Carnatic

I don't know where you live in the world but here at the moment in the UK that's just how it is. The NHS has been hugely underfunded, especially when it comes to mental health for years. Maybe my luck would be better if I lived in a big city but out here in the small towns the mental health services are usually very poor. Most of my friends have mental health issues of one kind or another, only one or two actually get proper tailored therapy, and it's been a lot of back and forth and a lot of waiting for them to get to that point. Usually you have to actually have a breakdown in the GPs office to be taken seriously. There are private options of course... just like anywhere those are expensive.

OK, but like I say... it's difficult. This isn't a situation where I could just easily go in there and say the CBT isn't working can I have something else and the doctor would just go 'yeah OK then'. They would most likely tell me that it's the only thing they have to offer, unless I just want to go on meds again, and maybe it'll work this time. It's not purely down to me not being willing to try something else, if I was offered that right now I'd rip your hand off for it. I have acknowledged multiple times on this thread that I am aware that there are things, in my subconscious somewhere, holding me back, or causing me to feel triggered, when I try to get what I want out of life... but I'm still detecting a lot of passive aggression from people being all like well clearly you really just want to be miserable.

Because getting therapy that isn't generic is really difficult. I've been on the exact same six week CBT course run by a counsellor rather than a psychiatrist about five or six times and any time I broach mental health with my GP the option is to do it again. Other stuff is available but capacity is really limited in this area and so you have to really really convince someone of your mental health issues in order to do something besides the same six-week course of CBT yet again. I don't present that well to mental health professionals either. Partly because I'm feeling positive just by being there and then minimise my issues in an effort to prove the therapy is working. They see no reason why I couldn't just do another course of CBT and maybe some meds.

I tend to feel really anxious about telling myself that I'm good enough to be able to find a relationship (or any life goals really). It brings on feelings of guilt and shame and then these feelings are triggering and can cause panic attacks or a spiral of depression. I know enough that I'd like to stop this, but can't see anything to give me reason to. I find it difficult to just believe that I'm good enough without someone telling me that I am, because I think... 'well I'm obviously being biased, of course I would believe that'. Even when I'm like in the deepest pit of self-loathing, I still feel that deep down I have exaggerated and unrealistic positive opinions of myself and that I just don't let anyone see this side of myself. I want to change how I see myself, but every time I try just makes me feel worse because I can't make myself believe deep down so when I try and have tell myself positive things it's like 'so now, not only are you uncharismatic, talentless, egocentric, boring etc, but you're also arrogant and a liar to boot.' I started with what seemed like a concerted effort to have positive self-esteem about six months ago or whenever I started to post on this site again, but yet my self-esteem feels as low as it has at any time in the past twelve years.

Maybe not the emotions in their raw form, but you always seem to find it fairly easy to choose the most productive way to react to them; like perhaps you don't avoid things that produce negative emotions (unless of course they also produce negative outcomes), or if you know that an emotion is coming from the irrational part of your mind you're better able to compartmentalise it and not let it have a seat at the table of your internal decision-making committee. I've usually already reacted by the time I have those thoughts. I'm irrational and impulsive when in a heightened emotional state. I don't know exactly how we differ in this respect but I do struggle to understand your perspective sometimes because you seem to move past certain things with less effort (or at least you don't talk much about the effort and it comes across as effortless) and I'm sorry if I misinterpret that. As far as dating goes. I'm open to the suggestion that I'm avoiding it, people have said it before, but I couldn't tell you how. As far as I'm aware, women just aren't interested in me, never have been and never will be. There's either something about me that is just an instant, universal turn-off, or just a total lack of things that might spark interest. The former might be a thing I'm doing subconsciously because of fear or even PTSD, but I don't know what it is. The latter is just that I can't really think of a good reason why anyone would be interested in me. Whenever I talk to people about it they say that can't be possible, you can't be 39 and have never in your life been someone's crush or even just caught the eye of some girl in a bar... but that's just an assumption, I hope they're right but 'it sounds unlikely' is all the evidence they can really offer; and these aren't people who know me IRL either so they're just really saying that it's generally impossible that a person can be as undesirable as I think I am. However I struggle to think of a reason to think better of myself, or to put my finger on what I might be doing.

