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Feeling you've never been loved

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Dear Gizmo,

My childhood was rough, I was brought up by an alcoholic gang member father who would abuse me and then belittle me and make me worthless. I have never loved myself and I believe that this is where you need to start.

How can others love you if you do not love yourself. Find the inner you, the child or adult that likes anything even if its stupid cause it will make you laugh and feel better about yourself. then once you have found that then find another and then another.

Eventually over time people will see the change and will be drawn to you like a magnet full of positiveness. And this is what we all crave for, to be around that person who makes you feel good. And so Gizmo become that person.
 
I feel it all the time, and I usually just feel sad until I don't feel sad anymore. I don't know what else to do. I've managed to claw my way out of the deepest darkest part of the hole and now I have a career and a savings account and a husband -- all things I never thought would be possible for me -- but I still feel like I'll always be held back somehow.

Growing up it was mostly just me and my abusive mother, and because of it I was so frozen and hypervigilant in social interactions that I could barely talk to other people -- which means I never really learned any healthy ways to connect and attach. Even though I've silenced the voice of my mother in my head and learned to accept and love myself, I still feel like I'll never "catch up" in this area. It's extremely difficult for me to make friends and connect with people. Even when the playing field is level and I think I feel confident, I never quite seem to "fit in" anywhere, and I know it's because I never learned what it's supposed to feel like to be accepted, and I never gained a reliable sense of "OK, this is what I can expect from other people in this interaction," so I always feel and act like a deer in the headlights. Nothing is reliable when you grow up dependent on a loose cannon. They teach you that there's something wrong with you, but they also more subtly teach you that other people are incomprehensible and unsafe.

That's what triggers the feeling for me most of the time. I'll go to a Meetup or even just the short breaks at work where everyone sings and eats cake for someone's birthday, and end up shaken to my core by how difficult and jarring it is to just try and chat in a group for ten minutes. I feel like I'll never have normal friendships no matter how much I learn to love myself.

I wish all the "turn to the body" techniques worked for me. I do a lot of yoga and I know I'd be far worse without it, but stopping to breathe never helps me ground or center. Nothing does.
 
This is something that I am currently dealing with. Other than my Gamma who helped raise us kids, I'm not sure I've even felt true love from my mother. How could she have really loved us, or me, when she stayed with my step dad (still with him) even after multiple confrontations and my sister and I begged her to leave because we feared for our own safety... I worry so much about future relationships because I've never had a real relationship. I have NO idea how to do that and I'm on the wrong side of 25 haha. But really, I've made it a personal goal to share all of MY love with everyone else in hopes that that will help fill the void. Maybe someday I will feel the love back, but until then, maybe emptying my heart for others will help...
 
Maybe someday I will feel the love back, but until then, maybe emptying my heart for others will help...
I think I did this most of my life. I seem lately to have cottoned on to the fact I need to be loving myself, and that actually living myself will enable me to feel and accept the live that others offer. What do you think about that?
Sorry you've felt unloved too x
 
I kind of want to ask others what they do with the sadness of never having been loved.

But at the s...
As I've gotten older, I finally realized that what I need so much is to just be loved "for being me". I have always felt that my "job" in this life is to satisfy the men in my life. I wish sooo much that someone would love me, for no reason at all. Just love....
 
For me I've decided I can give myself the love I always wanted better than anyone else ever will be able to :hug:

Love this.

One of my own lessons in life?

Be the person you want to rescue you.

It doesn't preclude someone amazing coming onto the scene... But if they do? You get to want them, which is infinitely better than being needed, instead of needing them... And now you've got two total badasses in your life, instead of just one. :sneaky: It's a win/win.
 
I realised that one of - no - the most biggest trauma Ive survived is nt being loved. Not being cared for. Not the rapes, the sexual abuses, being bullied at school being scapegoat at home, violence etc etc etc. Solely the lack of love.

I can still remember one of the most painful childhood memory I have. Mother never came to say good night. Didnt even know parents do such things. And I need to say also she never ever tocued me unless sexual abuse was involvedl. No hugs, stroke over hair nthing of what is probably normal. So one night she had visit from a friend that particulary liked me. And for once not in any bad way. After I left the living room to go to my room and go to bed she came in. Sat by my bedside. And then she stroke me over my chin. This is some of the most painful I experienced in all of my childhood. It was so painful tears flooded down my face. But I knew I where to be a good girl. That the tears shouldnt be there. That it wasnt what she wanted nor expected. But that gentle stroke from a woman that couldnt have her own kids and then had an gentle like for me of this reason - that just killed me.

So I belive the lack of love makes us confused. Bewildered in this world. Lost. We can endure a lot but the lack of love we can not.

Maybe you could find some one that has a dog that needs a dog walker? I found a dog this way called Bobby. And the love he has shown me has made all the diference in my world. Made my frozen self lit up. Let me know that I am capable of this thing called love. That there is such a thing at all.

I wish you all the best and send you loving thoughts.
 
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