* Dear Brandy:

“What’s the cure for rejection anxiety? Anyone know?”- I will take the challenge, referring to the content of this thread: rejection is scary, naturally. So are heights, therefore most people will not engage in rock climbing by choice, or jump out of an airplane with a parachute. But some people do these things, stimulated by the fear of climbing a steep rock, stimulated by the fear of falling to their death if they make the wrong move. It excites them.

Some people are excited by rejection, it stimulates them, it excites them in much the same way others are excited by rock climbing. And just like a person excited by climbing steep rocks is not interested in no longer climbing, so is a person excited by rejection, not interested in … no longer being rejected.

When John waited for his mother to pick him up, 4th grade, Christmas time, that was the most exciting time of his life. It was going to be the best Christmas ever, followed by a happily-ever-life in Oregon with his mother who finally, he was told, was okay and capable to be the mother he needed for so long.

It didn’t happen that way. There was no happily-ever-after. She didn’t attend to him, didn’t come to see him at school sporting events, late to pick him up, had a series of boyfriends, one who was abusive to John for years. The close, loving relationship he longed for with his mother did not happen.

And so, it was that waiting at Christmas time for his mother to pick him up, that was the highlight of his childhood, the exciting time. It is this excitement that he is trying to recreate and relive now. He is not trying to re-experience a loving, close relationship: he doesn’t have that experience and he gave up on having it long ago.

He is trying to re-experience that which he did experience before, and that is the excitement of waiting.

anita

i just came out of a year and a half relationship with my ex girlfriend, we had been on and off most of the time,but this time i decided not to go back and ive met someone new and she is great the total opposite of my ex sweet, thoughtful, kind, loving, selfless, loyal, a hard worker, not alot of which i can say for my ex, but for some reason i fell so deeply in love with my ex like i never have any woman before eventhough she cheated on me several times lied to me was verbally and physically abusive sometimes, she has major depression and boderline personality disorder and heavily medicated most of the time. When we had first met and been dating for about a month, she scared me she got upset with me for not liking too many guys calling her phone while we were out on dates,and tried to jump out of my car while i was driving i pulled her back in and immediately took her home, as soon as we pulled in she jumped out of my car and took off running leaving her phone behind, no idea where she went, so i took her phone and placed it on her backdoor step and told myself im not doing this and i left but i was concerned about her and wanted to make sure she was ok, so i contacted her the next day and we began talking and going out again. As we began to know each other a little more i learned that shes been that way all her life struggling with depression loneliness and had attempted suicide several times in the past way before i came along, and i asked myself are you really wanting to go through this in a relationship? i didnt want to but i wanted help her and before i knew it i had fallen in love with her, id never dated anyone like her before with so many issues and someone being in trouble so much she had arrested a few times for shoplifting she had been in fights with people from roadrage incidents and it was scary being with her because of her violent temper, i tried to keep her from doing those things and keep her out of trouble, i went to court with her alot when she was facing charges and i supported her thankfully she only got probation. when i met her i had no clue but her life was a wreck, she was having seizures from stress and anxiety in which i tried to help with and i figured out that some medication she was taking was actually causing her to have more seizures on top of her stress, so i called her doctor and asked him if he could take her off of it and he did she had been suicidal while on this medication as well so he did not prescribe her anymore and i was very thankful because after that she stopped having seizures at all and not suicidal like before. i like to think that hopefully i made some difference in her life. I helped her take care of her three children as well, living with her and them and being responsible for many things. Everything is going well with my new girlfriend right now but i still feel this emptiness missing my ex, eventhough it was a wild and volatile relationship and i know wasnt good for me because i couldnt trust her we had undying chemistry and connection something very special that i never had before and some things about her were great like she was very nurturing and kind to me when i would be feeling down or crying. We laughed together some too and just got used to each other and the sex was amazing like the best ive had, i believe mainly because i was so in love with her. Shes attractive and is my type, she was the woman i had dreamed of the day we met everything down to her beauty her eyes the way she talked and her personality she was my dream woman for sure, but it was so hard being in a relationship with her dealing with all her anger being violent and verbally abusive to me, i kept telling myself i love her and thats just the way she is, but it hurt me inside alot to hear and see those things from her on top of the cheating, no transparency from her and sometimes felt like she was using me. i walked many times but i always went back until now, i couldnt resist her she was so special to me and i committed myself to her and took alot of things from her like i never did from any other woman. i knew she had alot of problems and i wanted to solve them all and help her to be happy but i figured out eventually that i cant fix that for her it has to be her that wants to fix it.

* Dear Brian: if you would like to start your own thread and receive input from me/ other members, you can copy the above and paste it there (go to FORUMS above), adding what kind of input, if any, you would like.

anita

Hi John,

I’m so glad you didn’t fall off the earth and I understand why you’d need some time to take everything in and process it.

