I have Complex PTSD.

I was raised in a hellhole with no references for how human connection is supposed to work, who can and cannot be trusted, how sex works, how relationships work… Usually your parents are supposed to teach you these things, but mine taught me that nobody can be trusted and I deserved to be tortured. So, I’ve spent the last 10 years slowly, painstakingly piecing together what love and connection looks like from almost nothing, all for the chance of a loving relationship.

I’ve been going to therapy, but often asking questions about love and connection here helps to get me unstuck from a mental rut and grounds me in the real world just a bit more. I ask a lot of questions simply because there’s a lot to learn, and it’s often things that are obvious to other people (like voicing your needs in a relationship). Some answers I’ve gotten have helped me a lot and genuinely improved my ability to trust others. I don’t have any trusted individuals I can talk to in real life besides my therapist, and I only get a couple hours a month with her.

If you have any better suggestions on where to ask these kinds of questions, I’m open to hearing them. But from what I’ve seen, there aren’t a lot of Q&A style communities here on Lemmy that are very active. Most Lemmy communities have barely any activity, so if I posted anything there, nobody will see it. And I don’t want to give Reddit traffic.

No, honestly? If you can’t tell I’m a human by now, we are genuinely f u c k e d as a species. I have never had anyone accuse me of being AI like this before and it’s so fucking grim that people can’t tell I’m a real person. At least we don’t have any age verification bullshit going on here, but I don’t know what you expect me to say or do at this point to prove I’m a real guy. You honestly just convinced me that the Internet truly is dead at this point. Tear it all down. See you in the real world.

I won’t know until I try and if I get rejected then I have lost nothing and gained knowledge, honed social skills, and gave it my all.

I like this mindset. For me, rejection felt like death, but I didn’t know at the time that this was because of trauma. I’ve been locked out of pursuing intimacy in part because my brain would interpret rejection to mean something it doesn’t (Dad was right VS we’re not compatible). But I didn’t lose anything externally; the loss was in my head, and I can work on my mindset to diminish the amount of shame I feel.

I’m hoping I am reaching a stage of recovery where I can lose a lot less sanity from rejection and start talking to more people in real life. In fact, it kind of already happened. This is my lowest upvote ratio on a post and I haven’t collapsed in shame and defeat, just staying curious and trying to learn.

I’m straight.

Entertaining the idea that I needed to somehow force myself to be bi to be loved just reinforced the idea that my real self is unlovable and that women’s desires are monolithic, so I stopped doing it in favor of trying to deconstruct my sexist beliefs – namely, that men’s sexual desires are innately predatory and women are passive victims of men who have no agency or desires. Dismantling this view is what made me realize that I am vulnerable to advances by women and the possibility of intimacy with them terrifies me.

Maybe what I need to do is to recognize that this agency means that women are individuals with their own preferences, and for some women, many of their preferences will overlap with my own traits. Treating women as a monolith was a symptom of my failure to engage with them as individuals because I had conceptualized them all as victims.

Man, I hate that you can’t tell who’s real and who’s AI nowadays.

I have a bad habit of turning everything into a grand narrative with lots of background details when it doesn’t really have to be, and I’ve been pretty verbose long before this stupid LLM slop wave. I’ve always written like that because I thought it would help people understand my situation, but now I’m starting to think it doesn’t actually help that much. Too many blanks for people’s minds to fill in, to the point where it’s like they’re talking to a totally different person.

Just a symptom of loneliness I think. “Hi, before you answer my question, please read my biography so you know as much about my life as a close friend would.”

Maybe keeping things simple and providing less context is better.

Thank you.

I guess I’ve just been far too susceptible to the idea that if the people around me make faces or get short with me, it confirms that I am as worthless as my parents made me feel. So I’ve always been to be afraid to be soft or a little effeminate because it would hurt my fragile self-esteem when some people would punish those traits so harshly in men.

But just because the people who will love me aren’t right in front of me doesn’t mean that I’m unlovable. It just means that I need to keep looking.

I met someone who gushed over how adorable I was once. I was just too afraid to trust her because I never realized that she was seeing right through my paper-thin veneer of masculinity because I just looked so gentle and clumsy to her. I thought at the time that it was just a fluke and I found one of the 0.001% of people who would accept me, but now, I don’t think that it was.

