Dear Daniel:

I suggested to you that understanding the situation better may be helpful, so for this purpose, I am taking my time today studying the recent situation and your whole thread:

On July 9, you shared that you met a new girl, Y,  in the context of a group of friends. A week later you went to a party with the same group of friends. You left that party with Y, walked together to the subway, talking for a few minutes, and went your separate ways. A few days later you met her and ended up sitting in a park with her for two hours. There you kissed her. She told you later that she was hoping and waiting for you to kiss her. You wrote later: “It’s strange you know. In the beginning she seemed to be so interested in me. She was the one asking to see me and she was the one who sent me signals so that I would eventually kiss her”.

A few days after the first date at the park, you spent the first- and last-  night with her in her flat. “We had sex and it was a smooth and nice moment for both of us”. In the morning you kissed goodbye and planned to see each other in a month from that time, because of holidays.

A month later, Aug 9, you shared there was no third date.  She told you the following: “things are going too fast for her.. she needs more time… she does not feel ready for a relationship, that she is too ‘unstable’.. she’s never been in a relationship… she needs the ‘freedom’ brought by being single”.

Basically, she friendzone-d you, which is the title of your thread “Friendzone?”, a title that you chose Dec 22, 2019, almost 8 months ago.  At the time you met another girl, D, in the context of a group of band members. Two weeks after meeting her for the first time, you had your first (and last) date with her, having a drink together and talking for several hours. You wrote about that date: “time flew for her and me”. After that, you tried to see her again, “but it never happened”. At one point she told you “that she doesn’t like me more than a friend and that she didn’t  know that I liked her more than a friend”.

About the first girl you fell in love with, about 7 years ago, when you 16, a classmate in school. You wrote: “I was crazy about her, my whole world was revolving around her and all I wanted was to get close to her.. I barely knew her. My feelings were so intense that she new I had them. One day, I asked her out but (she) told me that I was imagining things, that she considered me as a colleague of class that that’s all. I was devastated, crushed”.

This is my new understanding today: you’ve been suffering from anxiety and depression for many years. And you are aware of it. You are aware of feeling fear and sadness and you accept that you do. But you are not aware, nor do you accept that you feel anger as well, that you are not just a scared and sad person, but also an angry person. I will elaborate on this-

Your father was angry: “My father was starting to become violent… he could get angry at any moment for no apparent reason”. I believe that you decided early on in life that you will not be like your father, that you will not be angry.

You wrote about your mother: “She rarely gets angry. I think I’m a lot like her”- as a child, you sided with your mother. Your early life decision was to be like her, not like your father.

But you are angry, so what happens when you are angry but not aware of it/ rejecting the fact that you are angry: other people can see that you are angry at them, but you are not; you are aware that you are scared and depressed, and craving connection, but you are not aware that you are angry as well, and therefore, rejecting the connections you crave.

You think that girls reject you because you are sad (“Girls can feel when I’m sad and it’s something that makes them go away”), but it’s your anger causes girls to go away from you, is my understanding.

Here are the indications of your anger (but not aware of it): “I act a bit cold in a way to tell a girl that I’m not as enthusiastic as she is when together.. When I’m tired.. people tell me I look sad or angry in those moments (but I don’t)… Several friends told me that I have a gloomy, sad or angry face when I am alone in the street….. I’ve been spending my life more or less isolated, surrounded by people I don’t like for the most part”.

You wrote: “The more time flies, the more I feel people run away from me”, and “Girls can feel when I’m sad and it’s something that make them go away”- often people, including girls, don’t run away from people who are sad, instead, they want to help sad people, find out what makes them sad, try to make them happy. But people almost always run away from people who are angry- it is a natural instinct, all animals almost always avoid or run away from angry looking/ sounding individuals.

After the night at the party with D, “she told me that there’s nothing to talk about. That she didn’t like the way I tried to get close to her the other night when we were both drunk”- maybe your anger came out when you were drunk, and you were not aware of it.

– better you don’t try to form a connection with an individual in a group setting, in a party setting, and when getting drunk. A 1- to- one context, such as in a coffee shop during the day time is a way better context for you to form a connection with a girl.

“I feel like most people around me already have a life full of memories and relationships behind them. Unlike them, I’ve been spending my time more or less isolated, surrounded by people I don’t like for the most part”- I think that you are angry at people for having the good memories and relationships that you don’t have. Saying that you have been surrounded by people you don’t like for the most part, indicates to me that you’ve been surrounded by people you were angry with, for the most part.

“I’m pretty sure my ‘friends’ think that I need a lot of time on my own and that’s why they don’t send me messages very often”- maybe they stay away from you because your anger turns them away.

