Now that I'm feeling better and am seeing things in a more realistic manner ...
It wasn't so much others not being able to be there for me as it was me abandoning my own self and not being there for me.
Pete Walker calls this The Abandonment Depression & Abandonment Melange:
Pete Walker, M.A. Psychotherapy
Quote:
What Is The Abandonment Depression?
What Is The Abandonment Melange?
The Abandonment Depression is the complex painful childhood experience that is reconstituted in an emotional flashback. It is a return to the sense of overwhelm, hopelessness and helplessness that afflicts the abused and /or emotionally abandoned child. At the core of the abandonment depression is the abandonment melange – the terrible emotional mix of fear and shame that coalesces around the deathlike feelings of depression that afflict an abandoned child. Surrounding the abandonment melange of the flashback are perfectionistic and endangerment cognitions and visualizations of the toxic inner and outer critic (See my articles on the critic), and at the surface is the self-destructive enactments of the fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses (See “A Trauma Typology”).
In a typical flashback, an individual is recapitulated into the original experience of abandonment. Fear is immediately triggered and soon produces shameful feelings of self-hate. This self-hate is a self-rejection that mimics parental rejection and that is equivalent to self-abandonment. Self-abandonment in turn deepens the abandonment depression and creates an even more fearful state, which in turn generates even more shame about the fear, which triggers increasingly depressing self-abandonment. This process then becomes a self-perpetuating, perpetual motion cycle that can spiral around and around in a despairingly painful descent that at its worst culminates in feelings of panic and suicidal ideation. During particularly extreme flashbacks, more than a few of my clients have uttered things that sound like this: “Life is so hopelessly depressing, I might as well be dead. Take me now God, why don’t you!” (See Managing The Abandonment Depression” for practical guidance on how to respond therapeutically to the abandonment melange.)
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Sadly, I gave up on myself after only two attempts to reach out ... In reality had I tried a couple of more times, I may have actually gotten the help I so desperately needed ... Now that I've put the brakes on my inner-critic, and ceased my outer-critic's "scorched earth policy" reaction to the situation, I am going to do my best to remember to not give up on myself so easily the next time ... To make myself reach out just one more time if the first two tries don't go in my favor ... That's my goal, and hopefully I can remember to do just that the next time this happens, but I'm hoping it's a long, long time before I'm ever that sick again!
