people whose lasting impression of me is negative. I have a track record of conflicts with people.. these people run in similar circles as me… (I) spiral into thinking.. of someone saying horrible things about me and nobody believing my side, and then everyone hates me and I’m a bad person”.

This fear and guilt is keeping you from “fully embracing my career path and trying to put my name out there. I even get scared of making new connections because I’m worried I’ll just ruin it. I don’t know if I can rightfully call all of these people toxic or recognize myself as the common denominator. I don’t know how to find peace and confidence”.

My input today: I am guessing that not all the people you referred to as toxic were or are toxic, and that relationships/ connections with people went bad for you as a result of different combinations of your wrongdoings and theirs. As far as your part in destroying connections with people- I imagine that your anger is responsible, an anger born in an incredibly lonely and empty childhood, empty of love and of a feeling of safety.

As a child, you were robbed of the possibility of experiencing life as a carefree, adventure-seeking child. Feeling responsible for a mentally-ill mother meant that you.. never got to be the child who is taken care of. This kind of experience creates a lot of emotional pain, and in the mix of the incredible hurt and sadness and fear, there is also anger.

If you want to, we can communicate for a while and hopefully better understand your emotions, motivations and behaviors, move toward the “peace and confidence” that you need, and plan the steps toward managing  your career-social media situation.

anita

Dear Z:

You are very welcome. Don’t worry about your post being long, I read very little of your recent post because I am not focused, but I am looking forward to read and reply to you tomorrow morning, in about 12 hours from now.

anpta

Dear Z:

You are welcome. The way I understand your childhood experience, from the limited information I have, is that you were born to an anxious, short fused mother who yelled a lot (“anxious and depressed, and she also had a really short fuse and would start yelling a lot or have mood swings”), a father you didn’t share about, and two siblings: a brother who was 13 when you were born, and a sister who was 8 when you were born.

Your brother and sister, by the time you were born, already suffered 13 and 8 years respectively of an anxious mother who yelled a lot, had a short fuse and  mood swings.

At first your brother and sister were nice to the cute little baby/ toddler that you were, but “then one day they switched and started being really mean to me without me ever knowing why”- I am guessing that your mother’s aggression hurt them and they in turn redirected her aggression against you. Siblings often do that in aggressive (“short fuse.. yelling a lot.. mood swings”) households. Often it happens that when a parent is aggressive toward older siblings=> older siblings become aggressive toward younger siblings.

You grew up within your home with three people who were older than you and who were repeatredly aggressive toward you.

“I internalized it as something I did”- this is what children automatically do: if they suffer aggression, they automatically assume that they did something to deserve the aggression, and if only they corrected what they did wrong, the aggression will stop, and they will therefore be safe.

You assumed you caused their aggression because you did something wrong (“I internalized it as something I did”), but you didn’t know what it was that you did wrong (“without me ever knowing why”).

Truth is: you did nothing wrong. You did not cause the aggression of the three individuals in your home. But you assumed that you did, because that’s what children do.

You asked your siblings in letters: what did I do wrong? But they ignored your question. In 2nd grade, you came up with ways to make your older siblings (about 10th grade sister and  college-age brother): “laugh at all their jokes, don’t argue with them, do favors for them..”, “I tried to be a doormat in the hopes that I’ll be rewarded for it”.

But it didn’t work, “they were still mean”, and your 16 year old sister had an online public blog where she posted horrible things about her 8 year old sister, called you vulgar names, accused you of masturbating.

A few of your family members had access to those blogs, you wrote. Curiously, none protected you and stopped that blog.

You felt “really responsible for (your mother’s) behavior at the time, like it was my job to try to keep her calm or make her happy”, you wrote.

“Her mental health issues didn’t start until after I was born”- how can you possibly know her mental health status before you were born… I figure you were told that she was mentally well before you were born. I don’t believe it to be true because the mental health issues you mentioned on the part of your mother are not issues that suddenly appear in a person’s 30s or 40s, when you were born. Also, your much older siblings’ meanness and aggression are congruent with a mother who is mentally unwell and aggressive while your brother and sister were very young.

You wrote that your family’s financial situation improved when you were born, so your siblings were jealous of you for getting “more things”- that makes sense, being part of what motivated them to hurt you.

You shared about your school experience- reads like you were an anxious child, and understandably so, given the aggression within your household. It is difficult for anxious children to sit in place and focus for a long time, it feels as you put it, like an “utter teeth-pulling torture”. You “dropped in and out of school”, homeschooled, pressured “A LOT” to go back to school, “a ton of tension and fighting around the topic of my education”, and you were given very little educational help. Eventually you dropped out of high school, got your GED at 17, attended community college and later earned your bachelor’s degree.

You were sexually harassed in-person at 11 years old, sexually harassed online at 13 while being homeschooled, bullied when in school, and you “started turning into kind of a bully myself just because it felt like the only way to get people away from me. Aggression became my armor”- that’s what happens with aggression, people who are victims of aggression (“my family was kind of aggressive”, “being bullied.. harassed”) often turn aggressors.

After high school, you stopped being a bully but “always carried a little bit of spikiness in my personality”, but you also continued “tolerating horrible things in the hopes of being rewarded with someone liking me. This is kind of a recurring pattern throughout my life”.

You referred to this pattern of behavior as being a doormat. No person is okay with being a doormat and sooner or later, the person gets angry. The behavioral pattern of a doormat is acting passively, then angrily.. then passively again, and repeat. This anger may be what’s behind you saying rude things to people and burning bridges (“I said some stupid or rude stuff, and burnt a lot of bridges by just pushing people away”). This anger may also be behind your reactions to the girl back in college who pretended to be a lesbian (?)

In previous posts you shared that you “crave intimacy, yet.. afraid of it”- no wonder, that’s what happens when a child suffers from aggression perpetrated against her by the people you feel most intimate with/ the people she loves the most: a parent, older siblings, the grown up in the household. No  wonder you built “emotional walls”- when the people you love hurt you, you build those walls. No wonder you became very sensitive to people distancing from you- you learned at home that moments of intimacy were short-lived and cruelly interrupted by a parent’s (and older siblings”) anxiety, or aggression, or both.

It is interesting and unfortunate that your sister badmouthed you on a public forum when you were 8, and  your ex partner badmouthed you on public social media for a year and a half after you broke up with her.

Regarding your concern about your creative career path that requires lots of social media activity that involves people with whom you argued a lot in the past, having a record of conflicts with people”, there being- “so many people whose lasting impression of me is negative”-

– it will take you learning to no longer behave passively (a doormat), nor aggressively, but assertively. Assertiveness is a set of skills that you can learn, practice and perfect. Once you are comfortable with being assertive, having confidence in your ability to get what you need in ways that are fair to you and to others- you will no longer be trapped in the pattern of being a doormat and .. being angry at being a doormat.

I put a lot of time into this post- please take your time reading it, re-reading parts of it, making notes for yourself, perhaps, before you reply. When you reply, if you choose to reply, please make an effort to focus on one or two issues. Let’s tackle things in smaller portions. Over time, we can address all that you want to address here, with me.

anita

Dear Z:

I will be back to your thread, read and reply in about nine hours from now.

anita