I’ve had a bit of a rough go with it in terms of being raised in a bad environment, not properly socialised properly early in life, and to top it off my partner of 7 years just ended things because of some pretty nasty issues between us that I felt were perfectly fixable.
Everything as it is, I’ve started having issues with feelings of being disposable. Like I don’t matter, like I’m nothing and I can’t expect people to stick around, like they’re waiting for a reason to abandon me.
On a logical level that doesn’t hold much water, but at this point I’m starting to wonder how to fight these feelings if they come from very factual places. How can I justify the thought that I inheritly have worth, if the reality of the situation is that I keep being treated like garbage.
I’m doing all the right stuff, seeing a psych, prioritising recover, actually have a pretty decent inner voice going, but the feelings are still really strong and it’s hard to fight them. I’m not really sure how to handle this.
Support groups.
Seeing a therapist is a great idea, but most people can only afford to go a few times a month, if that.
Support groups are cheaper (or free) and they accomplish the same thing, albeit without the focus being solely on yourself.
To an extent, embrace it.
You’re disposable to other people?
Other people can be disposable to you.
Other people treat you like you are inadequate?
Their cruelty is their deficiency that makes them inadequate to you.
If people do not respect you, your boundaries, your minimum requirements, reject them.
Not out of malice or a misplaced sense of revenge.
Out of a safety mechanism for yourself, to prevent you from becoming too attached to people who are likely to fuck you over.
Become more self-reliant, become more functional without depending on others who extract more from you than they give in return.
You are not nothing, other people are not nothing.
I’m not saying ‘fuck everyone, everyone is awful, you don’t need anyone!’
But every particular person is much less necessary to be a part of any other particular person’s life than you would think.
There is a happier, more stable middle ground between total rejection and closing yourself off from the world entirely, and gloming on to anyone who even just once shows you the slightest kindness.
You’ve got a lot of experience with shitty people, shitty behaviors, shitty patterns.
On the one hand, that’s immensely traumatic and destroys your self image, and that needs help to recover from, process, understand.
But on the other hand, its given you a strong sense of red flags that shitty people display.
After you’ve processed the harm that’s been done to you… evalute your past experiences, formulate them into a kind of fucked up training guide for the kinds of people to be wary of, not become attached to or dependant on in the future, for behavioral hard nos, that you must make clear explicit boundaries against.
Become a greater degree of self-reliant, capable of existing and doing more and more things, experiencing more things, on your own. This will bolster your sense of self, and it will give you practical tools to avoid bring abused in the future.
That’s not to say to look all gift horses in the mouth; helpful people with good intentions do exist, and can benefit you.
But you need to learn who you really are, what your values really are, what boundaries you really need to feel like a stable and competent and respect worthy individual.
Its a journey that lasts untill you die, not a goal that you just a accomplish at some point.
Keep doing the right stuff, you’re already on the right track. Learn, not so much to love yourself unconditionally, but instead, how to respect yourself.
Develop a fair standard that you hold yourself and others to equally. Be forgiving to both yourself and others for minor deviations from that, but be wary of those that repeatedly deviate from it, or massively transgress it.
In defining yourself, you gain identity, confidence, and practical means to avoid being exploited again.
First of all, I would spend some time being single and learning about yourself. Who are you as a person? What do you value? Second, sit down and make a list of all your uncrossable boundaries. This applies to every relationship you have, not just dating. For example: I won’t allow poeple in my life who hit dogs. I won’t allow people in my life who are rude to wait staff. Third, and most important of all, ask yourself what you bring to the table? Learn to recognize green flags in yourself and others. Be kind, be a helper, but remember your boundaries.
I highly recommended Pete Walkers book Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving. Along with What Everybody is Saying by Joe Navarro. These books will allow you to start fixing your “poeple picker.” So you can stop of cycle of being around the poeple who drag you down instead of biuld you up.
Best of luck!
I’m not asking for details, but first you said the issues were nasty and then you said they were fixable. That’s a sharp contrast. Regardless, once one person checks out, the potential doesn’t matter any more.
Another thing, perhaps more importantly, is that your worth is not derived from your partner. If it were, all the single people would be worthless, and we aren’t. But you might have grown up being fed that value, that you have to get married or whatever, and if you don’t then somehow you messed up, or some bullshit like that. It takes time to let that kind of bullshit value go.
