a hurt ego, obsessive comparison and envy :(

[Bobo]

Hello to all.
hope this is the right category.
i'm glad i found this serious looking forum to try and share my problem.

i'm almost 40 years old, and been in on/off dynamic therapy for at least 15 years now.
generally- i probably have a very hurt ego problem, very low self esteem and i generally hate myself most of the time, not feeling anything, apathic, cannot make any crusial decisions. indecisive.
i do work in editing, i create music and films..
however-
i'm a overly depressed, negative,and embittered person, very detached (fearing) from my inner feelings.
this has caused a very deep obsessive envy and comparison.
i was pretty aware of that over the years but it getting worse and worse.

this has some hard history, as i'm an extremely sensitive person, only child, age 3 divorce etc..
i never learned to share or dissolve envy properly as a child so i just got "stuck".

ok, now for my current situation in life:
these days it seems i'm at my lowest point, feeling i won't be able to stop comparing myself to my close people around me for ever.
i can summon it up as not wanting/avoiding ANYONE who is "happier" than me.
that is, anyone who "passes me" makes me feel like a loser,
empty from any self esteem, and basically want to die.
i cannot even describe those envy feelings.
it burns me up inside and consuming me completely.
at the moment, no logical thinking or humor can even start solving it.
so my only way of "surviving" this without being evil and negative to other people's lives, is just walk away and disconnect.
and then i can walk around for a few days, wishing them dead, or that they fail,
or disappear..
especially considering my friends romantic relations.
but it also concerns certain succsess, artistic achievments (i'm an artist).

it actually made me disconnect with most of my friends, i did it again and again many times. once they found relationships.
and even now, when i somehow managed to marry a very nice
girl who understand my situation and still choosing to stay with me, helping me and love me,
i STILL can't stop comparing my relationship to others, STILL avoiding social
meetings in order not to get into those destructive feelings, because it can also destroy the only stable relationship i finally got. i cannot stop my obsessive thoughts, and then i always start degrading HER : she is not good enough for me, i need a "better "relationship, on and on and on and on...

i can summon myself up as feeling like a monster, an evil pig baby.
and i cannot bring myself to really understand that nothing is perfect for anyone.
this logic doesnt work for me cause i'm CERTAIN others around me are actually happier and have better life than me, and i just can't bear that feeling.
it's like i "lost" in the race, left behind to rot. finding comfort in other people 's trouble.
and this has also a deep feeling of SHAME. shame is also something very dark inside me.
i feel i'm the most deformed, twisted and dark person in the world.
(except of course- real psychos who actually KILL their friends..)

all this had lowered me to a very depressive state, but still somehow functioning (working, etc..).
i was treated with a few kinds of SSRI's, and now started to take "wellbutrin", also giving a chance to a few hypnosis meetings (although i'm very sceptic), and maybe CBT.

right now i'm pretty sure no one in here is living in this HELL i created for myself.
i cannot feel alive, happy, blessing what i DO have. a frozen person.

i will appreciate any deep and fresh point of view, any options of a best therapy technique to really try to treat myself from now on, any similar feelings, and any other words i might find helpful.
i must change something, or i might damage/loose my only close relationship.

thanks for anyone reading and commenting

[slinkysally]

Keep in mind that I'm just a student, first off. Secondly, sorry to hear about your troubles, I definitely don't know enough to be able to give you more than just my perspective, but besides that I did see you were curious about CBT and hypnosis, I'd definitely recommend CBT because it's demonstrated to pretty much be the most effective therapy for resolving specific issues. Hypnosis could definitely be great if the person is a well-rounded psychotherapist in general. Ericksonian hypnotists seem to have it going on.
And now to my perspective. You mention this obsession over comparing yourself to everyone else and your relationship to everyone else and I think I'd point out that these types of comparisons are pretty much something that everyone does. In fact it's likely based in instinctual patterns. If anything though it would seem that the reason it becomes a thinking process that is so prominent in your mind and has even become an obsession might have to do with it constituting a threat to your livelihood, in that it's preventing you from being happy on your own terms. So your mind latches onto these types of thinking because it needs to accommodate it being a threat by knowing what is happening, and this in turn makes even more out of it than it would otherwise be...
Dealing with the negative feelings that are being created might very well center around figuring out why making these comparisons would be a threat to you. What is being threatened? It's possible that these things are pretty deep, unresolved feelings from distant experiences. This is why a good hypnotherapist might be in order, as well as some CBT to start to address the immediately present problems and how to get results in changing them.