I'm a different person to you. I don't know how to take control of my emotions to the extent that you manage.

I don't know. I guess I've always found myself overruled, ignored and talked over so I kind of internalised that. It doesn't necessarily affect what I do with my own life when I'm alone but affects me in social situations. For example. I'm self employed. I just try and quietly get on with it and not talk about it too much because everyone wants to give you advice, tell me I'm charging too much, to little, marketing wrong, it just seems like if I mention my career to someone then I'll immediately get a lot of advice about how I'm doing it wrong. Sometimes this even relates to the photography itself with people wanting to tell me what camera settings I should use and not respecting that I've been doing this for over a decade and don't need told by someone who once picked up an SLR that I should use a wider aperture to put the background out of focus. Despite this, it causes stress, especially when it's about business since I'm far from being an expert in business. I find it hard to just disregard.

I don't know, it's a confidence thing... if you were just ask the simpler 'Why in the world do you care what others think'... about anything then I'd say it's because I don't have much faith in what I think myself. If I have an opinion on something, if someone else has a differing opinion then I find it difficult not to let their opinion override my own... because in my head they're smarter, more mature, wiser, more intuitive and just generally better placed to know anything than I am. I try and fight back, internally... but it's definitely a long and exhausting battle to disregard something someone said.

Yeah I know... I'm holding myself to standards that I don't hold other people to. Not because I think I have to be better than other people, but because I think I need to make an extra-special effort to make up for all my many flaws. Like also... when guys flirt, it always looks creepy and predatory to me. Maybe it does to other people I don't know. I don't judge my male friends for that because I know them well and I know that they aren't predatory or creepy, and I know that it's all consensual and the woman is flirting back. It's just what it looks like to me, flirting in general looks cringe. I can't really bring myself to do it because I feel that I haven't earned the benefit of the doubt, that I won't just look predatory and creepy but actually I will be predatory or creepy because she won't flirt back and I just don't have enough positive attributes to be allowed to do that.

