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I Know They Care, But Can't Feel It.

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There are a couple people in my life that I know truly and honestly care about me, what is happening in my life, what I am going through and try to support me however they can. I know this because they have helped me with things instantly and have never held it against me or tried to say, "I did this for you, you should appreciate it. Blah, blah, blah." I've even tried to push them away multiple times, knowing that I don't deserve their time or compassion, but they have been steady in their support and just ignore my requests for them to just give up on me. Logically I know they care, I can say they care, but I don't actually feel it. If anything, this gets translated into feeling guilt. I'm sure there are probably links from past trauma that is causing this. Anyone else have struggles like this? Advice?
 
I can absolutely empathize with this feeling, Life. I wish I had some words of wisdom on how to open the door to feeling love and support. I really don't. All I can say is I relate strongly to this feeling and have experienced this many times.

Really, this is how I feel when I'm depressed and dissociative, so I'm numbed out anyway. It's like having a local anesthetic emotionally. If my hand were anesthetized, I could touch it and intellectually know it is being touched, but I wouldn't feel the sensation in the hand that was numbed.

This is the dark, dank land of depression for me, where there is little or no light in my world and I can't experience any form of positivity without it feeling muffled and distant. That place is a lie. It is the place that tells me things do not get better, that I am unloved, that my place in the world is insignificant. All lies. :(
 
A couple of possibilities come to my mind, though I'm not a professional.

One is... if you have counterproductive thoughts that quickly go through your mind when these folks do something kind for you, you can actually identify and change those thoughts to realistic ones that will open the possibility to feel supported. It can be really hard to identify such thoughts, for me they have gone by at light speed sometimes!

Another possibility is that you might need to give yourself loads of time to feel safe feeling supported. Maybe part of you needs to grow in order to do this, and these friends will help nurture this part -- but the process might be really slow. You can help nurture yourself too and such friends can be great examples for how to treat yourself.

I'm sure there are other possibilities that I'm not thinking of too. However maybe giving yourself space to figure this out slowly is a good step no matter what?

Do you have a therapist? Maybe they can help you figure this out.
 
Yes, I can relate. I have some tentative advice prefaced by a question. You don't have to tell us the nature of your trauma if you don't want to (sorry if you have done this in a previous post and I missed it) but is it something recent or something that dates from early childhood? The reason I ask is that the inability to feel supported even when you know people do care about you is part of the difficulty with connection that stems from trauma and interrupted bonding in very early childhood. It's like there are simultaneous forces pulling you in different directions: desperately wanting to feel connection but afraid to accept it and pushing it away when offered, because your nervous system hasn't learned how to tolerate it. If this sounds like you at all, there is a book I would recommend called Healing Developmental Trauma, by Laurence Heller. If you go to youtube and type in the title of the book, you will find a two -part interview where he goes over his work in some detail. I've recommended this book on the forum several times now because it's just the best I've found of its genre, that explains how very early trauma affects us and proposes a system of therapy designed to heal the deficits. It's a fairly new system and of course then you have the problem of finding a therapist trained in it, and I have no idea whether it has reached Russia at all. But even though I also am facing that hurdle, at least now I have the understanding of why my symptoms are so severe and the hope that they can be healed.

There are other possibilities for why you are having this problem of course, like depression, a history of being told you don't deserve help, emotional numbness caused by trauma, or lots of other things. But my guess, in the absence of more information, is that even if any of these are the case, the core issue may be this trouble with connection. Let us know if that fits.
 
One is... if you have counterproductive thoughts that quickly go through your mind when these folks do something kind for you, you can actually identify and change those thoughts to realistic ones that will open the possibility to feel supported. It can be really hard to identify such thoughts, for me they have gone by at light speed sometimes!
I just had another thought. Could it be that you expect your friends to give up on you if you let them know how much you are suffering? Have other friends, or other people in your life, done this before? Maybe the association for you is "if I accept help too many times, this person will get tired of me and leave". Which may not be true at all, but if it has happened before, you could be guarding against getting hurt again. I know this happens for me. Just another possibility.
 
the inability to feel supported even when you know people do care about you is part of the difficulty with connection that stems from trauma and interrupted bonding in very early childhood. It's like there are simultaneous forces pulling you in different directions: desperately wanting to feel connection but afraid to accept it and pushing it away when offered, because your nervous system hasn't learned how to tolerate it.
This really articulates what goes on for me. I know what you mean, @lifeisdifficult, I can't feel any of the caring that a few people express towards me. I know they aren't lying, because they are honest, trustworthy people; but it can actually cause me physical pain to hear them tell me that they care.

I don't think I classify as having childhood trauma, but I was isolated as a child; my therapist says neglected, I'm not sure it's that strong - but there was no affection or connection expressed to me from any person until I was around 8, and by then I strongly rejected it.

This thread is really provocative, in a good way. Thank you for starting it - and you are definitely not alone. I don't know how to fix it either. @sun seeker, thanks for the book recommendation.
 
dont know how to fix it eiether sorry, but this is also issue for me too. maybe you can accept little parts of what they give you... take tiny steps, find what you can accept and build on it bit by bit. accepting help is hard when you dont feel you deserve it. It sounds to me like if they didnt want to help you heal and be there for you, they wouldnt show you so much caring. From what you said, it doesnt sound like they are going anywhere away from you. They accept you for who you are already. They accept your response to them caring as who you are. Its what you feel you can give back, may not be much now, but maybe it can get better, so feeling guilty only puts a wall there, let them help you climb over it.

For example : I'm working on this with my kids. Sometimes accepting hugs from them is hard for me and makes me anxious. I'm trying to deal with this like i said above.. little steps .. they give more than I feel I give back to them. I felt guilty about it, and it wasnt until I saw that whether I responded to them more than I was or not didnt make a difference to them. They wanted nothing more from me than to recognize I was cared for by them. That this was meant to be something without strings.

I still dont have deep feelings from them caring, but im trying to build on responding to them bit by bit by giving them a hug first at times. I dont know if that will help you at all, hope it does somehow.
 
Yep. Intellectualize the emotion so that you don't disregard it and consider it to be non-existent. I'm still working on this one.... I can intellectualize the love from my family, but I'm still the biggest damn cynic when it comes to feeling love or care or concern from anyone else.
 
I don't think I classify as having childhood trauma, but I was isolated as a child; my therapist says neglected, I'm not sure it's that strong - but there was no affection or connection expressed to me from any person until I was around 8, and by then I strongly rejected it.
It doesn't take a lot. We're not talking necessarily about major traumas here (though they are included), but anything that interrupts the normal development of the child's ability to connect. It can be as simple as hospital birth practices, major stress to the mother during pregnancy, early hospitalization, a mother's postpartum depression, anything consistently stopping the mother from picking up the baby when it cries... If you were given no affection or connection until age 8, that would have had a serious effect on your ability to connect later, as well as on all sorts of other things. The good news is it is possible to turn around. It's a really good book.
 
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