[Bobo]

If anything though it would seem that the reason it becomes a thinking process that is so prominent in your mind and has even become an obsession might have to do with it constituting a threat to your livelihood, in that it's preventing you from being happy on your own terms. So your mind latches onto these types of thinking because it needs to accommodate it being a threat by knowing what is happening, and this in turn makes even more out of it than it would otherwise be...
Dealing with the negative feelings that are being created might very well center around figuring out why making these comparisons would be a threat to you. What is being threatened? It's possible that these things are pretty deep, unresolved feelings from distant experiences. This is why a good hypnotherapist might be in order, as well as some CBT to start to address the immediately present problems and how to get results in changing them.

thanks for the serious and interesting answer.
yea i think you hit the spot with me being threatened... extremely threatened-
by comparing and giving it an absolute power over any chance of my own personal happiness.
of course this all has to do with my early childhood and the suppression of my feelings and ego..
i did 3 meetings with a hypnotherapist, and i'm SOOOOO skeptic and almost cannot "let go"... so i don't know about that..
do you really think CBT could bring any improvement on my comparison and bad feelings?
how it is possible if i'm not being able to solve HOW not to be threatened?
forgive me on this mess, i just HAVE to take some action because it might damage and poison my marriage
(THAT's my biggest war of all- not putting my wife into comparison)..

[slinkysally]

thanks for the serious and interesting answer.
yea i think you hit the spot with me being threatened... extremely threatened-
by comparing and giving it an absolute power over any chance of my own personal happiness.
of course this all has to do with my early childhood and the suppression of my feelings and ego..
i did 3 meetings with a hypnotherapist, and i'm SOOOOO skeptic and almost cannot "let go"... so i don't know about that..
do you really think CBT could bring any improvement on my comparison and bad feelings?
how it is possible if i'm not being able to solve HOW not to be threatened?
forgive me on this mess, i just HAVE to take some action because it might damage and poison my marriage
(THAT's my biggest war of all- not putting my wife into comparison)..

I think that if it was a decent CBT practitioner, there would definitely be good chances to work out exactly how not to feel threatened. It's pretty effective for changing behaviors and ways of thinking.

I understood that you consider yourself to be a really sensitive person and that you were an only child... It's so hard to say without much more specifics (and again I'm not really qualified to analyze these types of things), but I do know that sensitive people have more issues than others when it comes to socialization and dealing with other people (I have had a similar problem myself that still has some negative effects on me), and I'm wondering how possible it could be that you didn't get very many chances to socialize when you were younger? This may or may not be the case or even relevant, but I guess that it might help to take a few and think back to all kinds of moments when you were pretty young and were dealing with other kids, maybe you could think back to the first few grades of school... I personally think back to my own stuff and remember all these little situations and scenarios in which something happened and it impressed a very specific feeling on me...
Do you remember a lot of things? If you remember something specifically, maybe a moment in which someone else put you down or something else that could elicit a similar bad feeling, you could try playing it back a few times and imagine different ways it could have happened, different ways you could have felt, knowing now how much you really want things to be in your life now...

