luke wilson said:
The way you described your need to have sex made it appear like you have this hunger inside you. If your need is that great, mine must be going supernova right now as I have 4 years on you and I'm a stone cold virgin surrounded by beautiful women everywhere and all sorts of stuff that is designed to get your heart racing.
fwiw I was a virgin until about the same age as you luke, until I got myself into some relationships that where very unhealthy (and that lasted 7+ years due to my 'loyalty').
In hindsight I can see that pretty much everything to do with any kind of social interaction, 'intimate' relationships being an amplified version (probably because of desires and hormones all mixing together) is based on avoiding the pain of social rejection and angsting about it.
mugatea said:
I'm lovesick at the mo, really putting me in a bad/self loathing place. I see/chat to this woman pretty much everyday - she's an employee of mine and in a happy relationship and generally we meet up most days at the same time to walk dogs! I've never had a girlfriend. I end up withdrawing from people I have feelings for and do a "I dont care about you" act and so this week have been staying away and not walking with her and not being really chatty and then hating myself after for being such a prat. I tried Plenty of fish a couple of weeks ago thinking that might help but after sending 40 messages to local girls and getting zero responses it just made me feel so bad I quit. I have problems with rejection and confrontation, I know this cause a old lady in a dream told me. lol
I'm hoping the EE (which I started this week will help me 'man-up' and behave in a more proper and healthy manner and help with my own self loathing.
Everytime I see this girl it just makes me feel so depressed, really bad and I think there's a combo of starting keto and just starting EE which is adding to my low vibes.
Anyone been lovesick? How did you deal with it? Is me staying away the right thing to do or pathetic? Do I just need a kick up the arse?
Jamie
Again I went through this, and my default behaviour was social withdrawl/isolation - even for 'not having friends'.
A useful thing to learn about us as machines is that memory and imagination are registered as 'real and now' by the brain, and if you are particularly sensitive/predisposed or have gone through many invalidating/painful experiences the accumulated pain can make you hypervigilant to avoiding it.
Feeling like a failure/social outcast, feeling 'broken', and all this being amplified when the sex drive kicks in and you start thinking about having 'failed' compared to the rest of society.
http://www.sott.net/article/226527-To-the-brain-the-pain-of-rejection-really-hurts
To the brain the pain of rejection really hurts
Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press
Tue, 29 Mar 2011 06:22 CEST
Print
Washington - The pain of rejection is more than just a figure of speech.
The regions of the brain that respond to physical pain overlap with those that react to social rejection, according to a new study that used brain imaging on people involved in romantic breakups.
"These results give new meaning to the idea that rejection 'hurts,'"wrote psychology professor Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan and his colleagues. Their findings are reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Co-author Edward Smith of Columbia University explained that the research shows that psychological or social events can affect regions of the brain that scientists thought were dedicated to physical pain.
In a way, we're saying "it's not a metaphor," Smith said in a telephone interview.
The study involved 40 volunteers who went through an unwanted romantic break-up in the previous six months and who said thinking about the break-up caused them to feel intensely rejected.
Functional MRI's were used to study their brains in four situations: When viewing a photo of the ex-partner and thinking about the break-up; when viewing a photo of a friend and thinking of a positive experience with that person; when a device placed on their arm produced a gentle, comforting warmth, and when that device became hot enough to cause pain, though not physical damage.
The two negative situations - thinking about the loss of a partner and the burn - caused response in the overlapping parts of the brain, the study found.
Previous studies had not shown a relationship between physical and emotional pain, but those had used a less dramatic event, such as simply being told someone doesn't like you, Smith said.
In this case, the volunteers were people who had actually been rejected and were still feeling it, he said.
There is evidence that emotional stress, such as the loss of a loved one, can affect people physically, and Smith said studies like this may help researchers devise ways to aid people who are sensitive to loss or rejection.
So fwiw worrying about such things can cause/amplify any anxiety/pain (probably from loneliness -
but it can be any type of physical/emotional pain that triggers this, as well as fatigue, hormonal imbalances, inflammation etc) that already existed. Add in social withdrawal as a coping mechanism and guilt and you create a loop in which the pain levels of 'social rejection' can become unbarable.
The irony (and part of the catch 22) is that from the point of view of evolution/human nature is that the best way of dealing with pain is sharing it socially so isolating the self makes it worse as there is no outlet for it. Feeling safe enough to share is part of that, as your brain/experience probably tells you that sharing such pain opens you to be hurt by social rejection! Having someone tell you that 'your pain is stupid/means nothing'.
Now I could be wrong on this, but the same underlying 'fear of social rejection'/amplification of pain may be present in those that tend to be driven to seek out sex. The difference is that they learned how to engage socially. If you can spot anxiety and a 'build up'/amplification of feelings that eventually drives you to 'do something' then it seems highly probable. Guilt and shame are other clues. In the end the behaviour that is used to 'relieve the pressure' isn't so much the issue as the drive and faulty self beliefs that cause the build up.
