Have you ever tried volunteering with animals? I’d suggest looking into if you can help the local animal shelter with socializing the cats, walking the dogs, taking photos of the animals to market them, cleaning the cages, etc. It might be easier than doing anything people-focused.
I really believe what will help you most is just trying to find something to do that will distract you from over-analyzing yourself. One thing that is very clear from your posts is that you spend A LOT of time thinking about yourself. Now a lot of us are very self-focused so I’m not saying that as a criticism. It’s easy to be self-absorbed, but I don’t think it’s healthy for you to be so self-absorbed when you don’t even like yourself.
My opinion is that you’re never going to find the answers by spending more time focusing on how bad you are and why you became this way. You’ve been trying that for years and it just seems like you keep going in circles of neurotic self-absorption.
Nobody has the magic answer that will turn you into someone you like. So the best thing you can do is try to find ways to distract yourself from dwelling on all the ways you don’t like yourself. Many of us have unhealthy thoughts to some degree and a lot of us deal with it by just trying not to think about it and trying to focus on other things. That’s why I think the healthiest thing for you would be to find some way of focusing some of that energy on something else - whether it’s animals, another therapy group, something else…try to find SOMETHING outside of yourself and your parents’ house.
Have you ever thought about donating your musical abilities? You could give away free lessons or entertain people for free.
I was a sad depressed person before I started giving away my artwork. At first I felt like Little Miss Weirdly doing it. Now I feel like I am providing a useful function. I keep people from spending too much money during the holidays. I help to create a memorable experience for people visiting the city. I challenge misconceptions.
It keeps me so preoccupied that I no longer navel-gaze on my suckitude.
Thanks for your post since contrary to all other posters, I didn’t know what an emotional vampire/victim was.
One thing that is unclear to me : does the EVV just revels in real but quite mundane affliction? Perceive a negative event as vastly more tragic than it really is? Consciously lies/exaggerates to get attention?
Am I missing something? From what I can tell, you have identified yourself as some fabricated, user-friendly version of a personality disorder which is marked by both an inability/unwillingness to change and permission to reject any input from others. Yet, you started a thread in which you invite others to ask you questions and/or give you input, knowing that ultimately you won’t change and they will be left feeling drained and frustrated?
I don’t know how generalizable my experience is. I only know one vampire. What seems the case here is more that she exaggerates the *effects *of any minor tragedy, but does not fabricate the tragedies themselves. And she has a knack for ending up in tragic situations. She stayed married to a physically/verbally/sexually-abusive asshole for 14 years. She went right into another marriage and (surprise surprise) he was an asshole too. Now she’s unmarried (hopefully for good), but bitches incessantly about the tragedy of her eternal loneliness. She’s diabetic and refused to change her eating or exercise habits, which is 100% why she’s on disability now.
She does not lie–in fact she has an obsession with truth. She cannot let go of anything. I’ve met people with infinitely more tragic backgrounds than hers, but nobody can be allowed to be more tragic in conversation than she. Tragedy and adversity have a tendency to make the average person more stoic, but on her they seem to have the opposite effect.
Since she’s unable to work and rarely able to drive, she is inwardly-focused 24 hours a day (something the OP also seems to have a problem with). She appears to perceive common adverse events as vastly more negative than they really are: one time she stepped on a cheez-it and started bawling about how she was going to lose her foot (obviously, she didn’t).
Outright fabricating things for attention is a separate affliction (pathological liar). Although there’s no reason it couldn’t be comorbid with emotional vampirism, that hasn’t been my experience.
Yeah. Kudos to all those who have taken the time to give advice thus far, but if ever there was a thread with big flashing neon lights that say “I’m just doing this for the attention and will never ever listen to a single thing you say” it would probably be this one.
So I have no advice for the OP. No questions to ask either.
Huh so my mom is an emotional vampire? She always asks for advice which she never takes, it has gotten to the point of forcing her and then she always bails at the last minute leaving everyone with less money and less give a fuck. Then six months later she asks for help with the same issue, seemingly blind to the fact of what a disaster it was last time.
She also has irrational and nonsensical reasons why any solution can’t work, she’d rather shit in plastic bags and cry to you about, but suggest some root killer for the pipes and no you’re going to kill my pipes! Suggest to hire a plumber and NO!! only a specialist $20K plumber is qualified, and on and on and on and ON.
