Dear margotescargot:

“With my boyfriend, I should feel less alone and lonely, but I genuinely do not know why I feel like this”- it is my guess, based on personal experience and on learning about many other people’s experiences, that you felt “alone and lonely” for years, as a child, a time that felt like eternity, and that as an adult you keep re-experiencing that same childhood emotional experience in different, adult circumstances (in your adult relationships with your former friend and with your current boyfriend).

What do you think?

anita

Dear margotescargot:

“As a child, I often find myself clinging to people, always afraid of being left behind or abandoned.. being by myself, feeling alone and rejected”.

This emotional/ social experience stayed with you into adulthood.  It so happens to be that something very similar was my own childhood experience as well, and it stayed with me as an adult, for decades to come.

With your seven-year friend, at times you felt that the two of you “were inseparable and shared so many things with each other.. like she was the person I can truly be myself with”- it reminds me when I had my first friend in school, I was so delighted, so excited, to finally have that feeling of togetherness, instead of the usual aloneness/ being left behind. Finally I was in the in-crowd: a crowd of two was good-enough for me!

Back to you: you and her got your respective boyfriends in your lives, she didn’t like yours and she exited the friendship. You wrote that as a result, you “became insecure, lonely and uncertain”- you were back to being insecure, lonely and uncertain, just as you were as a child and onward, it’s just that at times, you felt together with her, and that was a wonderful feeling.

I keep stating at times, because when you grow up alone and lonely, rejected and feeling abandoned, year after year, for what seems like an eternity, that experience sticks.

Your  boyfriend, as attentive and patient and wonderful as he is, “nothing but patient and good”, he is not enough to void that childhood experience that sticks, and that is why, even though you have him in your life, you still feel, “now feel alone, more subdued and unable to make new friends because of the fear of being abandoned”- it is the same experience of your childhood, more acute now, because of the loss of your friend.

“Why is it always so hard to let go of these traumas?”- being rejected, not being part of the in crowd, is very painful. We are social animals by nature. It is painful for every social animal to not be a valuable part of the social group/ herd. Every social animal suffers when being rejected from the social group. In nature, such rejection often equals death, as the individual, alone, cannot access food without the help of the group, and/or be protected by the group from the cold and from predators.

Even though we are humans living in a complex human society, we are still subject to the same instincts and emotions of other social animals.

“How do I make myself understand that I must accept that it happened and just learn from them?”-

– for a social animal in nature, rejection often means death, like I just wrote. You know, logically, that you are not in danger of death because your friend rejected/ abandoned you, but it.. feels like it because of our animal instincts and emotions. Remind yourself that your life is not in danger because she is no longer your friend, it only feels like it, but it is no so.

Also, remind yourself of the times, while being friends with her, that you didn’t feel great. You didn’t share about those times, but I am sure that there were many of those times, during the seven years, when you were not in her presence, and sometimes, even when you were in her present (am I correct?)

Key is to heal, best you can, over time, from that powerful childhood experience of having been rejected, of having been left behind, abandoned- a powerful, devastating experience for a child.

I hope that we continue to communicate and learn more from each other.

anita