I've been trying to think through the underlying traumas and triggers for some of my behaviour over the last decade or so, especially where it relates to relationships. I came out of a really bad relationship and I'm always reluctant to talk about it. Mostly because my memories of the things that caused the trauma are pretty sketchy, I don't want to look like I might be lying, I worry enough about that myself without giving anyone else reason to worry about it. This was in 2009-2010, I was 26-27 years old. The thing with the memory issues is that not only are they are cause of me not properly addressing trauma, but also are relevant to the trauma itself. My ex would undermine my memory, even to the point of convincing me that it cannot be trusted and I shouldn't rely on it when she could remember events much better. She also convinced me that my poor memory was upsetting her as it showed my lack of interest or committment to our relationship. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy I suppose, convince someone their memories are worthless and they subconsciously start to reject them. At the most extreme I lost a whole week to amnesia. I didn't just have selective or sketchy memories for that week, I mean I had zero recollection of anything at all for an entire week. None of the nights out with my girlfriend (during which I was told my behaviour was poor bordering on abusive), but also nothing of my work (which worried my colleagues). This all happened in the UK. Traumas there usually involved the suggestion, whenever we argued that I had been abusive, but also having other people turned against me or being put into tense social situations with someone my girlfriend believed was trying to ruin our relationship was very panic-inducing. I felt like I needed to believe her even though part of me really didn't. It was harder for her to isolate me in a situation where she herself was fairly isolated and I had friends though she did do a lot of damage to my social connections, some of which was never repaired (and to be fair it's not on other people to just forgive and forget when I come to them and say that we've broken up). Another particularly difficult episode saw me frequently ducking out of work and just wanting to be alone. It ended with me deliberately crashing my car into a wall in some sort of half-hearted self-harm attempt. She eventually had to move back to the US when her visa expired and for a while we were long-distance. This was stressful in its own way as I was required to be constantly there for someone who lived in a timezone 5 hours earlier than my own. I pretty much had to adjust my body clock so that I could stay up until she was ready for bed, which might be 6am my time. I would still often fall asleep while trying to stay awake and this would displease her and she would convince me this was further evidence that I was a terrible abusive boyfriend. She had her friends around her by this point, so whether they implicitly sided with her or because they were being lied to I don't know but by the time I got to move out there with her I was moving to somewhere where I knew nobody and everyone I met already thought of me as an abuser. The time we spent living together out there was bad on another level. I was expected to pay for everything, as she was out of work, even though I had been out of work myself for three months and she could have got a job whereas I couldn't work in the US. I had no opportunity to ever do anything just for myself, there was no passion in the relationship and I was made to sleep on the floor and act as her personal taxi service whenever she wanted to go out drinking with her friends. That's not the entire story to be honest, just the bad parts, we would also do things together that were very enjoyable but I'll focus more on the negative here. If I was guilty of being a bad boyfriend in any way, which could be as minor a thing as going to do the shopping but coming back without something because the supermarket were out of stock, then I'd be threatened with being kicked out of the house. We broke up when my visa expired and I had to go back to the UK, and while this was a good thing I didn't feel so at the time. She broke up with me because she had met someone else, and in any case, couldn't just wait another six months or how long it would be before we could see each other again. By this point I had no job and had to move back in with my parents so I could no longer support her. I was very upset for a few months. Anyway, I didn't expect to write so much about that time in my life, as this is supposed to be about what I've been doing since then, but once the words started to come out I didn't want to stop them. I did get over her, but at the same time, maybe never really did. The desire for her faded but the damage didn't entirely heal. It was really a bad time to have quit my job and moved out of my flat, economically. Jobs weren't easy to find and I was on the cusp of getting to the end of my twenties with no proper experience post-university. That wasn't entirely down to the relationship, I had quit jobs before, I never really found anywhere that I could excel, I'm not really good at detail-oriented jobs, and office work, and organisation, and then the 2008 recession happened. Finding myself though living in my small home town, where I hadn't lived since the age of 18, no job, no money and struggling to process trauma wasn't ideal in any case. So I sort of just didn't process it. I accepted the situation for what it was and just passively got on with my life. I did seek therapy and had been on anti-depressants since around the time that relationship started but I was putting out of my head the idea that I had anything to work on, I didn't bring anything up with therapists and the fairly strong medication I was on made me quite passive and just really willing to shrug my shoulders at anything life threw at me. I felt like I was almost 30 and it must be pretty normal by this point in life for all the joy to have been sucked out of it. All there was left to do was focus on getting a job and then moving out of my parents, but I did so slowly, with no real sense of urgency. After about a year of this, in 2011 I did attend a business course as I wanted to work as a photographer. It was my hobby and I had earned money from it before but the course was free thanks to EU funding and there was a grant to apply for at the end. I'm not a natural though when it comes to selling myself (especially when as depressed as I was) so that would hold me back, and later on that same year I found a job in a call centre so my business was put on the back-burner. I worked at the call centre for two years. 2011-2013, or ages 28-30 and there were definite positives to it. It was actual money for a start, not a high paid job but I didn't have rent to pay at least. I was quite good at the job, it was dealing with billing enquiries for a utility company, so customer service rather than sales. I was quite happy to do a job where I would just deal with people's issues during the day and then go home and not have anything playing on my mind, and I did make some friends there. Despite this my life was very stagnant. I went on a couple of European road trips with friends in the years before working in the call centre but in the call centre it was difficult to get more than a couple days leave at a time, you certainly couldn't get a whole week or fortnight so road trips were out the window and my social life wasn't really up to much. I would occasionally go and sit on my own in a pub but for the most part, I did nothing. Ultimately it couldn't last beacuse the money would never be enough for me to get my own place, there were liminted opportunities for progression and I still wanted to be a photographer, so when I felt ready to step up with my business, I quit the call centre. That'll do for now... the cafe I'm typing this in is about to close.

To be honest it really doesn't bother me. I don't think I've ever encountered this situation where 'rejection' is an emotive word to be reserved for certain situations. Obviously people do have fear of rejection but that's not fear of the word so I don't think restricting your use of the word changes anything there. I presume you would use it only if there had been at least one date before they decided they didn't want to see more of you. If you want to date someone but they don't want to date you, that's rejection.