I didn’t do a great job of it, the gist of it is the nasty issues like inability to communicate, stonewalling, etc facilitated the ongoing small issues. For example I wasn’t allowed to do certain chores, but she wouldn’t keep up with them either. Easy to fix if communication is there, harder if all those issues are getting in the way.
Yeah I’ve been staying to wonder about that today, I do think my self worth was derived from the relationship, as my regular stuff kind of fell away as our lifestyle became incompatible with them. It’s a slow rebuild, but I felt relaxed for the first time in ages today, so progress is happening.
Granted, I never lived in any other era of human history, but I imagine our fractured society plays a huge role in why so many of us feel this way (because you are absolutely not alone in this experience.) We used to stay in close-knit communities, which forced us to hold our ties to each other, but we now have the entire globe to connect with. Consider how dating sites proliferate the idea that we can pick people the way we pick items in a grocery store - check one out, put it back on the shelf, put another in your cart, return another at a later date. It’s a pretty messed up way to think about other humans, but unfortunately a lot of people have internalized that this is a normal way to treat others.
When this happens enough, it’s easy to end up feeling disposable. It’s important to remind yourself that it’s not about you per se, but about how others treat each other. Being loyal is an underrated trait nowadays, made all the harder when you’ve gone through experiences where people take advantage of it.
I would love to offer solid advice on the matter, but unfortunately I often feel the same way. The best I can offer is the knowledge that you likely aren’t doing anything in particular to bring this on yourself - it’s a massive societal issue. Not the greatest hope, I know, but you are far from alone. I think it’s important that we recognize that loyal people are out there. It’s just hard to know how loyal someone is until the chips are down.
We are all disposable and pointless, friend. Even the richest man in the world will die and be forgotten unless he goes full Hitler. That’s the only people who are remembered. The ones who kill a ton.
So embrace it.
We’re born alone and we die alone. Rejection is tough but helping others is always a cure. All the best.
Do not have an expectation of loyalty. It’s not about what you get from others but what you’re able to give/share. When you are a good friend, even to a stranger on the street, it will always come back to you. And if it doesn’t, you still have the pleasure of spreading smiles. Expectation is the source of disappointment and fear of abandonment.
I have kind of the opposite problem. My friends and family are very attached to me. I would prefer to be a vagabond again, for a while.
What helped me was roughly two beliefs:
- That “worth” is not necessary, life is/humans are entirely fine existing without any concept of it
- There are other people equally “unworthy” as me (or more) and I’d tell them it’s fine, so why wouldn’t I extend the same to me?
Could you be confusing the facts with your feelings? You thought the relationship issues were fixable but the partner did not. Were they just saying that as an excuse to abandon you? You could look at this differently. Everyone gets to decide if a relationship is where they want to invest their life. If you honor their right to do this, you could stop looking at it as if the entire enterprise was a great big abandonment of you. That really does sound like your take on it. We’ve all had relationships end. I’ve been on both ends of it. I didn’t see it through the lens of abandonment because I don’t have that upbringing.
But you seem to insist that the facts align with your feelings, therefore your feelings are pretty legitimate and so you don’t know what to do. It really sounds like your feelings are 100% in charge of you here. They don’t have to be.
Are you me? Fuck.
The best I’ve got is to be more selfish and be okay with the idea that people and relationships are temporary. When a relationship feels like an event and not a forgone conclusion it doesn’t hurt as bad when it ends. It also helped me with grounding myself and reinforcing that my emotions are not always mirrored and are not factual.
I completely understand your logic there, but I’m not sure it’s something I can become accustomed to. I feel like I’ve got a similar viewpoint with the idea of death at least, the inevitability of things passing, but my issue seems more the idea of my own inadequacy, the fear I may not deserve connection with other people.
What does “adequate” mean? Serious question.
That would be the standard unshakable idea that I need to meet a certain approval criteria that will mean I’m worth love and care. It’s not valid, but I’m well aware it’s in there.
Who is telling you that you need to meet a certain criteria, other than yourself?