Yeah, the “most guys are pretty quiet” thing is what has been tripping me up. That led me to a chain of reasoning like:

Most guys aren’t vocal during sex → Women don’t expect guys to be vocal during sex → Women would get turned off by guys who are vocal during sex.

And of course, all of this hinges on treating men and women as monoliths with deterministic behavior rather than individuals with individual tastes, preferences, and openness to new experiences.

I think I’ll probably encounter a lot of women who still like more conventionally manly men. But where I’ve gone wrong is believing that my worth is contingent upon how popular my physical and emotional traits are, and that a woman rejecting me confirms that Dad was right. That way of thinking is my weakness, and it prevents me from thinking about positive things that will help me better connect with others because I am too busy hating myself over something that isn’t even a real flaw. It’s like saying that I’m worse than everyone else because my favorite color is yellow when red, green, and blue are more popular. Just because I like a less popular color doesn’t mean I’m incompatible with people who like the other colors.

So I think the solution is to embrace liking the color yellow and stop worrying about the other colors. It’s to work on cultivating the sweet, silly, caring masculinity I want to embody and trust that there will be others who like it. Maybe I’ll end up with a woman who wants to see me get dramatically flustered and melty during sex because it’s telegraphed by the rest of my personality.

So basically, the porn stuff is all bullshit and what really matters is building trust, being attentive, and showing your partner that you’re enthusiastic for them? So then if you sound like kind of a goofball sometimes, it’s just kind of cute and funny rather than a deal-breaker?

Obviously women aren’t a monolith, but I’m imagining it might be something like that.

This narrow focus on not sounding silly is distracting me from those aspects. Maybe you’re right that this is just one small part of our connection and the mental and emotional bandwidth it’s taking up in my head is far more damaging to the relationship than my reactions themselves.

I’m also kind of assuming that even if not every response I have isn’t the hottest thing in the world to my partner, she would be willing to throw away everything else and leave just because of that.

I guess when you think about the insecurity like that, it makes a lot less sense. All the time I could be spending being present with my partner and thinking about how to make her happy instead goes into obsessing over a performance that I don’t even know she wants. Then I can’t meet her needs because I can only think about myself. Maybe I can make a playful joke or two about being really sensitive or making silly sounds, but having constant anxiety over it is counterproductive.

Maybe connections are more than just one thing and more than just “being a man,” whatever the hell that means at this point.

I’ll admit that I was a bit heavy on the self-flagellation, but I did so because I wanted to convey the current feelings of self-loathing that I explicitly want to overcome. I think being ashamed of this aspect of myself is a definitive weakness that needs to be worked on, but I don’t really know many good places to talk about it.

Personally, humiliation and femdom content triggers me because I want safety and repair, not re-inflammation of the same wound. I explicitly said that I fantasize about acceptance, not further degradation.

My intentions really are straightforward here: I want intimacy but get blocked by my insecurities around my responses to touch. The only way to make intimacy possible is for me to unlearn that shame, so that’s what I am trying to work on.

Maybe the post looks suspect because the answer is obvious to everyone else and it only isn’t to me because it took years for me to learn basic things like “some people care about my feelings” and “violence isn’t a normal response to mildly disagreements with others.” So because of our different backgrounds, it looks like I’m asking something so obvious that I must have an ulterior motive, when the answer is much more mundane – I haven’t learned that not everyone is as backwards and abusive as my parents were, and that’s the personal shortcoming I’m trying to work on.

Perhaps the fact that my insecurities look contemptible or suspicious to others is a sign that I shouldn’t let them stop me anymore and I should just focus on learning to communicate and build trust with a partner, then go from there.

So basically, cultivate a set of skills to market yourself with, include a portfolio or tell stories about past work experiences to support that picture, and apply to jobs that mostly or partially match that skillset?

I suppose, then, that my main concern would be figuring out which skills are both feasible for me to do and likely to remain in demand, despite all of the AI and economic bullshit happening.

Edited. Basically I have POTS and a neck injury, so it’s hard to do physical labor and I suffer from dizziness, brain fog, and fatigue from being up for an hour or so. I don’t know my exact limits yet, since the severity of my condition varies by day and there appear to be ways to partially recover from the fatigue without having to lay down (salt water, compression socks, bouncing my legs).

