Thank you simplex.

Yes, I thought that way almost literally until last week. To have to face that this young lady, so attractive and much younger, connecting with me and equally interested in me, would so quickly not want to communicate anymore due to my barrage of drunken messages and porn videos, has really left my heart obliterated. Especially because so much of our communication was by phone and I used my phone for everything. So any alert that comes in, I hope she changed her mind and is messaging me back. Or being in my phone and the very act of doing anything on it reminds me of her.

Yes, that is me almost exactly. The only difference is that I didn't have my father through that period, so I think I finally gravitated towards drinking at that party because of the "liquid courage" factor, not knowing what I was getting into. On top of that,

I do have some love-hate problems with home, again not to be Freudian but I think it was the fact that my mother had to raise me and that is really tough for a mother to do with a teenage son. Even the best mother can't be a father to a son. So I started to just go along to get along and recall having a crush on a girl at that party and decided to drink. But as a pattern that would repeat itself for years after until last week, at some point in theory I should have asked her out or made a move and so on. But I did not. I just ended up leaning against a wall. So I don't really get liquid courage anyway from drinking. At this point I go straight to emotional gushing of pornographic nonsense. Because that has also been my home life for years now. So I am in this weird state where I balk at the prospect of cooking alone and eating alone at home, probably because I feel like a failure that I can't do that successfully with a woman in my life.

Yes, this is not the worst bottom in terms of pure drunkenness for me - I have passed out and a couple of times woke up with injuries sustained when I somehow fell while drunk. But this is by far the single worse emnotional bottom I've gone through. The crushing remorse of thinking that all I had to do was head home that night instead of stopping at the bar is killing me. But thanks for your kind words. I will somehow try to find some compassion for myself on that score.

I found a really good video on YouTube yesterday after crying.

How to fix a broken heart | Guy Winch

A couple of the best lines from that video really hit home with me.

"And since she could not have the heroin of actually being with Rich, her unconscious mind chose the methadone of her memories with him"

And:

"To fix your broken heart, you have to identify these voids in your life and fill them, and I mean all of them. The voids in your identity: you have to reestablish who you are and what your life is about. The voids in your social life, the missing activities, even the empty spaces on the wall where pictures used to hang.

But none of that will do any good unless you prevent the mistakes that can set you back, the unnecessary searches for explanations, idealizing your ex instead of focusing on how they were wrong for you, indulging thoughts and behaviors that still give them a starring role in this next chapter of your life when they shouldn't be an extra."

What's so amazing about that video is that even in my devastated condition, the speaker made so much sense that it got through to me, if only for the night. He says two kinds of pursuits - "self-expansion" and "routine" - are needed to get past a break-up or bad rejection, because the brain activity is just like with a drug addict. Amazing.

I happened to be reading "The Brain That Changes Itself," which has an amazing chapter on love, attraction, and porn. The author points out that the human brain has two systems for pleasure - the "appetitive pleasure system" and the "consummatory pleasure system." The first uses dopamine and is geared towards the desire of chasing sex or other pleasure, while the second one uses endorphins and is geared towards satisfying and calming pleasure. This is covered in Chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves."

So it dawned on me that my terrible fear of being alone is matched by my terrible fear of looking stupid in public, a subset of which is being rejected by women. That explains the porn habit I developed in my teens before I started drinking. So somehow I must have blended the addictions once I started to drink. Maybe it was a way to blunt the appetitive pleasure system convince me I was actually engaging in consummatory pleasure - or to put it in simpler terms, I had fantasies of all the pretty women I saw in bars, and somehow thought there was more of a chance that I would (in my fantasy) actually meet them, but even if not, still have a buzz that colored the women in the bar as having some odd kind of "relationship" with me. I don't know if that is exactly it, but I feel these are the puzzle pieces I need to fit together.

One last thing that supports what the brain book says - for days now I have all but lost my actual food appetite. That would make a ton of sense if what I am going through is mourning the loss of the appetitive chase I had with her, and which to my amazement she was returning. The remorse over that must have overloaded that part of me that handles appetite.

All of the above would also explain what I stated earlier: "That self-hate is compounded by the fact that I feel stupid and incompetent almost every day at work due to the increased complexity of the work that I am now doing. The work was hard before, but I was familiar with it. Now every day is a new task which I have never seen before. It all has made me completely paralyzed as to how to cope with this in any kind of healthy way."

Many times towards the end of the workday in recent years I have started planning which bar I would go, which one had pretty women who had talked with me in the past, as if bars are the place for someone like me to meet someone. That is its own hang-up because I feel insecure that there are men who do well with women in those situations. But again, as you said, that is a separate issue, one that can only be made worse by alcohol, and one that was another way to get that combined appetitive fix of a beer buzz and a hope for a woman to take interest in me.

I'll keep coming back to this forum, I just started here but I think I know what you are suggesting - that many people post and run and in that way avoid staying in a supportive group. All I can do now is keep trying for the next day. I may stop in at AA but can't promise that now. I just have my calendar to check off the days and the sorrow of how I screwed it up with that girl.

Thanks again for your reply.