Flip the perspective. For example, you felt like the issues with your partner could be worked on and they didn’t work on them, they just left. So rather than wondering if you deserve a connection with them, consider if they deserve a connection with you. You’re putting work into the relationship, trying to figure things out, and they didn’t put in that effort. If they aren’t willing to put in the effort for you, then they don’t deserve a relationship with you. Surround yourself with people who value and work for a relationship with you. I don’t mean this in like a “test people to see how much they’ll put up with” way, but in a “find people who match the effort and care that you put into the relationship”
If you approach a relationship from the perspective of not being good enough and having to always earn their love and care then you’re always going to give too much and try to take something they can’t give you (self love)
Also, try to remember that you’re going through a rough time right now. The pain of the relationship ending is still raw, so of course everything else is going to feel more shit too. Keep moving forward, working on and caring for yourself. It will get better, so don’t give up
You are absolutely correct, I suppose it’s gotten a bit weird because the relationship was super odd regarding the intentions communicated vs the actual work put in. It was made things very muddy and it’s hard to understand my part in what went wrong, and reflect on if and what I need to change regarding my own behaviour. I don’t think I’ve experienced a situation where everything got this messy before.
Of course you deserve it. What happened with me is, I started noticing things that before I was too caught up in my feels to notice. For example, mean girls/boys are just another sort of “pick me.”
You absolutely deserve connection with others, we all do. There’s an expectation that you and I have that really hurts us and makes that hard to accept though. I wish I had more concrete or resonating advice to give. Honestly it was a lot of therapy and work just to get to where I am.
You deserve connection and you deserve love.
I find it hard, but try some introspection to find what your mental and physical needs are (hobbies, bodily movement, experiencing nature, whatever it may be) and then see how you can meet those needs on your own.
Once you start to get a better grasp on yourself and your own needs without external validation, youll be closer to the zone of “happy on my own/loving yourself”.
Then you can start to fit someone else into the picture, be it a romantic partner or more friends.
If you do have any close friends you know you can trust, lean on them. Tell them where you are mentally, and let them know they don’t need to be there always, but when you’re in the shits they will be better prepared to support you
And always remember, baby steps are still steps forward. (Also, if you have access to therapy/counseling, please reach out to someone professional)
I think you are correct to identify it as a contradiction, and shouldn’t fight your feelings. For lots of people absence of durable connections inherently just hurts you and you can’t change that by pretending like it doesn’t. How you are treated is experienced as an opinion, and in a real sense it is one. Something that helps to cope with it though is realizing that the opinions about you that society expresses by being such an environment are disingenuous and deluded. So much about the way people think about and treat each other is wrong, both factually and in terms of whether it makes for a good way to live, but even if you can’t ignore it you can object to it through the way you treat yourself and others.
Stop seeking the approval of crappy people. Let them go, and stop trying to think you can ‘win’ them over. You can’t. You never had them in the first place.
I’ve been here too. I just kept interacting with crappy people. Good people won’t abandon you.
You are disposable, and there is nothing wrong with that. Thinking that you can make yourself indispensable, is where you go wrong.
The abandonment issues are a huge challenge. Empathy by way of anecdote: my abandonment issues as a child were so bad that I couldn’t tolerate the idea of limited edition breakfast cereals. “What if I really like this cereal and they stop making it?!”
It took me a lot of time, professional help, and mindfulness. Understanding my attachment style helped a lot. The super short, abstract spiel: attachment style is mostly set in stone; we can only work on our reactions. A positive inner voice is a huge step.
Everything as it is, I’ve started having issues with feelings of being disposable… I can’t expect people to stick around, like they’re waiting for a reason to abandon me.
That shit is going to happen. Stick with me here, because this is going to take a dark turn, but I found what works for me. You are disposable to most of the world. And you absolutely cannot expect people to stick around. To wish otherwise invites disaster. Graveyards are full of irreplaceable people.
You can, however, be such a positive addition to your physical circle (with enough self-awareness and boundaries to prevent getting exploited) such that your circle regard it as unthinkable to be without you. That positive inner voice you’re working on… great! But it’s not going to be one big thing that makes everything work better. It’s going to be lots of little (and a few big) changes that turn the ship around. Give the self-work a couple years. You may not even notice the changes, but they all add up.
In understanding your attachment style, you can more easily find people who are compatible. Spoiler alert: avoidant attachment tends to trigger people with abandonment issues; anxious-avoidant attachment styles tend to burn everything down around them.
Calm your reactivity, improve your communication and self-awareness, grow your mindfulness and acting with intention. Non-violent communication (NVC) is the kind of thing that pays dividends everywhere in life. As is mindfulness. Develop a consistent meditation routine.
In my experience, very few people are looking for the relationship exit. Those that are, you didn’t need them around.
Edit: forgot a word
