Come and sort my head out... Please :)

[FolkGirl]

I had a thread last summertime (was in chat so gone now) about how I didn't feel anyone would ever love me (get out your tiny violins...) Actually, I think I've posted somewhere on here about it recently too

Lots of people replied and said that they were sure somebody would, that I come across as a lovely person on here, etc etc.

But I still feel the same. I'm having counselling now, but thinking about it is only confirming what I already knew rather than challenging me to think differently. Intellectually, I know that other people are loved, I just can't reconcile that with myself. It feels as ridiculous as suddenly thinking of myself as male or something like that. It's just not me.

I did 6 months of online dating and, on the whole, found it was a positive experience. Yes, I met a couple of oddbods, but I took something from all the men I met. I 'dated' a couple of men for 5 or 6 weeks each and I ended it with both of them. I'm now 'sort of seeing' a man I met online.

I do now feel that I could be attractive to someone, that someone could think I'm 'sweet', or 'lovely', or 'romantic', or 'funny', all of which I've heard about myself many times over the past 6 or 7 months.

But I'm more resolute than ever in my belief that I will never be loved. I feel almost ridiculous typing that, like I'm insane for even thinking it should be different to that. More than that, the thought of someone saying it makes me feel a bit sick and disgusted. I think it would fill me with either contempt or The Rage. It just feels like something so big and far out of my league. I'm not beyond thinking someone could say it, I've heard it in my life, it's just not ever been true.

I get cross with myself that it's so important to me. I know I over think it - my parents didn't love me, neither of my children's fathers loved me. If I can get to nearly 40 never having been loved, it's hardly likely to happen now. But at the same time, it just makes me so, so sad.

It's not important to me that the man I'm currently seeing might one day love me. I don't expect him to, I don't want him to, he's a really lovely man. We've got things in common and we have fun together, he's lovely and kind and thoughtful, but if he was going to love someone, it wouldn't be me. So I don't harbour any desires as far as that goes. In fact, more than that, I often think about ending it with him. But I don't really know why.

I don't really know what I want from this. Probably nothing really, it's just that today I've been thinking about it.

Sounds like the counselling will help, and maybe for some reason you are putting up barriers to 'stop' people loving you, maybe to protect yourself?

I want to say I hope it will help Parsley, but by saying that, it sounds like I'm saying the problem is with how I think about it, rather than it just being a Truth.

It's probably wrapped up in the way you were treated as a small child. I've wondered recently whether similar deep-seated beliefs I have stem from things that happened before I was 2. If your parents never gave you reason to believe they loved you, that's very harmful. I wonder whether you need a different strand of counselling? Have you looked into the different types and asked anyone what might be most helpful?

Do you have friends who love you?

Folkgirl I get everything you say and would be interested to read advice given to you about how you feel. I also have not been loved as a child. Husband/partners who professed [insisted, sung it from the rooftops] to love me have proved that they didn't.

I no longer want to hear that anyone loves me, I would not believe it anyway now and if someone has said they loved me recently it really enrages me. It seems manipulative, and I just can't trust any more. Heartbreak has exhausted me.

It's certainly not going to happen for me, and I no longer want a relationship of any kind. I also feel it's what happens to others. I see it as the lesson I have to take from life for some reason. I have loved, but not been loved in return, that's just [my] life. I'm not being dramatic, just factual/realistic.

So sorry I can't offer you advice or wise words. I only have my own [long] life experience, had years of counselling and tried everything I can think of to address the issue.

I too struggle with things I know on an intellectual level to be true, but getting to believe it at an emotional level... hmm.

If people are being nice to me, I think it's because they have to work with me, or live next door, and it's easier than being hostile, or they feel sorry for me. But I find it very difficult to believe that they actually like me and want to spend time with me. My inner self still believes my mother once telling me I am too selfish for anyone ever to love me, and so I don't let people get too close, so I can't be hurt when they don't want to be with me after all.

(It's also all a lot worse just now because I'm premenstrual - in three or four days, I won't be feeling quite so hopeless as this.)

Meant to add - counselling has helped, though clearly I do still have some work to do. If you're finding you're not achieving what you hope to with counselling, you might need to consider trying a different counsellor.

Charlotte I've had counselling a few times over the years. I think this current counselling is going to help generally, but getting past an idea that I'm unlovable assumes that, primarily, I am essentially lovable. And I don't believe that I am. I believe that someone could feel that I am lovable fleetingly, but that it couldn't be sustained.

No. I don't have friends that love me. I have friends, but I keep them at arms reach, I suppose.

