Dear Puce,

You don’t trust that you, as a person, is enough for anyone in your relationships, which lead you to not trusting others.

You’ve been hurt by people before so it’s understandable that you are leery of forming deep bonds with any females. And the bullying had damaged your self-esteem during your formative years so that’s something to look at too. That’s why it was safer for you to befriend male friends while fantasizing intensely about your casual female friendships. It’s not that you didn’t want female friendships, it was that you didn’t want to relived your childhood nightmares. But right now you’ve cocooned yourself in fear and shame, with your thoughts and imagination fueling it.

Your apprehension of all the tensions with many of the females you are acquainted with speak of your fear that they might not like you, hence rejecting you. BUT that fear is your personal interpretation of the situation. You don’t know what the person before you is feeling or thinking until you’ve asked them point blank their thoughts. Yet your assumptions on the silence seems to lean toward the negative.

Though you might be correct in that they actually might not like you, that’s simply how the world works. People will have lukewarm feelings for you at the best of time, no matter how much you wished to cultivate a deeper relationship. And there will also be those who won’t like you for whatever reasons. You can extend many olive branches, but it is still their decision to commit to a deep friendship with you. And if they don’t wish for it, the best thing for you to do is to mourn that potential deep friendship then move on.

It’s just, your fear of rejection makes you want to control the impression that other people have of you. Your fear makes you out to be a defective person therefore you fear that people will also see it. You fear that other people will see the defect in you and scorn you for that reason. After all, you were rejected by your peers in your childhood, whose to say that it won’t happen again? Therefore, in your need for control, you rejected your mother and your boyfriend and possibly keep a certain distance from your female friends. If you reject them first, then they can’t reject you.

Right now, you know that you are looking at your world through the lens of ‘what if’, invoked by your desire for a relationship similar to the ones in your fantasies because you fear your reality. You have casual friendships as you imagine what could happen if it was a deep friendship instead. You offer olive branches to those who you don’t like that much while silently thinking that some people don’t like you. You try to appear likable even when you avoid people. You wish for friendship because you don’t want to be rejected because rejection is a reflection of your own flaws.

So if you ask the people around you to show up, would they? If you tell the people around you that you think you are defective in some way, would they be able to accept you irregardless? But it doesn’t seem that you’ve asked anything of them while also not letting them ask anything of you. You’ve been making assumptions while avoiding speaking of anything less than harmless to these people you call ‘friends’. After all, you don’t say “I’m scare, worried, anxious”, you only say “I have migraines” as if they would understand the underlying message that you’re struggling with being a friend and asking them for friendship. You don’t say much.

Your fear keeps you from speaking, it provoke you into making assumptions about others, it makes you keep people at arms’ length. Then there is your shame of being defective. Your reaction to your shame is observing people’s reaction to you and using those reaction as building blocks to support the basis of your shame. And you’ve trapped yourself in that spiral of shame.

Now, is the UK a country that stigmatize mental health? Because your sense of shame of yourself is definitely not new so the best course of action would be to seek professional help in untangling it. Be warn, changing the perspective of your view on yourself and your world is difficult because you are essentially challenging your personal truth of your shame, but if you wish to be able to form relationships without pushing people away, then it’s one of the challenges you’ll need to face.

Each person carries their shame with them in some way, yours simply show up as the fear of rejection and being ‘defective’. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s simply your form of shame. But it is something you’ll have to work with for the duration of your life because life has an ironic sense of humor in that you’ll always have to face your fear in different forms in the various stages of your life.

You’re scare, that’s okay, but you have the choice in what to do about that.

Dear Puce:

You are welcome and welcome back to your thread. I will quote from your original post and the recent one:

“I am a victim of bullying by several close female friends since I was 7-14”- what happens in a child’s brain when that happens, being bullied for seven long years?

Hurt and anger build up, hurt and rage. I know because it happened to me. I can still feel the rage as I type these very words. At times when I talked about it, my voice got low, thick, monster-like, threatening.

“Becoming more and more convinced that I am defective in the same way I was when I was a little girl”- but you were not defective when you were a little girl, just as  I was not defective. This is why it hurt so much, this is the reason for the rage: the injustice of it, there I was not defective and yet treated as if I was defective!

The Rage is exhausting.. I feel the exhaustion right now as I am typing these words. It is hard to contain the rage, that emotion wants an out and yet I sit with it and it rushes through me and I am exhausted sitting with it.

I wonder if your “debilitating migraines” are about this rage.

“Even as I am typing this I am thinking I should stop, because I am taking up too  much of the space”- it is, again, enraging to feel less-than, less deserving of the page or a person’s attention and appreciation, to  see it given to others but not you… Why not me???

“anger is a massive driving force for me. Lots of internal rage and anxiety together… my anger seeps out in many ways… underneath it all I feel is love.. What I find so hard is to  not act on the strong intense emotions which seemingly come out of nowhere. It does hurt so much to feel like I am excluded from a group… Every time I talk I feel stupid, I feel like they want me to leave, that they wish I wasn’t there”-

What is happening with you is what happened with me for so many years and still happens (but way less intensely, and I notice it and then talk sense to myself):

A child feels things intensely, in a raw way, before protecting herself, as we do later in life. Unprotected, unprepared for rejection, the child experiences hurt and anger and fear.. intensely.

These emotions don’t go away, they are well recorded in the brain and get activated any time a thought appears or a bodily discomfort, or when a person says or does something that reminds us of that emotional experience of childhood.

– What to do?

That emotional experience of childhood needs to be acknowledged and processed. You have felt these emotions ever since, throughout your ten years or so  of adulthood, but they need to be connected to the childhood events themselves. You mentioned CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and indeed like any PTSD, the stress, or  distress of the past event keeps getting activated in the present. Healing is about bringing the distress back to the events of the past and figuring that we are now safe.

Effective psychotherapy is the way to go about doing this. It takes time and a hard working, capable therapist. Within the context of effective psychotherapy or counseling, you will feel safe. You will  feel that the therapist wants to  help you, believes you are worth it, worth his or her time and effort and hard work.

I am willing to share with you much more about this healing process I am referring to, from my own experience. And so, if you want that, post to me again and I will reply every time  that you do. After all, you are worth the space on your thread, any space you take- please take all the space here that you want to take.

anita