The interesting thing about CBT in my opinion is the way it really draws out the thought processes into the open and allows for them and their consequences on behavior and feelings to be fully analyzed, to be experimented with, to learn new ways of thinking and coping with problems... And I think it's safe to bet that there have been all kinds of moments, throughout your life, where this problem wasn't really an issue and you were more free, even within just a specific circumstance, to feel better and to not have to obsess about how you relate and compare with others. A lot of the resources you'd need to make a kind of change like this are already stocked in your subconscious, and with some work, the way that your consciousness draws from your subconscious all kinds of guides as to how to think and feel can reorientate itself and emphasize the quality things that make you feel better and allow you to successfully make decisions. We can essentially get ourselves more tied up and trapped by the ways things progress day to day to day to day, becoming more inflexible in how we think and feel and make decisions, but there's a lot of room within us to simply refresh all that and clear it out.

Hopefully you'll be able to find a good CBT practitioner to collaborate with. Cheers!

[Bobo]

wow, thanks for all those kind and thoughtful words.
i really really really appreciate it.
you arose some more things to reply to, but i'll deal with this tomorrow..

thanks again.

[Bobo]

ok, so- looking back at my childhood first of all brings nothing GOOD to my memories.
i also cannot remember any FEELING i had back then. it's only pictures of moments, most are negative.
my problem with having any feelings towards my childhood is very annoying.
i can just talk about it and analyze it for ages, but i can never describe how i felt. never.
as for specific moment?

my first memory (age 3) is my parents beating each other in front of me.
that was the day my mother left the house and took me.
i have other negative memories but this is the most profound one.
my parents never tried to communicate how to parent me better.
i pretty much grown alone rooting in my own world, with no one to really recieve and understand my emotions.
on top of that, my father is a famous musician and i was growing up always socially deeply embarrassed by him, and always having his shadow over me.

i do remember times when i sort of felt betrayed by friends.
one more point to consider, is that i was a very competitive child, in a bad way. feeling i DESERVE to be first in everything.
so now when looking back on all those lost years, it's a very embittering feeling of LOOSING IN THE RACE.
it's like if i'm not first place (socially, or even in being just happy), than i feel like nothing. like i lost everything.
this feeling is so profound and devastating every time i look around and imagining everyone's life.
i guess i'm a very spoiled person, along with being so sensitive...

thanks for listening, hope to hear some more interesting words

[slinkysally]

Hey, sorry to hear that your first memory was both so negative and pivotal. I can definitely understand where you are coming from when you say that you pretty much grown alone while not really having any kind of relation on an emotional level. I pretty much grew up off in my own world and didn't really relate to anyone in any way concerning my feelings and this of course created all kinds of situations later on where I would just be out of touch with emotional realities. I also can relate to the feeling of needing to be first in everything, although for me it was about being smarter, or separately, normal, which I think was an obsession for me then that was based in protecting myself from feeling bad by entering into moments where I'd be made fun of or put down.

I'm not sure quite what to say about not remembering any feelings from then because personally I barely remember things from my childhood. Logically though I think it makes a lot of sense and isn't something to be too concerned about, simply based in my understanding of how memory works - anything that would still be retained from that long ago are going to be things that were distinct and not easily confused with other moments - things like specific images, like what you mention. Feelings in one moment share a lot of similarities to feelings in other moments and as such kind of just blend together when it comes to memory - plus a feeling doesn't have as much tangible information for the memory to lock onto. So basically it sucks for us to not be able to recall so much about how it was then, but it's normal and it doesn't take away from anything else.

I'm a bit curious about the fact that your dad was/is a famous musician and how this relates to your feelings. Mainly because you mentioned being deeply embarrassed by him. Was he famous then? Did you spend a lot of your time with him? Did everyone you spent time with know who he was? What kinds of things was he doing that made you feel embarrassed?
Also, how would you describe his attitude, in general?

I don't know to which extent you feel like getting into these matters here and everything, but I think this stuff might definitely relate.

And, on a more unrelated note, what kind of music are you creating? Fellow musician asking. 