On one hand you have a great need for a girlfriend (“I really want her to be my girlfriend. I want it so bad.. I really crave for it.. Very often, I can act too close to someone I barely know”), but on the other hand, you are angry at the girls in your life (“it always bothers me that she almost never answers my texts right away. She can take 10 minutes to an hour”)

You recently wrote that you started therapy- it will be a good idea to explore your anger there. Your anxiety and depression are significant, but so is your anger. You are not a bad person for feeling anger. The emotion of anger makes us neither good people nor bad people, it just makes us.. people.

Rejecting our anger, denying it from our awareness, doesn’t make the anger go away, it shows itself in our behaviors and other people can see it and hear it, and they run away from it.

anita

Dear Daniel:

You are welcome.

It is almost 9 pm your time. I would like you to relax and do your best to have a restful night. Sometime tomorrow or in the next few days, maybe in the next weekend, re-read the post I wrote to you earlier, part by part, consider different parts of it further, take some notes of thoughts that come up for you on the matter, and post to me more later- a few days, or a week from now.

anita

Dear Daniel:

You wrote that you will see Y next week “as friends”. I don’t know if you will be seeing her in the context of a group or 1-to-1. I hope it is the latter, so that you have the opportunity to ask her a few questions, so hopefully to get honest information from her. It’s almost midnight, your time. Good night, Daniel.

anita

You are welcome, Daniel.

anita

Dear Daniel:

Congratulations for moving to your own flat in 2 weeks !!!

“the feelings I have today have something to do with my relationship with my father”- I agree. On one hand you “don’t want to be like him”, angry. On the other hand, you are angry.

“I may have trouble seeing that I am in fact a bit like him”- I agree that you are a bit like him, angry. But you are a bit like every other human being in the world because everyone is angry at times.

As a child, your parents were your world. Your father was angry and you didn’t want to be like him. You had no way of knowing that it is not just your father who is angry but .. everyone. It’s just that not everyone expresses anger the very same ways.

Anger feels the same for everyone, different intensities at different times. It feels uncomfortable: it automatically follows with more blood output to the muscles, and it demands some behavioral expression, like the volume of the voice going up, and the muscles in our faces and bodies contracting, as we instinctively prepare to scare the enemy (sounding and looking dangerous),and fighting if necessary.

Some people yell and fight, some people go out for a run, other people distract themselves with hours of computer gaming. Many people hold the anger in, become silent and withdraw. But the anger demands expression. When you don’t express your anger, that demand unmet, the anger doesn’t calm down and disappear, it keeps being there, exhausting the person, and over time, depression is the result.

“Sometimes I yell at my mom and I don’t know why”- you yell because anger automatically causes the volume of our voice to go up (the purpose in nature is to scare the enemy).

“I’m still very afraid of the idea to see my father again”- fear and anger are closely associated. When an animal is angry, it is right after it’s afraid. First there is fear- then either an animal runs away (the Flight Response) or the fear changes to anger, making the Fight Response possible.

“I may be frustrated to see to see that life is not like I wanted it to be. That even now, as a 23 year old man, I still struggle almost everyday with sadness, anxiety, fear and anger”-

– our distressing emotions don’t go away or resolve themselves just because we get older. You can be in the same emotional state that you are in now, when you are 33, 43, and 63 (only older and more tired, and maybe even angrier and more depressed).

“I am almost always disappointed by others. Maybe I expect too much from them. That’s why I tend to think that I should rely on no one but myself”- if as a child you felt that you could rely on your father or on your mother; if as a child, your expectation that your mother would protect you from your father was met; if she didn’t disappoint you, you wouldn’t be feeling disappointed by everyone else as an adult.

In other words, it is not just your father that disappointed you, it is also your mother.

“I feel close to no  one and feel like no one among my friends really care about me (even when they tell me they do).. I have never truly been in a relationship”- you haven’t been in a close, trusting, mutually loving relationship with anyone, not with your father, not with your mother, not with anyone yet.

When you view the relationship emptiness of your life so far, you may feel that at times you and your mother were close, and there probably were moments of closeness, but rare and far in between: there was no solid, close, honest, loving relationship between the two of you. And it  was not your fault!

“I don’t agree that people want to help sad people. I think they run from them because facing them means facing their own sadness and insecurities”- this is your personal experience. I remember that you shared that at 16 you were heartbroken, very sad, and your mother didn’t notice the seriousness of how sad/ depressed you were. Is it that she didn’t want to face her own sadness and insecurities?

anita

Dear Daniel:

Good thing that your mother successfully stopped your visitations with your father when you were 13. I wish it was possible to stop the visitations before that, because you told me how terrified you were during those visits.

Do you remember yourself angry as a child, if so, at whom and under what circumstances?

One more question, if I may: you wrote that your mother might have protected you from things that could have brought you joy: what things and how did she stop you from joy?

anita