Dear ninibee,

sorry if this threat made you feel shameful, I am sure noone here wanted to hurt you. Personally I just wanted to give you my take on what I read in your posts, and I might well be wrong in interpreting what I have read. You have been pretty brave and open so far and I am glad you continue wrting here.

I am a bit short on time today but just wanted to say a few things:

You dodged a bullet with loosing that job, I am 100% sure. three 12-hour shifts in a row? Thats a recipe for even mentally stable people to loose it long term. I know entry lvl jobs can be tough, but I take tough to be “doing the dumb work noone else likes but needs to get done during a normal 8 hour shift with breaks, tea, some boredome etc.”

I believe (and this might have come up here before, sorry) that you need a therapist (CBT?). Why?  Because you need someone consistently in your corner that you see regulary face to face. Is that something that you can afford or that your parents could help you affording?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Lara.

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, 9 months ago by Lara.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Lara.

Dear Janine, I would like to comment on your posts but I have a question first if you don’t mind: the guy you had the confrontation with, can you explain in what ways he treated you badly? Was it “only” the incident on the stairs when you greeted him or other incidents as well? And if so, what happened? Sorry if you allready wrote this before and I missed it.

Dear crawford,

sorry for the late reply but I don’t log in here often I am afraid.

I am still not quite sure what you mean when you say “people who think they understand but only intellectualize what i tell them”. When you mentioned “As a great master once said, sharing the truth of the self to the wrong person is like putting a million volts through a electric shaver. It explodes.” I immediately thought of this in terms of someone enlightened (e.g.) Jesus saying something but its missinterpreted and causes great pain. For example I think I can safely generalize that Christianity did in the past cause great pain missinterpretating Jesus. Is that the kind of impact you mean? You later mentioned that you want “want recognition/reliance”  and don’t want people “stealing” your knowledge. So I don’t think at this point I have grasped the outcome you are worried about. Do you worry about a negative impact for yourself? Or for other people?

As for your brother, from the situation your described, I wouldn’t say he tried to take advantage of you. Or maybe not in the way you seem to take it, him wanting to steal something, take it without giving something (recognition?) back.What I interpret from your description instead is this: Your insecure brother was in a stressful situation for him. He turned to his brother, but beeing the shy/insecure person he is, he won’t say “Dear brother, I felt insecure in this situation. What should I do better next time?” Very few people do that, take the direct approach. maybe because they are afraid to be vulnerable. Still he wanted to voice the topic, see if you are willing to get into it. And you were (“i opened up a discussion about anxiety and my experience on it and let him know alot about it.”).

So in this case I wouldn’t read too much into it. But maybe instead of opening up a general discussion and talk about your experience, how about turning that question back on him? “Yes I notice it quite often that people are anxious, actually. You seemed to be a bit anxious yourself earlier, how come? Don’t you like (Person X)?”

As a sidenote I do wonder if he wondered if you were anxious, since you didn’t take part in the conversation between him and his friend.

One more thought on this:  ” The feeling of giving away some information which they should be able to solve on their own, and relying on me solving it for them in the guise of other people or manipulative ways.” This is something I experienced with my father in a bit different way. Him wanting something for example and not saying “Could you bring X?” but instead “You could bring X, you know.” (Can’t really phrase it well) So I feel I get the frustration when you think “You want something, freaking ask and don’t go about it this roundabout way” . Maybe calling them out on it (gently) might be one way for you to go. E.g. in my example: Ah you would like me to bring X for you?

What I disagree on with you is that you expect people to solve things on their own. Problem solving for me is one part reflection, but a bigger part team effort in some form or another (talking to friends/releatives/strangers/therapists/teachers etc., reading other peoples thoughts, observing).

Dear anton,

I am not in the situation your are in, no experience living in a third world country but I wanted to comment on your post. If I write something offensive just take what you find useful and discard the rest.

Your “friend” is not really a friend imo. Maybe she tried to shake you up a bit to get you moving, but frankly its not working, obviously, and its pulling you down. She basically told you what a depression would tell you “other people work harder than me”, “if only I hadn’t moved back home” , “I made so many poor choices” classic depression thoughts. You don’t need that influence.

Obesity can pull you down even further when you are allready down so I would like to suggest to you to check out nutritionfacts.org/topics , especially the infos on beans and weight loss. You might not have access to all the food suggested there, but I believe improving your diet even a little can improve your overall well-beeing.

In general small steps as anita wrote is the way to go. Personally I set just one goal for myself every day, one thing that definetly needs to get done. Or make a list of really small goals, but not more than three. If you have a really good run you can add more goals when you finished those and feel like it.