The biggest problem I have is with the suggestion that the issue might lie with how I feel about/see things rather than it being a Truth. After all, there'd be no point in trying to change how I feel/what I think about something if, essentially, I'm right.

cafesociety Absolutely. Your post has made me cry, I know exactly what you mean. It would enrage me too. Yes, it's something that happens to others. I don't doubt that for a second; I believe that others are loved.

Perhaps you're right, perhaps it's my lesson to take from life too.

I don't want to hear it either.

It is not the Truth. It is about the way you see and believe things, and it ultimately is about self-love. There's a book by Louise L Hay called You Can Heal Your Life. Look it up.

Some of its a bit , but it's mostly about breaking the beliefs about yourself that you have absorbed since childhood and can't see aren't actually true! I didn't follow it to the letter, but the gist of it was really helpful!

EBearhug It's early days with this counselling, so I'll see how it goes.

I don't let people get too close either, friends or otherwise. I had difficulties with friendships all through my childhood and teens too. I think I just think that some people aren't lovable and I'm one of them.

I'll look that up bunnies, thanks.

Folkgirl I fully believe you are loveable, you sound thoughtful, self aware and people seem drawn to you. Good stuff. Just keep hope, hope for good things, for truthful, honest people in your life and good times and then who knows. Maybe you will have questions answered as life progresses, I hope so.

The love I trust is the love I have for my sons, my grandsons, my DIL's...pure, non-romantic. That is what I'm sure of and know is genuine. So love in my life in some shape.

Now wipe those tears....

I think most people are loveable, really, and that must include me. And there's part of me recognises that friends who are with me who say I'm great, thinking they're just missing something - that's not actually seeing them in that positive a light. Maybe we should trust them when they say they like us as we are.

(Yes, very easy to say it...)

You know when you weren't loved as a child? I think that you can build that up into thinking that love is this utterly identifiable "thing" - some rush, fireworks erupting, music playing, sledge hammer hitting... because we don't know any different.

But love can maybe be much simpler, and just being happy, respected, cared for... and when it comes, it's easy to miss - because we didn't learn that it is simple in childhood (when it should be simple) so we built it up into this "thing".

I haven't found it yet, same age as you. I haven't given up yet though - hopefully got a lot of years left on this planet!

Good luck.

cafe My friends are truthful, honest people but I can't let them see the 'real me'. I have a couple of friends I'm closer to, and I'm very fond of them. But I'm not even sure I 'love' any better than I could be loved.

EBearhug that's what I tell myself , but, like you say, it's one thing knowing something on an intellectual level and then it's quite another knowing it on an emotional one!

Cabrinha I think you're right about it becoming a 'thing'. I think about it a lot and what it should have looked like, what it could look like, what it might look like. I was brought up not only believing that I wasn't loved, but that I couldn't and wouldn't be loved. I know it can be a simple thing, but perhaps it's just not something for me.

I have my children and I love them, but even their love doesn't feel reliable. I don't trust that I couldn't be replaced in their eyes; that they wouldn't just stop 'love'. I only accept that they love me in the first place in as much as we bonded and it's biological. It's got nothing to do with 'me'. It took a long time for me to stop loving my parents, after all.

The counsellor said I've built up many layers of protection around myself over the years and I'm very controlled in everything I do and feel. I hadn't really realised, but she's right.

I wonder if you are building "love" up in your mind to be something it isn't? I personally don't believe that there is such a thing as the great unconditional love we read about in books.

I'm another person who has always felt like an outsider, who had distant parents and an ex-husband who cheated and put himself first. However, my conclusion has been that love is mainly circumstantial. We look for in others what we want from our own personal shopping lists at that time. If they fulfil our requirements and we strongly like them and propinquity makes a relationship possible then "love" is how we describe the resulting feelings.

But there is no such thing as unconditional love. If a more appealing prospect comes along, people who would have said they were "in love" can and do move right on to the better prospect. They feel their own personal list of requirements is better met by the new person.

I would have said I loved by rather unworthy ex profoundly. He always wanted someone slimmer and prettier because to him looks and having other men compliment you on your partner was higher than almost everything else on his list. Do I love him now? No because he treated me so shabbily (not just the cheating but the whole circumstances of our breakup) that I had to recognise that he did not fulfil many of the important requirements on my own personal list (like moral principles for example!). I'd be mildly interested if i heard he had been run over, but no more than that.

Even with my children, I'd say I love them and I certainly tell them so, but that love is built largely out of protectiveness and an acceptance that as immature human beings they need me to put them first. When they are adults I'm sure they will flee the nest without a backward look other than the odd duty call, but that is how it should be. Like all animals we rear our young to be independent adults.

