“I just want someone to care about me.” “I wish I had someone to talk to.”
I feel for you.
It’s never easy going at things alone. It’s not easy to break out of loneliness after being in it for so long. Day after day, you see the happy couples. Inside us, bitterness, jealousy, hopelessness.
When you talk to the normal people, they don’t understand what you’re going through. It’s a struggle to talk to people, so maybe it’s better that you just don’t try anymore. Things don’t work for you anyways.
But...You do want to break this cycle right?
You don’t want to stay in this pain of loneliness forever right?
You wish that you had a better life where you can be more confident right?
Then DON’T give up now! Try with me.
While we want to move towards having relationship with other people, there are also emotional work that we can be doing ourselves.
One of the most common mistakes that people with social anxiety does is jumping into any relationship TOO intensely. It pushes people away, because they feel overwhelmed.
Good thing we can work on emotional management by ourselves. The better we can learn to work through our emotions, the more we can remove this emotional barrier of being too clingy.
Here We Need to Learn How to Comfort Ourselves Emotionally.
In general, no one likes to feel the negative emotions. Anger, sadness, jealousy, anxiety, and more. So when these emotions arise in us, we do things to avoid it. Video games, shopping, music. We would do anything to distract us from feeling the pain of emotions.
This is where we start to lose the ability to care for ourselves emotionally. When we are frustrated with someone, we don’t know how to comfort ourselves. Shopping and video games only help us temporarily.
But there is still hope! Emotional skills can always be developed.
Do this exercise with me - [Please stop at any time if you feel uncomfortable]
I want you to remember a painful memory that you had in the past. The more vividly the better. Feel through the entire emotion. If you feel like crying, then cry. Don’t act on anything, just feel and accept the emotion. Take as long as you need. 30 mins or 3 hours. However long it takes.
Good job. Going through painful memories are never easy.
Now think about an action you can do to comfort yourself when you feel negative emotions. i.e. Playing catch, journaling, etc.
What these two combination does is helping you being able to adjust yourself when you feel bad while accepting your emotions and having a safe outlet afterwards.
So this prepares us for if other people rejects us in some way and allows us to not depend on others to for our own happiness.
