Oh, I’ve done things I find worth while and interesting. I just could do so much more. There’s never enough energy.
OK, I’ll bite; Exactly what were you doing on/in/to the flight jackets to make it creepy?
All I do is wear them. Trust me, unless you’re a pilot or a military vet, that is mighty strange.
I happen to find them handsome, practical, and comfortable, and I kind of like airplanes, but those aren’t good enough reasons for me to want to talk about it with strangers. I feel like that about most of my interests; I need an explanation that will withstand a long awkward silence or I don’t want to talk about them.
It’s just self absorption (ego) dressed up in sad clothes, Dude.
The cure is to ‘get over yourself’. Stop hanging with people who feed your neurosis and start hanging with people who have higher standards. Who don’t reward you, with attention, for being a victim.
Maybe read a little Buddhism too, always good if you’re looking to tame an ego. And your issue, is all ego.
One moderately effective treatment is to be dropped into a situation where all your energies are devoted to merely staying alive for a month or two. Amazing how it focuses one’s attention.
Of course, treatment failure is common, due to the treatment’s side-effect of death.
Qadgop, you’re feeding my point that the Victim may have to put everything on the line to get better.
elbows, my issue may be ego, but it’s not egotism. Not every self-doubter is a narcissist waiting to have his ass kicked.
Frankly, you sound depressed to me. It sounds like you have no purpose or passion in life. Have you tried meds for depression?
This is my 14th year on various kinds of antidepressants. They keep me alive.
As for passions, I have many, mostly very arcane. I shy away from purpose. I wasn’t cut out for ambition.
There’s nothing strange in the least about wearing a flight jacket, unless you falsely claim to be a pilot or military veteran that is.
If you were wearing a complete United Airlines captain’s uniform to go and sit around the waiting room of the local gynecologist’s office, that would be mighty strange.
I have worn my father’s USN pea coat (WWII vintage) for decades, in cities all around the country, and in well over a dozen different countries around the world. When occasionally asked if I am a Navy vet, I truthfully tell them that the coat belonged to my dad, and not a single person has acted like there was anything even remotely odd about it.
Trust me, unless you are pretending to be something you are not, (if even then) no one on Earth gives a mollyfock about the jacket you have on.
I haven’t read some of the latest responses to this thread, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it.
Doug, I’ve been thinking about something you can do for yourself right now that you might enjoy. I did it a few years ago and it was seriously fun and destructive at the same time. You might want to try it. It doesn’t cost much, but it will take a little time.
Go out to CVS or Walgreens or whatever, and buy a blank notebook. Like a big, five-subject notebook. And pens. Lots of pens. Ballpoint. Black.
Start the first page like this:
"FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23rd, 2012, 8:49pm
Fuck you everyoone! I will kill you all youare such asshioles I want to shoot you all in you’re stuopid faces!!!"…
…and keep going. Write a suicide note. Write a homicide note. Write a bunch of both. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling or sentence structure or punctuation. Instead of getting out the white-out, scratch things out in a violent way. Draw pictures of T. Rexes throwing Ninjas at volcanoes.
Don’t edit anyithing. Don’t censor anything. Just keep going with the HATE. And GRAPHIC VIOLENCE.
The important thing is to keep going. How many pages can you fill? How many pens can you go through? Keep going!
When you have absolutely nothing left, keep going!
You’ll know when you’re done. Get some sleep. Then post back here. We’ll be interested in how it went.
Oh, and don’t throw out the notebook. But you might want to keep it hidden. 
MPB, I agree no one gives a f about what jacket I wear, but that means they don’t care in a good way, either.
**tdn, **I like your thinking. I once wrote my name in blood, but it was blood from a sugar test and all it did was encourage a few weeks of good sugar numbers.
How odd. You always seemed like a relatively normal doper to me in your posts and responses. Is this vampirism strictly a IRL / in person thing?
Are you really an emotional vampire in your long term interpersonal dealngs wth others or is this some notion you’ve concocted recently because of what soneone said to you in anger, as some kind of self harming, punishing stigma for yourself?
It’s important you have some clarity about the answer. Long term emotional vampirism is largely an incurable personal trait. I’ve dealt with my fair share and I know, however (and I know this sounds odd) posters on the dope are usually the very antithesis of emotional vampires in giving lots of time and attention to others with no expectation of immediate reward. Long term dopers being real emotional vampiers is very unlikely prospect.
Are you sure this isn’t just a bad reaction to whatever meds you are using to control your moods and emotions?
. . . if what?
How do you know if you’re a vampire? How do you find out? What clues are there to clue you in? Why do you, Beware of Doug, believe you are one?
Certainly your so-called friends aren’t likely to tell you. (Did they?)
Okay, also: What are some of those passions of yours (arcane or otherwise)?
This thread, so far BTW, is a near-total threadwreck. OP invited us to ask question about being an emotional vampire, and instead nearly all of the respondents have offered unsolicited (and mostly off-the-wall) therapy.
So you think decent people should indulge a dysfunctional, self destructive cry for help vs offering solutions? Boy are we off base, better call a mod to get us back on track asking the OP what’s it *really *like being an emotional black hole.