That's a specific use of the term 'rejection' though, as it's an emotive subject, but it's difficult to know what better word to use for when you ask someone on a date and they say no.

Yeah you're right that they may often be very locally based... And ultimately the main factor is just whether they are getting asked out constantly, or never get rejected or whether they are getting rejected constantly, or don't get asked out. Regardless of how they look and how you look and what other qualities you may have. If you approach someone who gets dozens of offers a week then you've less chance of getting a yes, than if you approach someone who hasn't had a date in years.

The whole concept of someone being 'out of your league' is a tricky one. After all, it's not as if there is a one-dimensional scale going from unattractive to attractive... but it's not as if there are no commonly-held ideals for what counts as attractive either. Talking about 'leagues' sort of assumes that everyone belongs in a certain place on a scale that only partially exists. Someone you think of as out of your league may just seem that way to you because you think of them as attractive, but who knows how common your views are? I am attracted to a lot of women... I think, certainly seems a lot in terms of how often I swipe left/right on dating apps, or women I describe as a celebrity crush that friends are surprised by. How do people really know who is out of their league? It depends on your view of yourself too. For example, I have a really poor self-image. For this reason I am pretty much never attracted to any woman who I don't dismiss as 'out of my league'. I presume that because my self-image is so poor I am probably underselling myself. I am trying to be more open to dating (for unrelated reasons to this post) but that necessarily would involve talking to women who I view as out of my league while deep down have no idea whether they are or not.

On the topic of things I tell myself that put me off dating (or make me put other people off) I think is this fear I have that a desire to date will be seen as a sign of emotional immaturity. You will get comments, there's probably some on this site even, from people along the lines of 'there's more to life than just being in a relationship', 'you need to be in a good place mentally first', 'a relationship won't fix everything for you' etc etc. In context these are usually directed at people who are clearly just wanting to be in a relationship, almost for the sake of being in a relationship... So my situation is a bit different, I'm just sick of the way I've spent the last 12 years almost doing everything I can to avoid being in a relationship, and want to change, so nobody is going to make those sort of comments at me. There is a middle ground between, on the one hand, being obsessed with the idea that being in a relationship will make you happy 'like everyone else' will make you fit in etc and being totally passive and ambivalent to the idea of getting in a relationship.

I've found it difficult to get proper help because I can't remember a lot of detail I can't really give any mental health professional any information with which I could diagnose me with anything other than depression and anxiety. I brought up my relationship with my ex once in a therapy session, in a situation I thought it relevant, and was quickly told not to 'blame women for all my problems'. Also, more generally, even when I am just being treated for depression and anxiety, I tend to find it difficult once I step into the therapist's office to remember what I'm in there for in the first place, so we just end up having a nice chat in which I smile a lot, make small talk, touch upon the fact that my feelings aren't really how I would want them, but that generally I'm OK, thanks this was great, see you next week.