[Bobo]

I'm a bit curious about the fact that your dad was/is a famous musician and how this relates to your feelings. Mainly because you mentioned being deeply embarrassed by him. Was he famous then? Did you spend a lot of your time with him? Did everyone you spent time with know who he was? What kinds of things was he doing that made you feel embarrassed?
Also, how would you describe his attitude, in general?

wow, that's a long long answer...

basically, when they divorced my father got a hit song and voted singer of the year..
that was 1976 (in Israel, you wouldn't know him).
so while he was at the peak of success the family got broken apart.
so i remember myself embarrassed to be in the street with him since then, until today.
it's a feeling of great shame. i don't know what really caused it.
but he found it very hard to handle the whole separation and taking a kid once a week.
i was told i got left by him on a meeting point, once he saw my mother coming, etc..
and he NEVER bother to ask me if it bothers me to be with him in the street, surrounded by people.
so i guess the deep embarrassment is something that relates to all the emotional mess somehow...
i was never proud of him or anything..
and my mother never got in another relationship since then, so growing up with her, with her fears and over-protectiveness didn't help either.
my father has a black/white attitude. he never stops and thinks, hyper active and impulsive.
he didn't have abilities to treat me gently or talk to me, so he got impatient very quickly. 
so growing up like that, when everyone is addressing me as "the son of the famous singer",
as so frustrating, i can barely handle it today.

i tried my luck as a singer/songwriter, mostly alternative bittersweet pop, but going the same rout as my father has too demanding and destructive for me.
so i work as a video editor, try to focus more on making films or small project.
music will have to stay at the background i'm afraid..

[slinkysally]

Hey, sorry for the lateness in responding; I couldn't catch a break until now to give a proper reply.
Everything you describe about the influence both of them had on you makes a lot of sense in relation to the problems you're having now. I think it's important to say right now that the good thing is that resolving your problems doesn't have to be a matter of tackling and sorting through an entire past. It's just good to have an idea about the nature of it's influence in the background as you work on changing things now. Later on there might be some work to be done with bringing some resolution and acceptance to emotions that still persist from the past, but this pretty much happens naturally and as an effect of the real matter, which is working with how you feel now about what's happening with you now.

That's why something like CBT is more interesting to me than something like psychoanalysis, and also why it's usually more effective in producing the desired change, over much shorter time as well. The focus is on the specific thoughts that one is having throughout the day (as well as their relationship to emotions and behavior), and this is where the change happens. Clearly certain ways of thinking have become reinforced over time, as we've been through similar situations in which we preferred to react in the same types of ways, as our emotions have become associated with these thoughts and situations and created resistance to what would otherwise be our flexibility to making different decisions and feeling in different ways.
But it's entirely possible to work, supported by the power of one's consciousness and also one's motivations to no longer be stuck in the same way of being, with one's thoughts, as they are happening, to bring them out to the open more, to decrease the degree to which they happen automatically in the cases in which they do, to examine them and separate the ones that aren't serving you anymore and to emphasize the ones that will give you the best chances to move forward. That's another important thing too, the way of thinking that holds you in this kind of way happens because it is actually satisfying certain needs that you have, but, as always, the question is about the effectiveness with which this is accomplished and the question as to how many better alternatives there are.
And it's undoubtedly clear that there are better, more optimum ways in which your mind could be working that would satisfy your needs and provide you an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. There's just certain things about your thoughts and subsequently your emotions that need some reorientation. Definitely possible to accomplish.
Did you find anything in the way of a good CBT practitioner yet? In the meantime, we could try something, if you're interested. Try writing out a list of individual thoughts that you think throughout the day, in various circumstances, circumstances in which your problems really come out and others that might be more neutral. For example, a thought like "I can't stand to see him so happy" in the event of bumping into a friend. Any kind of individual, specific thought like that. Throw in some ones that pertain more to the way you see yourself, as well. Taking an extra effort to really, specifically review the products of your thinking like this will start opening the door to being able to analyze their value and the possibilities of alternatives which will offer you more.
And the great thing about the fact that we might get stuck in certain ways of thinking because of the emotional pull that is generated is that alternatives that have more capability of addressing our needs and making us feel better are going to naturally be more desirable for us to follow.