Funny, I did the same thing you did, took time to process everything, and I feel that I’ve learned some things from you and others here. I believe that the painful experiences you had as a young boy during your development taught your young brain what to expect and how to respond. For example, you say you’ll always have hope that your ex will contact you to meet or talk, a sentiment that I believe became very familiar to you when you were a kid and your mom repeatedly abandoned you. When a child’s brain is developing, traumatic events like those you experienced affect that development. I believe that the intense pain that this recent breakup has caused you has been exacerbated by the similar pain you experienced in your childhood, and that the right “coaching” can undo the damage and enable you to move through painful experiences better than you do now. We all go through tough times but we all have different coping strategies. Instead of holding on to the hope that this woman is going to contact you, search for ways to heal the wounds of your childhood. If you can’t afford quality psychotherapy, ask members here for advice on how to heal  so that you can move on from your ex and open yourself up to falling in love with someone else. I hope that’s what you’ll now begin to focus on: healing your childhood wounds.

B 🙂

John,

Your friend of 15 years killed himself in your home one week ago, and you were there when it happened?

If a long-time friend of mine killed himself in my home, I would without a doubt require hard core professional psychotherapy to get me through it.  I would make an appointment immediately. I would not rely on a website with random untrained people (like me) on it to help me through this.

My brain has trouble processing a single post that first describes in detail the events that led to the recent suicide of a friend and then to the hope that an ex-girlfriend will return someday. My untrained brain cannot connect the dots.

If you’re wrestling with feelings that you failed your friend and pushed him to suicide like you mentioned in your post, you need professional guidance. Take this seriously and fix it now.

B

Dear John:

“If I am understanding this right, it sounds like I’m self absorbed??”- in my experience of you on this thread, yes you have been self absorbed.

You wrote that you have been told that you say what others want to hear, and that you did that with your ex girlfriend a lot. You were afraid that she will end the relationship with you if you told her what you truly felt, so you told her what you thought she wanted to hear.

“That didn’t end the way I wanted it to”, that is, she ended the relationship. I suppose, you were wrong about what you thought she wanted to hear.

You wrote that you are “a go with the flow kind of guy”. To go with the flow effectively, you have to have an understanding or insight about the nature of the flow. Specifically, if you wanted to really tell your ex girlfriend what she wanted to hear, it would have been useful for you to have insight into how she thinks and feels, what motivates her and what she values. With such insight, you would have a good chance of saying what she truly wanted to hear. Without insight you are shooting in the dark.

You wrote that she told you that you “kept assuming things”, and you wrote: “I couldn’t believe why the reason was she told me and I would make up or assume other reasons in my head and believe them and begin to doubt her”- this is a big problem in a relationship, when the person stated the truth to you (I assume she did) and you treat her truth as a lie. No wonder you “irritated her again”. It is very irritating for a person sharing her truth to be doubted, repeatedly.

You wrote that in life you don’t stand up for yourself, don’t do or say what you really want, all so to avoid confrontation. “If I say something and it causes any kind of conflict, I immediately retract my words and rephrase that”- that is crazy making for a person who cares about honest communication to communicate with a person who is basically not honest, that is, saying their truth one moment, then saying what is not true, but without the qualification: this here is my truth, there I am making it up. For an honest person, not knowing when you say the truth and when not, that is crazy making!

Better you make a practice, John, today and every day to tell the truth, especially to the people you care about. Oh, how refreshing is the truth, how welcome it will be by those who need it desperately.

You wrote that your ex girlfriend told you that you hear what you want to her, that is you don’t hear what she is saying. Your current girlfriend told you that you don’t listen to her”. We people often have our own voices talking to us while another person is talking to us and we hear our own voices instead of the person’s. It takes noticing what voices you are hearing and then putting yours aside long enough to hear the other person.

You wrote about your ex girlfriend: “She would get so excited and just loved that… her laughing was amazing… the little things would make her laugh and smile. Oh that smile! and her eyes! … She would get so animated and excited. ‘look how big they are!’ little things like that… How much she loved being with my girls and doing things with them. You could tell just by looking at her that she really enjoyed it and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else… She would help them and she loved it… It’s hard to put it all into words. I did really feel connected to her in a big way”

It reads to me that what attracted you so intensely to your ex girlfriend was her expressive excitement being with you, that you “could tell just by looking at her that she really enjoyed it and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else”. She was very different from your mother who wasn’t excited being with you, didn’t really wanted to be there with you. This is why she left you, why she disappeared from your life for long periods, and when she was present in your life physically, she wasn’t excited having you in her life.

But your ex, she really wanted to be with you, she enjoyed herself. That was promising to you, promising that she will want to stay, that she wouldn’t leave.

“I want to be that guy that is happy, that doesn’t need other people or things to make me happy. But i’m not. I do feel needy all the time. Maybe it does stem back to my childhood and fear of rejection”- yes, it does stem from your childhood, this is where we are all formed, in the years of your childhood.  Because you were rejected a lot in childhood, the fear of being rejected has been intense ever since.

We can’t help needing other people, this is our  nature, as the social animals we are born to be. We are all people who need people. A solitary animal like a turtle can be as happy as a turtle can be all by itself, but a social animal, like a dog.. impossible!

I suggest that you make a practice of listening to your current girlfriend, and most importantly (to me), listen to your daughters. Notice your voices, quiet those, and listen to the other person’s voice.

When you state something that is true to you, and you noticed you feel distress as you think that what you just shared would cause a conflict, pause, don’t proceed to state something not true to yourself so to avoid the perceived conflict. Instead take a deep breath and wait: is there a conflict (there may not be at all). You can also ask the listener what she understood about what you said. For example: what do you feel about what I just said?

Ask questions so to check your assumptions.

And do post again anytime you’d like, if you do.

anita