Sorry, this is a long post, but what I am trying to say is that I think a lot of us (me included) spend a lot of time agonising about never having been loved when "love" as we mean it is an urban myth which sets us up to fail. I don't think there is anything wrong with you Folk, I just think you are looking for something which isn't there.

You are obviously a deep thinker. Most people don't look behind the superficialities of love. You have and you are seeing the disconnect between the "true love" of myth and what is actually on offer. That doesn't make you wrong, it makes you perceptive.

"It took a long time for me to stop loving my parents after all"
Folk, your post is very sad but this line is most telling. Your parents must have let you down on an enormous scale. Prior to stopping your love for them, you did love them deeply? Similarly your children love you very much, they need your love now and into adulthood. Hopefully counselling will help you to give to them which was so sadly not given to you.
Everyone doubts their own lovability from time to time, my own DM is amazed we still talk to her & yet all 4 of us think she's fantastic & is so much more important to us than she can comprehend. It's not about being some amazing super mum who never makes mistakes, it's about being good enough & she was. She thinks we are all off busy with our lives and that she doesn't count much but she's so wrong. Yes we're busy with our kids etc but we love her deeply (& she's not always loveable either). I'm dreading the day she's no longer there.
I'm amazed my DH is still with me but he's not been a walk in the park always either & he wonders why I stuck with him!
Life is all about love. It's not a big "thing" it's caring, it's being kind to people, empathy, companionship & so on.
Folk you don't have to be perfect to be loveable, nobody is. It's about forgiving people's mistakes and hoping they forgive yours.
All your kids want is to feel you love them and think they're great even when they are not. I still crave that from DM and I'm the wrong side of 40. I think you sound lovely, maybe you should try to believe that you are and that the fault was your parent's and not yours

OP I just wanted to say I have exactly the same situation as you. I've always believed this to be true about myself. I don't "believe" it rationally -- I know it doesn't make sense for someone to be "unloveable". And unlike you I know I am loved by friends and family, I've never had a problem with that.

But at some really primal level which I've never really addressed, I don't believe myself to be romantically loveable. Never have. I have had long-term relationships with people who purport to love me including a 7-year marriage which is now ending but I can't shake it.

I don't really know what the solution is -- I found counselling helpful several years ago and am now planning to try again now my marriage is over. But I just wanted to let you know that a) there are others who feel like you and b) you can and will get through it.

FolkGirl: I recommend you seeing an Holistic Hypnotherapist.

I met an inspiring woman at a meditation class. She had spent her childhood in and out of care, her mother was an abusive drunk, despite all that she had gone to uni and was a SW specialsing in adoption. She spoke very highly of Holistic Hypnotherapy. It had changed her life.
Several of us took up her recommendation.

I thought it was good because you don't sit and discuss the abuse as in counselling.

You say that you have built up many layers of protection over the years, with the HH treatment you would probably remove them as well as have your self esteem boosted.
The treatment isn't expensive but you have to invest your time.
The therapist records the session and you repeat it at home several times each week.

Best wishes to you.

Hi

Thanks for the replies. I went out early yesterday and have only just got back, so I couldn't reply before now.

3mum That's actually a really interesting point. Perhaps I am expecting it to be something more than it is. Everything you've said has really given me something to think about. Thank you.

avoidant I don't know that I did love them deeply. I certainly craved their approval and acceptance for far longer than it was healthy for me to do so - and I suppose that is what I have interpreted as love. We cut my mother out nearly 2 years ago and I've not regretted it, or wished it weren't the case, once. My dad died in November 2012 and I don't miss him or really think about him at all. I had a DIY query last weekend and my dad is the person I would have asked. I asked one of the neighbours instead. But didn't feel any sadness. I'm not sure I could love any more either.

Again, what you have said is really interesting about life being about love. I think I perhaps have been seeing it as something more than it is. But I'm still not sure someone could care that deeply, etc about me.

solace Thank you. It is horrible isn't. Particularly the knowing one thing rationally and then trying to know the same thing emotionally.

Thanks paxtecum I'll have a look and see if there is anyone locally.

FolkGirl, are you me in disguise?????

I don't believe that anyone has every loved me for "me" for who I really am.

I'm surprised there are so many people who feel similarly!

I realised yesterday when I was thinking about it, that I only married my stbxh because I wanted to prove to my mother that someone could love me because I think I thought that if she could see she was wrong about that, maybe she would love me too.

How pathetic is that?! I knew he didn't love me, and I don't think I loved him really. But we were very good friends and I think we probably both thought that would be enough.

Come and join us on the "zero emotional support from parents" thread - does that apply to you?

You know, I think it does. Thank you, I shall :)