Dear Rich:

You wrote that you “can’t feel love”, that is, you can’t feel the love your mother or sister say they feel for you, correct? The question in the title of your thread is How to FEEL love?

My question to you, if I may, is did you ever feel loved at any time in your life, do you remember?

And you don’t feel worthy. Did you ever feel worthy, at any time, for a short while?

If the answer is yes to any of the two questions, how did it feel?

anita

Hi Rich,

There is something else, I forgot to put in my original post to you. But can you define the word “loser” can you look it up in the dictionary? On Google? What does “loser” mean to you?

Hi Rich,

It sounds very much like what I have: Reactive Attachment Disorder. This is very common when we do not get the love of nurturing we need from a Primary caretaker. It can wreak havoc on our adult lives, making us feel like we “don’t belong” “on the outside looking in” “Isolated” “worthless” “not able to know what love is, because we never experienced it as a child. Not able to accept love. Getting into co-dependent relationships, unstable relationships.

I did not receive love in my early years. I just knew chaos, instability, a mother who severely neglected, verbally abused me and abandoned me and my siblings over and over often leaving us alone to fend for ourselves in a seedy motel while she would fire our nanny and go out days of drinking binges. My father, did his best, but he too, was unavailable due to travelling for business. He would come home to find us very unkempt, filthy house, beer bottles everywhere, nanny gone. He was beside himself and put my mother in a rehabilitative center, which she would run away from. We were taken away from her by the courts. By then we were six, and the damage had been done.

I was raised by my Dad’s sister and brother in law, a lovely, happy, well to do Midwestern couple who loved me. I do not remember loving them back. I did not know how. I wish that they had seen I was very troubled, self harmed and sent me to a child Psychiatrist. To this day, it baffles me. I guess what’s important is that I am very self aware and am in intensive therapy, as I have several mental health diagnosis, stemming from my childhood.

There **is** hope. It takes hard work, but you can learn to love Rich. It took me a long time to stop self harming, suicidal ideation, but with Psychotherapy and CBT, DBT, I finally have learned to love myself. Several years ago, I had my first long term relationship. It did not work out, as he had to move out of the country, but it was the longest relationship I have been able to maintain. I no longer consider myself worthless, a loser, unloveable, etc. And you can too. There is help, as well as self help books and work books, on Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). Just have hope and faith. Keep us posted.

Dear Rich,

Because I can relate to many things you said, I will assume things in my answer. Please do tell me if I’m wrong.

Anyway, I was raised by loving parents. I have a sister that I love. There were tough things in my childhood, but I believe this is true for everyone. My parents, in my early years, were particularly stressed, and even as a baby, judging from what they told me, I could feel it. They were never very good with pedagogy, but they taught me very important things (about helping others, mostly), and most of all, kept me very sheltered.
I am a very sensitive person because 1) that’s who I am; 2) my parents never encouraged independence. This led to me feeling very insecure about things I could and couldn’t do. Mostly I felt like I couldn’t do many things. Also, the tension between wanting to be my own person, my own selfish person at times, and wanting to be a good, helpful person, started building up.

I am a humanitarian worker. Just like you, I thought helping others was who I was, and I was terrified, and still am, of people seeing my true, sometimes ugly self. I spent my life giving love, on everybody else’s terms, and then resenting the fact that I wasn’t receiving it. Then I suffered my first break-up, and then I started suffering from various mental illnesses that were very self-destructive.

The reason for all this, the reason for depression, in my opinion, is the tension in your beliefs. You want to be loved, yet you think that’s completely incompatible with being a good person. Cause in your head, a good person is someone who gives, not someone who receives. I binge-eat to hold on to the rejection that makes me the “good” person that I am. The one that gives, and then self-destructs.

I don’t know how to overcome this. I know you’re not alone. And I know that the solution probably doesn’t lie in something very radical, or perfect. It’s about balancing these two things in your personality. You seem to be very self-aware, and you seem to actually care about other people. It’s not a big act, or a big lie; but the more you push love away, paradoxically, the more giving love will be draining and will seem like something you do just to feel good about yourself. It’s not. You are a caring person, accept that fact; but you’re also someone with needs. it’s not even a matter of “taking care of yourself”, being the best person you can be, etc. It’s a matter of, if you don’t do this, you won’t survive. So go deep. CBT is very good for these kind of things.

Please let me know if it’s unclear. I’m trying to organise my own thoughts and it’s actually good to talk to someone who seems to mirror some of my behaviours.

Good luck with everything. Take it slowly with that girl.

Hi Rich,

I guess what helped me was to let go of judgements and expectations, and be appreciative for all that you are. You are whole just being you. You don’t need someone to complete you. Another thing that helped me is try to see the other person as you. It helps shifts your perspective of people. Try incorporating this thought into your life and notice how much more compassionate, patient and understanding you are with your loved ones and complete strangers. There really are no perfect solutions, or answers, but this is what helped me and alot of Post Traumatic Stress Psychotherapy. Keep us posted with your thoughts..