Well, It's not so much about feeling that I'm such a bad person that I don't deserve to be in a relationship. It's more about feeling that I bring nothing to the table, and that it would be embarrasing for me to believe that any woman might be interested in me, almost pathetic that this person with nothing in their favour believes that someone might be interested in him. I don't even have especially clear limits or extents on my beliefs, they are inconsistent and I will think less of myself for things that I wouldn't think less of anyone else over. Whenever I mention how I see myself, I know it's absurd, just so negative that it's obvious no real human being could be so flawed and so lacking in redeeming features so I avoid putting into words, even in my own head, and maybe not putting it into words and revealing how ridiculous my self-image is allows it to endure. I find it difficult to shake off though. It's always present. I can try more positive thoughts and words but they feel like a pretence. I may sometimes wonder if attention I'm getting is attraction but can never actually believe it. It feels like a huge effort of self-belief and self-affirmation just to get myself to believe that the chances of it being attraction aren't zero. It just hangs over me all the time any time I try and be more forward, maybe flirty, maybe ask someone out, I can tell myself that I have every chance of a positive answer, but I can't actually feel that I genuinely do. I still end up feeling like an approach from me must be every girl's worst nightmare, that I'll be either creepy or just plain embarrassing. My approach is generally dismissive, if I just refuse to believe that attraction to me is a thing that can ever exist, then I don't have to feel the feelings that brings up. So for example, if I'm with a friend and a girl is talking to us, even if she's being very overtly flirty, and even if she's talking to me more than my friend, I will still convince myself that it's him who she is interested in. It is mostly dating/relationships related. Sometimes it pops up in other areas such as my career, my social or creative life and I generally feel that I'm a mediocre photographer and boring friend, not a bad person not particularly dislikable but more that people could come and spend an hour or two in my company and they would get nothing out of it. Nevertheless, despite this I do have a career, and I do have a social life, insecure as I may be in these areas, I can't really complain all that much about how things are actually going. My relationship issues are probably more obvious and more serious, my mental issues, particularly PTSD, came out of a relationship and the biggest way in which my life isn't how I would like it to be is the total lack of anything in that part of my life. Yeah, it's been difficult, coming out of that relationship affected me more than I realise because for a while afterwards I was just existing, and not addressing things at all. I could act like everything was OK when really it wasn't. Because I put everything I had into keeping that relationship going, when it ended I was left with nothing. I had quit my job, my flat and my lifestyle which my whole adult life had been based in a large city. I had to move in with my parents, in the small town where I grew up and found only low paid jobs because that was the economy of the time. I was on strong antidepressants, and for about five years of my life between the ages of 28 and 33 I really did nothing... or at least nothing relative to what I was used to. It was comfortable really, but also lonely and depressing. It took a while however before I started to feel the need to get something out of life again, took up exercising again, came off the medication, found better paid and more fulfilling work, was able to move somewhere bigger and busier and get my own place again. For those years, relationships had never even entered my head, not helped by living in a small town which are the absolute worst places to meet people in your 30's. When I started to live more again then I wanted to date or something... my expectations aren't high, I don't need to meet the love of my life or get married, just to have something resembling romance and intimacy, but found all these left-over issues as I went into it for the first time in ages. For a while I was happy with just a kind of quasi-relationship with a girl I met online who lived on another continent and would never meet, but were just sort of there for each other and I was happy for her when she met someone and started dating irl. That ended shortly after I moved and I started to build up my social circle in the city where I now live, but now I have this large social circle but still zero romantic life and whenever I got close to having a romantic life I would start to feel things I used to feel when I was with my ex, and then having baggage dragged up,

I thought I would share a bit of backstory. My last relationship ended almost 12 years ago (I was 27 at the time, 39 now). I have been single ever since and in that time have been on only a handful of dates, and only once had sex... which was a 'friends with benefits' thing with a girl I met online and was friends with first. So while the process I'm going through now has wider implications on my mental health and self-image, it starts with a traumatic relationship experience and one of the main defining features of my life since then has been a lack of any sort of relationship or intimacy. I guess it's always seemed easier to believe that I'm doing the right things in terms of seeking either of those things, but unsuccessful because I'm unattractive and uncharismatic. I'm used to having low self-esteem so those sort of thoughts are easy to have, it was pretty low even before I met my ex, but lower afterwards. The difficult thing now is changing that thinking. The fact that people who don't know me (such as on here) can still be confident in saying that I surely can't be as bad as I think I am suggests that the problem isn't who I am, but rather how I see myself. People here see how I see myself and without even needing to meet me they know well that just can't be true. I guess I've avoided it because accepting that who I am is still someone who could be interesting, enticing or attractive to a girl out there I'm yet to meet (or even that I've met in the past twelve years) involves looking instead at how and why I'm blocking women from getting close to me or making it so that I'm viewed in an entirely platonic, almost asexual light. Questions such as 'what am I scared of' and 'what did I do there that might have pushed away someone who was interested in getting to know me' are painful to ask and trigger my PTSD. I don't know whether I need to dig into my past or not... will digging into it just dig up unpleasant and traumatic memories that I want not to affect my current behaviour? I could just focus on behaviour, I think I can pinpoint ways my behaviour pushes women away. I'm pretty unflirty, and gave an example earlier in the thread where I laughed off someone's (admittedly half-joking) suggestion that me and a single female friend should get together (not that immediately starting to flirt would have been the appropriate response either). But that still leaves the question of 'well what am I afraid will happen'? Even thinking of myself as a guy who could be in a relationship for long enough to write like this, leaves me feeling shaken and emotional. It was a really terrible relationship and it took me a long time to get over the immediate trauma (and several years to regain the aspects of my life, home, career etc that I had given up for that relationship). I don't like going into much detail though, partly because I don't have much detail, or I fear that traumatic events I recall either didn't happen, or did happen but with me as the perpetrator. My imperfect recall isn't just because it was twelve years ago and minor details seem vague at such a distance. I would have struggled just as much in the weeks following the end of that relationship to fill in the many blanks and the things I did remember, I feared to talk about in case my memories were a fiction I'd created. Additional to the sort of twisting of memories that takes place after a traumatic event were bouts of active and visceral amnesia. Waking up some mornings with no memories at all of the entirety of the previous week, a blank complete enough that I struggled at work because even those things, despite not being the cause of any trauma, were gone from my memory. I don't like talking about it because I worry that someone will accuse me of lying, or that I have no right to feel traumatised about things I'm not absolutely 100% certain actually happened... or that when it comes to abusive relationships, and often both parties will claim that they were the victim, being a man, in 2022, telling people not to believe the words of a woman who says she was abused... is not a good look, and doesn't take me in a direction I want to go in. That's maybe enough of that... I'm prepared for this process to be painful, but I won't be able to seek support unless I learn how to talk about things.

