That’s not true. I like people and people seem to get along with me fine, but I can’t really make friends because going to meetups with strangers tends to routinely lead to me beating myself to a pulp. I really want to have friends, but it never leads anywhere good because if conversations go the wrong way and I think I’m upsetting someone I blow up and severely harm myself.
And, I mean, that’s a relationship dealbreaker, true. It’s why I know I can never date again. But you’re vastly oversimplifying the reasons someone may not have friends.
I mean, once with my ex-girlfriend she was smiling and I couldn’t understand why (I can’t remember the situation but it was odd to smile in it). I asked her why and she said she didn’t know, but kept smiling. It really freaked me out and I started having a panic attack and had to excuse myself. After I got home my panic was so bad I beat myself for 30 minutes because it helps me calm down. This is why I can’t have friends, I know it’s irrational and weird, but for some reason her actions didn’t make sense and I couldn’t process it and it just made me go apeshit on myself.
That has nothing to do with whether I like anyone or they like me.
Hmmm… as someone who doesn’t have friends, I’m a bit torn here as I think I’m a pretty good wife to my husband!
My reasons for not having a lot of friends are
I moved to the other side of the planet.
At the age of 40 with no children, most people I’ve met already have established circles of friends (either old friends from school or new friends made by meeting parents of their kids friends) and/or aren’t interested in establishing a friendship with someone who doesn’t have kids (which is a shame, because I love spending time with kids, but I understand it can be boring for their kids to spend time with us when we aren’t bringing along kids of our own for them to play with).
I’m not a particularly girly girl. I’m a geek in the true rather than fashionable sense of the word, so the pool of potential friends is smaller than the pool for people with more mainstream interests.
I guess it’s not really an issue because my husband is also quite introverted, so we are quite happy to spend our time together without feeling like we need to do stuff with other people. I could definitely see there being an imbalance where one person has no friends and the other person has a circle of friends they like to hang out with.
You’re describing pretty dang unusual behavior – if you can’t handle someone smiling without panicking and beating yourself, this is probably a major factor in why people are put off from being friends with you. Are you seeing a therapist?
I mean, it can work out fine which would be great, but the reason its a dealbreaker for some people is there’s just too much potential the person lacks friends for negative reasons. When dating, some people just don’t want to risk it for the following reasons:
-Ever person your partner knows is through you.
-Partner never wants to go out and interact with other people, so you’re always doing social activities alone.
-OR, Partner always wants to hang out with you and your friends; if you want to just hang out with your friends you feel guilty for excluding partner.
-There aren’t other people you get to see your parnter interact with to get a better idea of what they are like when they are not interacting with their boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse.
-If/when the relationship goes sour, partner makes you feel guilty for breaking up because they don’t have any other friends or companions.
And I know people might argue with this, but I consider a friendship to be easier to build than a romantic relationship. If a person struggles to build or maintain friendships, how are they going to make a relationship work? Friendships are a much lower commitment. Its true its much easier to build friendships earlier in life through school and such, but I think the potential is there to make friends through work or other social activities. My wife, for example, has many friends in her current job and she’s only worked there about 5 months; we don’t have kids but her friends run the gamut from working moms to childless single women.
I’ve had three therapists in a row tell me in no uncertain terms that I’m unhelpable. One went as far to say that I’m (verbatim) “too fucked up to ever be normal” and implied that I should possibly kill myself. I believe he said “have you tried medication? Like, an entire bottle of advil and some vodka?” This is not me warping their words.
And I remember the situation now. I was crying because I did bad on an exam and she was smiling and laughing at me crying. She said she didn’t know what else to do and it freaked me out so I left and hurt myself to help me calm down.
Exactly what I was thinking when I read Sam Lowry’s post. If a friend of mine was seriously considering rejecting someone because “even though he’s great and cute, he doesn’t know anyone else here and therefore will probably mire himself in my circle my friends, cling too hard to me, demand I be his social director, and then…OMG, he’s gonna stalk me if we break up!” then it would make me question her commitment to dating and her maturity level.
Like Blaster Master, I don’t throw around the word “deal breaker” lightly. Probably because if someone is great enough to arouse my interest (which is no easy feat for me; I don’t suffer fools gladly), it’s hard for me to fathom throwing them away unless we’re talking about non-theoretical problems. Like if I can’t communicate with you about important things, that’s a deal breaker. You have a criminal past and I’m worried about your ethical standards? That’s a problem. You spend more money than you earn? You’re too lazy to clean up after yourself? Deal breakers.
You don’t have friends? Well, if it’s because you’re an antisocial nutcase, I will probably be able to discern that by the end of the 1st date. If it’s simply because you’ve moved a lot, are a homebody, and don’t need a lot of social interaction, then I can work with that.