If you don’t have a clue you’re doing it, how do you know you’re doing it? Can you give some examples of things that “suck people dry”?
My sister is an Emotional vampire/Victim type. I find all interaction with her one sided (our conversations consist mostly of her kvetching about “problems” that 99% of Americans have & deal with on a daily basis) and completely exhausting. She sucks the life right out of me with all her negativity. And any solution I offer for her to deal with her problems, is met with irrational reasons why that “solution” wouldn’t work in her case.
The only remedy that has brought relief thus far is to avoid her, but that creates another problem. We have kids that are the same age, and when I avoid her emotional dumps, she retaliates by not allowing my kids to visit her kids. My kids love their cousins and I want them to spend time together, so I usually just pay the price of listening to her incessant complaining, so that my kids can see their cousins.
But I hate it and it depresses the living shit out of me. Any ideas on how to deal with an emotional vampire that I can’t just permanently avoid?
I am related to a “victim type” emotional vampire (who has no clue what she is and wouldn’t accept it if I told her, so I don’t bother). Some signs I’ve observed are:
-Often feigns helplessness to get attention.
-Has a string of former friends who refuse any kind of contact.
-Capitalizes on the sadness of others to point out how they have been in an even worse situation. Real-life examples:
[ul]
[li]“Oh, I’m so sorry your mother passed away from a heart attack. At least that’s a fast death, though. My mother died a week after a fire left her horribly disfigured and hospitalized. She had to get 15 skin grafts, but didn’t make it.”[/li][li]“Oh you’re getting divorced for the first time? That’s unfortunate. I’ve been through 2 divorces. My first husband was an alcoholic who beat the everliving shit out of me and refused to lift a finger to watch his own kids while I was working full time and going to school for my RN degree. It was like raising 3 kids instead of 2! hahaha”[/li][li]“You’re going out on disability for a couple of months? I’m so sorry to hear that. I went out on disability 2 years ago because I’m going blind.” (while failing to mention that the blindness is a complication of uncontrolled diabetes)[/li][/ul]
It used to be that way. It was a major issue in group therapy, which I attended for about a decade without as much progress as I had wished.
The biggest sign of vampirism is that no one can possibly know you well enough to understand you - it’s difficult to impossible to really respect others’ feedback about you, or sometimes, even to process it at all. You have to keep questioning, interrogating, nitpicking, because no answer makes you feel anything but worse, and in the short term, so does cutting off the discussion.
It was very evident in my group, and before that, in my interactions with family and friends. As I learned this, I cut back on my friendships, preferring to let them go rather than wear out my welcome. I also cut my family out of my psychic inner life. They were supportive with resources and usually patient, but drew the line at understanding or empathizing - at least as far as I could tell!
My need for attention began to shift to online fora such as SDMB in the mid 2000s. In my time here, I have filled almost every role from listening ear to helpful advisor to out-and-out flaming troll. The trolling would begin when I hit a rough patch and had to confront my life but wasn’t able to.
The one thing I’m not on SDMB, and never have been, is highly involved with any topic area or set of personalities. I don’t actually socialize here any more than I do IRL. I can’t remember facts about most Dopers, except a few I dislike. MMPs and such are tiresome to me, and realizing that makes me sad. About as accessible as I get is the odd cat thread.
Thanks to Effexor and Wellbutrin, I am usually a modestly well-functioning depressive with nonverbal LD. I avoid romantic relationships, most friends and most work. At age 46, I would say my self-reliance is at about the level of a college undergraduate. Several times a year, usually in times when responsibility or growth are at issue, I crash. Self-pity takes over, and I usually have to just let it burn. It rarely takes more than 2-3 days.
I’m at a crossroads at the moment. My parents are the closest people to me, and they’re supportive but elderly, and I have to face the fact that I’m going to have to start caring for all 3 of us before too long. We are in the process of moving to a place where we hopefully will be able to stay together, yet I’ll be able to try once again to build some kind of social and professional context for myself - something I’ve only found for brief periods in my life.
I’d apologize for the life story, but I honestly feel I’m barely scratching the surface here. This, if nothing else, suggests I’m a vampire - there is *always, ALWAYS,*more to say. I could talk, or write, about myself and my depression until I’m too exhausted to think. I’ve done it more times than I can remember. It’s chilling to know that I might be stuck that way, doomed never to be understood, a dark cloud in human form.
Doug, please let me give you some advice that helped me. What I see that you need I call Love - though you may chose to call it energy, it comes through many forms and people. The mistake I see many emotional vampires make is that they latch on to a person till that person is sucked dry, at which time you are left in a lacking state, and that person can no longer help as they are depleted. This cycle continues with you never being satisfied and never getting enough to break free.
My advice is look to Love as the living entity that is trying to help you get all you need, not the person. Follow Love from person to person, place to place as you feel the loving message leads you. If your love energy is coming through a person and they suggest you should join a club (that they are not a member of), do it, try it see how it goes, it may work, it may work for a time, it may not work.
By treating Love as a living entity, instead of the person you are currently sucking from, I believe you will see real progress.
A song comes to mind, perhaps it will help, called ‘Love Enough’ by Point of Grace (you can google/youtube it).
Peace
Okay, call me crazy, but I kind of like what kanicbird just said.