Although you probably feel like you’re socially delayed because you’re not just now working through all this stuff, speaking as someone who’s 29, I have known plenty of people who didn’t reach this realisation until they were a fair bit older than you, so from my perspective, you’re probably ahead of your peers. Some people may seem like they don’t need to work on this stuff, but often it’s just that it’s less easy to detect until it really becomes an issue later in life.

That just seems so crazy to me. For all my life, I’ve had a single-minded emotional obsession with (what I now know to be) secure attachment and realized in adolescence that gender roles make the mutuality I desire in relationships impossible. (When do I get to be the vulnerable comforted one? When does she get to be strong for me? When do I get to be pursued? When does she get to be the pursuer? Why can’t I be emotional too? Why can’t she be assertive too? What if I don’t want to treat women like cattle?) From my perspective, I couldn’t even try to date women because my brain refused to accept a relationship like this and couldn’t see an alternative. It wasn’t “less easy to detect” for me because it was the only thing I could think about – that there’s no space for me to be vulnerable and no emotional safety to be found anywhere. I couldn’t escape that depressive doom loop until I educated myself and went to therapy. I don’t understand how guys can go without that emotional safety and still seem to function perfectly fine without constantly being tormented by it.

I often see posts from the LGBT community that make me feel… Envious? Almost like I’m missing out on something. The social stigma of being “gay” for having feelings must’ve really gotten to me growing up. I feel there’s a blockage in my brain and emotions that tells me I can’t be a silly, goofy, caring guy, so I default to being quiet and closed off. Almost like my true potential as a person is being surpressed by the thoughts of myself and the beliefs of those around me.

I felt the exact same way, but perhaps to a more toxic and reactionary degree. Being called “gay” so much caused me to believe that I was indistinguishable from a gay man, to the point where I was better off being homosexual since I would face the same amount of discrimination anyway (not true). In other words, I thought that as a guy, it’s worse to be straight and feminine than gay and feminine, because bigots think you’re gay in both cases, but in the former case, you also repel the gender you’re attracted to (based on the assumption that women universally find feminine men unattractive).

At least that would explain why I was born, but my family has shown little care for the mental health or wellbeing of myself or others. It’s almost like the societal pressure to get married and have children override the actual feelings of love for others.

I believe I was born for similar reasons. I think my parents had children because it was gratifying for their self-image and made them feel successful. They didn’t know how to create a safe or nurturing environment. Now they are disappointed that their kids didn’t turn out how they hoped, when it’s because they put no actual emotional labor into raising them and created two traumatized adults.

Thanks, although my psyche is kind of forcing me to speedrun this awakening because every day of my life that I couldn’t form a secure attachment was incredibly painful. Like, imagine that you’re on fire for every day of your life since you gained consciousness. Then you discover the existence of water at age 21, and it takes 2 more years to find enough of it to put yourself out. And then you’re left with physical scars for the rest of your life due to the unholy amounts of stress you’ve been under the whole time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so, SO glad to not be on fire anymore and this is literally the least horrible time of my life so far, but the lasting physical effects of being on fire for so long have radically altered my life trajectory to the point where I’m definitely going to need to lean on those secure attachments.

If anything, I’m surprised that I haven’t heard this story from other guys — being so desperate for warmth and care that you frantically deprogram from your entire childhood and culture just to be able to say “I need help” or “I’m scared, please hold me.”

I just don’t understand how lots of men find toxic masculinity or even misogyny remotely palatable. I couldn’t stand the idea of hurting people’s feelings for no reason. As a young child, when my dad expressed hatred towards women, I felt hurt and invalidated in my instinctive desires to hug them and be kind to them. I never developed malice towards women or a desire to subjugate them. I simply became attracted to cute, cuddly, affectionate women. Any kind of hierarchy or discrimination would just get in the way of the closeness I seek. I just see a woman I’m attracted to and get all blushy as I think “Hugs… warmth… safety…” I don’t see some kind of sex slave or asset, so I never understood the guys who talk about women like that.

Yeah, I made the first few when I was feeling much more powerless and only just starting to wake up to the fact that I had agency. People were understandably frustrated by my lack of action. In response, I said I would start planning on my own and only ask more questions if there was a specific part of my plan I got stuck on.