Yeah I think it depends where you are too, some places (e.g. small towns) are more conservative in that respect. I lived in a big city for many years and though it was still common there for people to think I was gay, I didn't feel quite as conspicuous as I do now.

Funnily enough just on Wednesday night I was at a poetry jam where someone had brought in a book of Emily *cough* 'Richardson's' poems and that exact one was one of the ones she read. I feel like I can understand what it must be like to be attractive, and it's not all good. I'm not attractive myself but just this small increase in attractiveness over the last few weeks has me feeling more exposed and, like I say, vulnerable... almost more judged over how I look than I was before. I don't think I'd want to be a head-turner. Like Batya says you want to be noticed by someone you might vibe with, but you don't want to be noticed by every randomer who is in the room every time to enter. I do have a couple of friends who are like that, and they are among the most insecure people I know... not insecure because they are vain, they can't help how they look, but insecure because they can't ever go anywhere at all without all eyes being on them the moment they enter a room... some people thrive on that, most don't. Difficult for women especially because a couple of my friends are that attractive that everyone automatically assumes they must be psychopaths. The whole 'crazy hot psycho b****h' stereotype.

Missed this... I don't mean ambiguous as in I'm not sure myself what my sexual orientation is... but in that other people aren't sure. I live in a small city too, so the expectations that all straight cis males are, what I believe Americans would refer to as 'jocks' or 'frat boy' types are stronger than it would be if I lived in a metropolitan city... that said last time I was out clubbing in London some gay guys thought I was also gay.

Maybe. Since losing weight I have felt my ptsd more triggered, as if being potentially more attractive makes me feel vulnerable and I had been avoiding that by not losing weight. But there are also more obvious reasons behind it. Starting with anxiety and depression being factors behind overeating and underexercising. I've gained and lost weight several times in my life and I don't know if its like this for everyone but it takes a long time after you start eating healthy and exercising before you see the first weight loss, months sometimes. That can be demoralising as you wonder when you're going to start actually losing weight, fearful that maybe this time that's it, no amount of diet and exercise will shift it, it's with you for life. If you were optimistic at the start then several months later you may feel yourself spiralling into another deep depression.

Like impostor syndrome?

One thought actually, is if people pay me a compliment, don't be weird about it, just say something like 'thanks, that's very kind of you to say'

Well I've only just really realised I have it, so I haven't given too much thought to how I change it yet. I'm between trying to think back to why I have it in the first place (I have only negative experiences of actually being in a relationship or being seen as desirable) and thinking what positive thoughts about myself I might be and to start with.