She also purposely creates bad situations so she can later cry about them or be doted on, I suspect she intentionally aggravates her health issues so she can go to the hospital. Stuff like saying OTC meds can’t help diarrhea she she won’t take them, then hospitalized for dehydration and diarrhea she still refuses to take meds and only relents after a week of medical attention OR the threat of scary procedures or surgery. It is like Munchhausen syndrome with no proxy.
She complains her cell plan sucks and she is wasting hundreds of dollars, she complains the phone is so broken and old she can only use it when it is plugged in.
She says son do you know how I could get a good cell phone plan?
Much research and time wasting ensues, finally we manage to talk her into walmart. They have prepaid phones for twenty bucks, with 40 bucks a month unlimited everything. We know she is going to do it yea!!!
Nope, she out of the fucking blue asked the sales clerk if she could call internationally and the answer was not without a credit card added to the account. Well that was that, she was not going to go with a plan that won’t let her call Japan should she want to call Japan for some bizarre reason.
We mailed her a pre paid phone we PAID FOR INCLUDING THE FIRST MONTHS SERVICE and she never touched it, sixty bucks down the toilet.
A few months later…
Oh son my cell phone is horrible and my plan so expensive, do you know a good cell phone company?:mad: Fuck you mom.
Hey all. Had a fairly good week helping set up temporary 2nd residence for the family (and myself) in a new city. Now I’m back in the old house and feeling the “Old Normal” self-pity again, thanks to a few hyper-violent action thrillers on the teevee, a missed dose of antidepressants and reading plenty of soul-searching tripe from lonely males on the innertubes.
Thanks to almost all of you for commenting, and all of you who were constructive. Even Enderw24 I can kind of excuse for expressing an attitude of self-preservation. Why get mixed up with folks who spill their guts, then disappear like a bad dream? Let’s just say that by disappearing, I spared you all a lot of crap you needn’t deal with. (Although I suspect living_in_hell is mostly looking for company in hi/r hot little confines.)
lavenderviolet, you suggested I don’t like myself much, but I have a defense mechanism built-in. Here it is:
I think I like myself pretty well until I envision interacting seriously with others in the real world. And once I have to interact on their terms, I don’t like myself at all. Anything I have to do solely to meet someone else’s demands is a ticket to Trauma City with express service to Guiltsville.
kanicbird, I might not know what love is unless it hits me in just the right spot at just the right time. It’s come mostly from other needy, fragile people (such as my family), who are liable to withdraw it very quickly. Unless there’s some negative payback down the road, I’m liable to devalue those everyday moments of grace as just pleasant politeness. Paradoxically, if others really cared…they’d stop caring, and have enough, and be hurtful.
One of my lasting wells of bitterness and self-pity is that I never learned how to fail at anything. Not that things were all easy successes of course - I just never got the message that failure was OK. It was just assumed that I would somehow Get Over It. So when it turned out that I needed that help but it wasn’t going to come, it was a major, negative life lesson.
If there is anything that led me to want to talk things out until no one could listen to another word, I guess that would be a big part of it. Life tells me to fuck off every day, and I have no constructive response.
Doug, I have low self-esteem as well, and I also fail at a lot of things, but to me, failure at one thing is no reason not to try something else. Just because one person let you down doesn’t mean everybody else will. And if life tells you to fuck off, well then, give life the finger and keep going. Also, I would suggest avoiding media that depress you, such as angst-inducing movies and books about real-life tragedies. My late mother had a ceramic frog on a pedestal with the inscription “Do one thing every day that makes you happy.” I try to live by that as much as possible. I still have my bad days, but that doesn’t mean that by extension the rest of my life will suck and I should just give up and stay in bed. Fuck that noise. (sorry about the Pit-worthy language.) I have a child, a job, an extended family that cares for me, and now a group of friends I care for as if they were my family also. Enjoy your life, and screw what anybody else thinks.
Unless, of course, that one person is you. I imagine you know what I mean here.
So many of us punish ourselves half-heartedly, just to feel self-pity and feel a little more alive, when we really ought to crush that part of ourselves. Just drown it in the bathtub and refuse to listen to the screaming.
(BTW, I’m hoping the above post is obviously too drastic a response, and that someone will have a saner take. Deep down I don’t believe that being “self-pitiless” is any better than being self-pitying. That’s the thing with the Victim - tell him his pain doesn’t matter and he just makes more pain.)