I had deeply ingrained beliefs that I needed my parents to survive and would die without them. But over the past couple of days, I found out that they barely do anything for me and I am essentially living in a really cheap Airbnb with free food. (And trust me, that Airbnb is really cheap for a reason.) I truly believed them when they said I was a huge burden and they sacrifice so much for me, but it was just a big lie used to silence me in arguments.

Because of those past beliefs, whenever I thought about leaving, all I could imagine was dying in the streets. I totally ignored the fact that homeless shelters exist, kind and helpful people exist, and I have an emergency fund that I might be able to stretch to last several months if I get creative. I didn’t trust myself to be competent enough to pull it off, even though I already demonstrate most of the skills I need to live on my own every day without even realizing it.

Now I’m getting ready to rock, just trying to patch this one gaping hole in the plan first before I commit. I’m not going to know everything, but the magic of trusting myself means that I don’t have to have an answer for everything upfront before leaving, because I believe I can adapt to whatever situation I can find myself in.

Thanks for the ideas!

What’s it like renting a room? Are there significant compromises or sacrifices you have to make compared to having an apartment?

I’ve looked into this option a bit, and from what I’ve read, you need a ton of evidence to get an SSN change. Still, as another commenter said, it’s worth documenting everything. I already keep a journal about what I think and feel day-to-day, which includes my fear of my abusers and anything notable they do. I’ll make sure to gather evidence as part of my strategy.

I’m steeling myself for the worst, but I’ll hope for the best. I’ll keep this in mind so I don’t live in crippling paranoia for the rest of my life. Thanks!

Just a question out of curiosity: how did you become self-aware of your Cluster B personality? I always thought Cluster B precluded self-awareness due to the belief that one is always right and others are the problem (in NPD and ASPD especially).

Thank you! Honestly, this is the happiest moment of my life. My whole life was spent fantasizing about warmth and safety and feeling hopeless to ever reach it. Now I’m oscillating between deathly terror and boundless euphoria. I know this is the most dangerous and uncertain time of my life, but it’s my only bridge to freedom and happiness.

My older brother will try to find me because he has a god complex and believes he is entitled to control me and do whatever he wants to me without my consent. He literally told me to call him “God” and told me that his sperm is the source of his power (???). I’ve never met someone so deranged in my life. My favorite quote from him is “Everyone needs someone they can control,” because it’s such a dead giveaway for how he views everyone he interacts with. He’s telling me exactly who he is, and I should believe him. He also recounted the incident where he beat his girlfriend’s cat to death without any hesitation, emotion, or understanding of why it was morally wrong to kill animals. I think that convinced me he was a psychopath more than anything. How do you describe bludgeoning a poor defenseless animal to death in gory detail without flinching? I’m done pretending this guy isn’t totally fucked in the head.

He learned early on in my life that he can dominate me through sheer strength, since he was bigger and stronger than me, given he was 2 years older. When we were young, he was way bigger than me! It’s no wonder I was too terrified to ever say no to him. He learned that he had that kind of power over others and never learned to be kind or caring. When the world demanded that he act with any kind of consideration for others’ rights and feelings, he got pissed off and called them “liberals” and fantasized about killing them en masse. He told me the reason he hasn’t done anything to humans yet is because he doesn’t think he can get away with it.

But I think I’m a bit different… I’m the original person he had power over, and if I disappear from right under his nose, the relationship that justified his entire identity is gone. I think he’ll become obsessed with getting that relationship back even if it has life-threatening consequences in order to avoid losing the basis for the violence and domination that form the very core of his being. I think my submission keeps him stable in a sense, and now that I refuse to submit, the system is about to violently explode. The fallout with my parents will be minuscule compared to what’s coming.

At the end of the day, I think one or both of us is fucked. I just have to do everything I can to make sure it isn’t me.

Thank you! I’ll keep this in mind.

Yeah, I’m definitely gonna have to cut off the whole family tree. Even if they weren’t in cahoots with my parents and brother, the generational trauma fucked them all up too, so they could certainly hurt more than they help anyway.

I already was a pretty anonymous person on the Internet. I never posted my face once, so at least I have that going for me.

What do you think about transferring from a big bank to a small one? Do I have to do that manually and smuggle a wad of $100 bills to transfer my emergency fund to the new bank? Even if I space out the deposits, I wonder if it would trigger investigations from the bank (to investigate the influx of cash) or IRS (to see if I have an income source I’m not claiming.)