[Bobo]

thanks for replying...
these days i tend to feel SO bad that i first need to relax somehow (added Cipralex to the Wellbutrin)..
i still need to find a good CBT therapist (what is a GOOD one? who knows)
writing my own thoughts looks a bit futile right now, hope i could manage to do so.
can you give me some more explanation on how to write my thoughts? i got the idea but it's still a bit vague.
huh, right now, thinking that all the people around me suffer in their own lives, REALLY relaxes me.. it's like a drug addiction.
my day actually looks better when i hear "bad" stories. it's like being the evil old woman that gossips and hoping for people to fail.. i feel so LOUSY!!!

[slinkysally]

thanks for replying...
these days i tend to feel SO bad that i first need to relax somehow (added Cipralex to the Wellbutrin)..
i still need to find a good CBT therapist (what is a GOOD one? who knows)
writing my own thoughts looks a bit futile right now, hope i could manage to do so.
can you give me some more explanation on how to write my thoughts? i got the idea but it's still a bit vague.
huh, right now, thinking that all the people around me suffer in their own lives, REALLY relaxes me.. it's like a drug addiction.
my day actually looks better when i hear "bad" stories. it's like being the evil old woman that gossips and hoping for people to fail.. i feel so LOUSY!!!

Really really sorry that I haven't had a chance to reply until now. Just returned from a vacation. Hope you're still bumping around here, although I think usually this forum sends email notifications of new replies. 

How have you been feeling lately? Same situation more or less?

Regarding taking some time to write down some various thoughts that you have throughout the day, it doesn't need to be a consuming process or anything. Just try to pinpoint a few of them that are relevant to your problem, and a few of them that are neutral to your problem, about anything else. Try to actually catch them, word for word if possible, and write them down. An example of a neutral one, for example, could be "I'm starting to get hungry, but there's no food in the house. I could go and get some groceries, but I'm kind of busy so maybe I should order something". To speculate, one that's relevant to your problem might sound like "I can't stand to see him happy like that...." and I'm not really sure where exactly it goes from there; I can't really generalize it 'cause it'd just take away focus from the actuality.

If you do this, you can bring them back to the thread, and we can work from there. There's actually a lot of potential in this to start bringing about the changes that you want to see in your life. I'd explain more, but you seemed unsure about the futility of it all, so rather than unload all sorts of concepts on you, just bring in a few of these specific thoughts and we'll go from there.

[Bobo]

thanks..
well things have gone better the last 2 weeks, maybe also because of the medicine.
and i also had a dramatic talk to my wife, telling her EVERYTHING.. was a bit rough, but she's really accepting me (at the moment).

[slinkysally]

Great to hear that you've been feeling better, and also that you took a big step and opened up to your wife about everything (and that she's been supportive). Do you see medication as being a long-term solution or a short-term one?

[Bobo]

i don't know, it's not my first time..
if the downside symptoms will disappear (the numb sexual feeling + too much appetite),
then i wouldn't care about taking it long term.

[slinkysally]

Often times these types of medications will mask emotional and cognitive problems, as opposed to resolving them. It's hard to say how it'll evolve from here, regarding the symptoms and how effective the treatment will be over time.
Cognitive therapy is proven to be as effective or moreso than medication for a lot of problems, like depression and anxiety. The idea is that the source of these problems is residing in the specific thoughts that an individual has, which impact emotions and decision-making.
Working with those thoughts and changing them typically tends to be the most effective in producing a permanent resolution of the problems, whereas medication just kind of mechanically flips some switches around in your brain, which may or may not have subsequent issues... not to mention leaving you dependent on them, as opposed to building skills which will leave you stronger and more confident in yourself.
I'd love to work with you a bit, regarding working with your thoughts, or at the very least to encourage you to visit a CBT practitioner while you're still taking your medication (which can be a really effective short-term assistance, together with something like CBT, since it can offer you the experience of an alternative way of being).
If you have a little bit of time, we could definitely go over this some more.