i'm losing myself.
Hello, I have been struggling for many years and I don't have the money or ability to see a psychiatrist. I need help to understand myself or what I am experiencing. I feel a huge emptiness inside me, and I get bored quickly, meaning my happiness is temporary. I have mood swings and get angry easily over trivial things. I find myself extremely sensitive and unable to accept anything, reaching a level of hatred and resentment.
I am introverted and dislike social gatherings and people, but I find myself looking for others to be around because the feeling of loneliness is painful. I get very attached to the people I love, like my friends and my partner; I feel like I want them to be mine alone, as if I own them. Although I respect their personal space and know they have their own lives, I don't understand why I get angry or anxious when they are busy or not around.
I feel like they don't want me, will leave me, or have lost interest in me. I find myself getting angry and judging them quickly, making hasty and wrong decisions, only to realize what I've done later and start to regret, blame myself, apologize, and feel guilty. The worst part is when my realization and apology come too late, after I've lost them.
I begin to hate myself and harm myself, feeling like the world has stopped and I have destroyed everything! This situation keeps repeating, even when I promise myself I won’t do it again. I can't control myself; it feels like my mind is talking, and I feel like I'm dying slowly. I love them and am grateful for their presence in my life, and my feelings for them are genuine. But why do I do this to them and myself?
Sometimes, I find myself repeating specific actions, checking them multiple times to ensure there are no mistakes so that I can be perfect and please those I love, so they won't leave me or get bored with me. I seek their attention and feel angry when they don’t pay attention to me, and I get scared when they suddenly become serious, leading to negative thoughts.
I also experience feelings of inadequacy, lack of self-love, and low self-confidence, along with many strange things happening to me that I don’t fully understand. I have tried to talk about the main things that affect me. Please help me understand what is happening to me.
@secretHuman9408
Hi, thanks for sharing. 💜 Makes sense that seeing a psychiatrist isn't really an option so you're just trying to figure out what's going on by yourself as best as you can and see if things can improve at all.
This will probably be over-simplifying, but wanted to draw attention to a pattern that sort of jumped out at me in what you wrote where it feels like one thing tends to lead to another:
1) Feeling lonely, empty, bored, etc.
2) Feeling very attached/possessive toward the handful of people that you're connected to
3) Feeling anxious or angry when they're busy or not around, fearing that they'll leave you or lose interest
4) Acting on these feelings of fear or anger in a variety of ways (e.g. judging them, expressing anger, desperately trying to please others to mitigate any possibility of them leaving)
5) Negative consequences of those actions (e.g. people leaving)
6) Feelings of regret, self-hatred, self-disgust, low self-esteem (i.e. "why do I mess up everything", "why can't I control my actions")
7) Self-harm, etc.
***
I suspect that if you were seeing a therapist, what they'd probably offer either directly or indirectly would be ways of trying to understand this chain, validating and accepting what's happening at each point, and trying to come up with ways to change or disrupt the chain at certain points.
For example, one part of the chain that feels pretty important is going from #3 (feeling anxious/angry) to #4 (acting on that feeling). DBT might work on that part of the chain through things like:
- Mindfulness - noticing feelings when they occur and getting used to observing them and letting them settle without immediately acting on them
- Distress tolerance & emotion regulation - coming up with a bunch of strategies for soothing feelings or just getting through them without doing something that you'll later regret
- Interpersonal skills - figuring out how to communicate wants/needs in ways that respect other people but also maximize the chances of getting what you want within reason
Another thing that might be relevant to a lot of points in the sequence is self-validation or self-compassion. Usually something happens and there's a feeling of self-hatred or self-disgust. But maybe it's possible to look at the different connections and see how they "make sense". Like, looking at #1 leading to #2 and #3... it makes sense to me that someone who's really lonely and doesn't have very many people in their life would have a feeling of desperate clinging toward the few people that do show up, that they'd be scared of losing them, that they'd feel afraid/angry if there were threats to those relationships. And it makes sense to me that those feelings would be really intense/desperate--because it's really important to not lose people, and there's an understandable and realistic fear/risk of losing people because it's happened so many times before. And then when there are really intense feelings, they're pretty overpowering, they feel very real, and it's difficult to know how to handle them in the moment. It makes sense as well that if you're losing people or feel like you're accidentally sabotaging lots of relationships and partly responsible for the loneliness, that you'd maybe dislike yourself or feel inadequate. And then it makes sense that that might spiral into self-hatred, coping with self-hatred through self-harm, etc.
Everything really does make sense! From a certain perspective, there's a sort of innate "healthiness" to everything that's happening, no matter how messed up it gets. Everything you do is you trying your best to work with an unbelievably difficult and complicated situation, and everything that happens is understandable. It's just that the causal chain as a whole leads to unfortunate or painful results, and of course you wish that things were going differently. 💜
Will pass along this link--maybe some of the resources in this thread might be relevant, especially the master post on DBT skills.
https://www.7cups.com/forum/personalitydisorders/BorderlinePersonalityDisorder_326/ResourcesforBPD_268269/
Sounds like Borderline Personality Disorder