Crying because you did poorly on an exam? Hey, we’ve all been stressed out and just broken down in tears after an exam or two.
Calming yourself down from a panic attack not by, say, focusing on your breathing or going to your mental happy place, but by beating yourself for 30 minutes? That’s a problem.
If any psychologist or psychiatrist told you that you’re unfixable, they’re really bad at their jobs, to say the least. If they told you to kill yourself, they’re horribly unethical and should be reported. No one is unfixable, no one.
Anyone reading this thread who feels like they don’t have friends because they are broken people, listen up: you’re not broken. You may have social impediments that make finding friends a challenge, but you’re not broken and you can learn social skills and psychological coping skills that will allow you to connect to other people.
If you’ve tried therapy and it hasn’t worked, find another therapist – it is very common for people in therapy to find themselves with a therapist they don’t work well with and then ask for a referral to someone else. If you have three shitty therapists in a row, keep trying. Were all your teachers awesome? Probably not – I know I had a lot of crappy teachers. That doesn’t mean all teachers are crappy or going to school in general is worthless.
Support groups for depression, social anxiety, Autism Spectrum Disorder, etc. are out there and are worth finding, too.
Human beings are social animals. Even tiny interactions like exchanging greetings with cashiers at the grocery store will boost your mood and increase your social connection. Keep at it and don’t listen to anyone who tells you you’re unfixable.
I have an idea for a sketch comedy starring Jragon and JohnClay as two buddies trying to navigate the tangled web of human social interaction. Sorta like 3rd rock from the sun.
That’s not fair. I’m usually okay in a business settings as long as the interaction is known to me in advance. I’m just so anxious much the time I can’t do anything, social related or not. It doesn’t have to do with people, that’s a side effect of my freakouts, not the cause. I’m just wildly unstable, sometimes I’ll be a completely normal person for weeks. Really. Totally able to be a rational, social human, read social cues, and be fun. I’ll be able to handle unplanned social interactions, and even cope perfectly fine with accidentally hurting someone or talking about something uncomfortable.
Some days I’m so fucked up I’ll blow up on myself for something stupid like doing some math wrong or forgetting some mundane fact. When that thing with my ex happened, I’d been up for three straight days doing homework for a really important class I was on a grade boundary on when I got the bad news about the test, and I was having one of my bad weeks.
When I’m rational me, I get people just fine. I act just fine. I interact just fine. When I’m insane me I’m completely, unmistakably, uncontrollably, violently insane and prone to extreme self harm for reasons rational me is perfectly aware are completely WTF. The problem is I have no way to predict when my… I don’t know, brain chemistry or whatever will flip to insane me and I’ll be unstable for the next who knows how long.
Your word salad posts aren’t helping your case. And a lot of what you are saying is extremely :dubious: in nature. A therapist that told you to kill yourself? There’s some sdth.txt if I ever saw it!
I don’t know what to tell you. That really happened. It was after me failing another CBT-ish assignment he wanted me to do, he got really mad and started shouting stuff like that and called me hopeless if I couldn’t do them. That was the only bad one though. The other two merely told me they had no idea how to help and I was outside their ability/expertise, but didn’t know of anyone that might be able to help either.
To be fair, I came in covered in bite marks all over my arms because I was in crazy mode and had punished myself for failing the assignment, so he may have been blindsided because up to that point we’d only been working on my social anxiety and anxiety. He wasn’t aware of my self harm yet.
Pardon the phrase, but that’s nuts. They sound like terrible therapists. If you have stretches of time when you’re normal and stretches of time when you have massive anxiety and self-injure, something clearly is going awry in your brain – maybe it’s bipolar disorder, maybe it’s a panic disorder, but it’s something concrete.
Have you talked to your primary care physician about this? Maybe they will be able to help you where the therapists haven’t, or could give you a referral to someone you haven’t yet worked with. (I get my psych meds from my PCP – you don’t necessarily need a psychiatrist.)
E: Just saw your other posts…it could be that your therapists aren’t trained in dealing with self-injury. (For example, my therapist works with me on my depression and anxiety, but she has no experience with ADHD, so we don’t work on that.) They might have been thrown for a loop when they realized you were dealing with a lot more than garden-variety anxiety and didn’t react appropriately. But the behavior you’re displaying is not completely unique or foreign to psychiatry, you know? There’s got to be someone in your medical network that can treat you for anxiety with self-injury. Seriously, please don’t give up – please ask your doctor for a referral. If you give me a minute, I’ll try to dig up a national contact number you could call to find out what resources are available.