The brain should negate the pain by releasing opiods, but overactivation (or genetics) can cause opiod tolerance - thus repeated exposure to social rejection (real or imagined) becomes more and more unbarable.
_http://clubhousenews.com/our-brain-releases-painkillers-when-were-rejected/
Our brain releases painkillers when we’re rejected
10/12/2013
By Casey Frye, CCNN Writer
The popular saying, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is usually taught to young children to teach them how to stay strong when others say mean things. Essentially, it’s saying that as long as a person is not physically injuring you, there is no way you can be harmed. However, researchers from the University of Michigan find that tauntings do sting a little, but the brain is there to kiss the pain away!
Of course, not literally, because brains don’t have lips after all. However, our ol’ noggins do have a special chemical known as “opioid.” Usually, when our bodies get injured, the brain releases this chemical to kind of dull the pain so it doesn’t hurt as bad. Apparently, it also sends out opioids when we’re socially rejected!
In their study, the Michigan researchers had volunteers go through fake personal profiles and select ones they felt would be interested in going out with them, kind of like an online dating site. Then the researchers place the volunteers in a PET scanner – a machine that images out the brain – and told the participants that person didn’t want to go on a date (how sad!). Guess what happened?
There was a surge of opioids released into the body even though there wasn’t a physical injury, as if the body was curing those rejection blues! “This is the first study to peer into the human brain to show that the opioid system is activated during social rejection,” said David T. Hsu, Ph.D., a research assistant professor of psychiatry. “In general, opioids have been known to be released during social distress and isolation in animals, but where this occurs in the human brain has not been shown until now.”
You want to know what’s really crazy though? The same exact surge happened when the person was socially accepted as well! That is, opioids were released when researchers told participants the person they were interested in wanted to go out. Hey, what’s the deal there? “The opioid system is known to play a role in both reducing pain and promoting pleasure, and our study shows that it also does this in the social environment,” says Hsu.
The scientists hope to use the information to treat individuals who suffer from depression.
Mal7 said:
[..]
In finding partners I think we are looking for intimacy, but having physical relations with a person we have just met is not necessarily intimate in the sense of intimacy that is of most value (I think that kind of intimacy would involve learning more about the other person on the kind of "mental plane" level - what they like, what they think about things, how they tick.) M Scott Peck's book "The Road Less Travelled" had a couple of chapters that I thought were quite good about dismissing the idea of romantic love, and suggesting instead that loving someone is better described as making a conscious decision and commitment. "The Narcissistic Family" by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman & Robert M. Pressman also has a short chapter on Intimacy, Sex, and Friendship:
[. . .] there is a world of difference between recreational or procreational sex, and sex as an expression of deep feeling and commitment. As the heroine in a recent best-seller says, "In some ways, loving is easy. It's trusting that's so hard." Our corollary to that is that sex may be easy, but intimacy is hard.
- p. 122.
When I was going through this myself people would give me advice, tell me I could redirect my sexual energy into other things, not to think about it so much etc etc....none of it really helped and mostly just fed my (very ineffectual) self coping mechanism of social isolation/anxiety/pain amplification/angsting about how 'broken' I was as a human and how I didn't deserve to be around others.
I think the above quote sums it up - I was always on alert for social rejection (real or perceived) and so could never be truly (soulfully) intimate with anyone. Taking on advice was not possible. This also got blocked because it seems that 'no one understood my pain'
which appart from being passively narcissistic was actually more about my personal wounds and how they formed - specifically I never felt (even if I was) emotionally validated. It's like the teenager that scream "You just don't understand me!" and slams the door - what they are actually saying is "I'm feeling really emotionally hurt right now, totally invalidated and socially isolated". In short "I'm experiencing social rejection right now, and it hurts like someone just broke my leg!"
More on all of this
here.
No one wants to be told what they feel is wrong, because it freaking hurts! Especially if it's the emotions, and social interactions are all about emotions. Avoiding emotional invalidation, and seeking emotional validation. You can't hear the advice of others when you are doing that automatically, and especially if they can't communicate it in a way that acknowledges your feelings.
So what happens if you can see all of that, and take it out of the equation? If you can find healthier ways to get emotional validation (i.e. validate your existence) and eventually learn to self validate (in a non narcissistic ways - tricky huh!), then the pressure to 'go and find someone' drops away.
Sure you may get lonely, or may want sex, or even just a superficial conversation - but you can then calmly acknowledge it and have more room to choose to do something different about it :)
These things don't go away, because we're all human.
What can change is how we see/understand them (are my emotions becoming amplified/dysregulated, and driving me to do something I don't want to do?) and with the right tools/practice what we choose to do with them.
*edit* clarity
