EndGameNYC

I've been debating with myself to comment in this thread, in part because you seem to be very sensitive around how other people respond to you. The other part is that you haven't taken well my comments in earlier threads of yours that dealt with similar concerns, and I'm not at all interested in making you feel bad. Or worse. Yet nothing has changed. Some people have commented around or more directly to your experiences so that it is no longer just the elephant in the room.

When I was much younger, and then when I was drinking, I craved the company of other people, but wasn't certain about how to go about getting it. I was much more interested in validation from other people than I was in creating a relationship with them. When I was drinking, I repelled many more people than I attracted. After a time, both the most comforting and the most reprehensible response I got was pity which, as it so often does, turned to indifference. What was wrong with me?

When we don't learn or never had an opportunity to learn what's referred to as "social skills," we may as well be blind when it comes to our transactions with other people. Either we try too hard to get the attention and care we want, or we send conflicting and often contradictory messages, without even knowing it. The outcome is often what you've described, a kind of "learned helplessness" that's founded in the degrading belief that no matter what I do, nothing gets better, nothing makes a difference. Not really, though. What I can do is find a way to make a difference in my own life. Appeals to helplessness are more or less the background noise that comes from despair, and they only reflect a familiar reality that has consumes us, rather than what can actually be. No one moves forward by repeating the suffering of the past.

In sobriety, I've come to learn some of the things I can do to put people off, but not all of them. How can I not know these things? Am I not the best judge of who I am? I've learned to contribute to and to sustain my relationships by holding up my part of the bargain which, in large part, is to offer the honesty of my feelings in a way that is not harmful. And when it's more work than otherwise, I've learned to re-assess, and then sometimes detach. There is often a whimsical element in interpersonal relationships that defies reason, that indefinable and elusive "chemistry" that exists between two people. It's never a simple one-to-one relationship in which I contribute X, and therefore the other person should do Y.

I do believe that you're the way that you've described yourself, a "nice guy," "helpful" and all the rest. But that's rarely enough to create a meaningful relationship with someone else. I think you're at a point where something else needs to be tried. Therapy, and especially group therapy, may provide some realistic information about how others perceive you and respond to you. I know from experience that living in a vacuum encourages distorted thinking about ourselves and other people. As a result, we often behave in ways that confirm our distortions, only strengthening our conviction that we are hopeless and that other people are uncaring.

You're framing the most familiar and the most destructive way of being for you in your life as all that there is for you. Empty, alone, despairing...There is no prize at the end of this black-and-white rainbow. You need to do something different, and discover how it is that you communicate to other people that you'd rather be left alone than otherwise.