shame related to letting my guard down, being witnessed (for the first time in a long time), and being rejected

Not about cptsd directly, but I know that the underlying emotional and cognitive process here is cptsd-flavored.

I’m looking for either advice or similar experiences. I’m okay, but I am feeling a lot of shame and my insecurities have really spiked.

I recently met someone online and we got extremely close extremely quickly — this is something that is entirely foreign to me and DEEPLY unusual (I am extremely avoidant and distant), but he sent consistently positive signals towards me, and I tried to just roll with it. Something about him made me feel safe, and for whatever reason, I made the decision to lean into it and not question or run away from it. We clicked and were very similar in an uncanny number of ways, but also different enough that there were things to always talk about. I don’t think that I misread anything: he was very verbally affirming and told me frequently that I was attractive (from a picture), that he enjoyed talking with me, that he felt understood, etc.

We had an hour long video call and I was in the wrong mood, and I knew I was in the wrong mood, but I didn’t want to make a poor impression by canceling something I had already agreed to & had been excited about. I think it’s harder to hide my dissociative issues in a live format, and I know that I am more off-putting outside of text. The conversation was fine but I was just a ball of anxiety and shame and I know I wasn’t coming off right. A few hours after the call, he sent me a text saying very kind things about me and that he cared for me, but also that he just met someone else and was therefore cutting contact with me. I was going to write something short — eg, thanks for being honest with me, hope it goes well — but he blocked me. It was jarring because that morning I had spent hours listening to a playlist he made for me the night before, and now I was just… kind of put to the side.

I was reeling for a bit there over the block itself, and not the sudden rejection, I think, because I felt like I had fucked everything up with the video call, and had already been sitting in the low-grade anticipation of something like that for hours. The rejection felt like relief. The 180 was stark — I know that the call was involved in some way. I could at least set down the anticipation of something bad happening. But the block hurt.

We had talked about fairly personal and trauma-related stuff, but just about him; I didn’t say anything specific about my specific genre of trauma or my dissociation or anything like that because it’s extremely heavy, and I did not want to dump it on him after he shared his experiences, and because it is absolutely the sort of stuff that people never know how to react to, and I didn’t want to sound like I was trying to one-up him or something. I don’t think I could have disclosed anything without panicking and hitting the reject button myself, truthfully, but I wonder a bit if I veered too much in the opposite direction; maybe the call would have been less bad if I had disclosed some of it to him and he had a better picture, or maybe I could have kicked the call off to a different day where I wasn’t struggling to hold onto being in my body, or any other number of things.

Ultimately: relationships of any kind of mutually optional, and he had the right to end it for any reason at all. I respect that and I’m glad that he communicated something and didn’t ghost me or string me along. I don’t know if I believe the “I met someone” thing because everything else in the departing message was too nice, and is exactly what I would say if I felt pity and weirdness towards someone and wanted out ASAP and didn’t want to hurt their feelings. And he and I were constantly similar in our thinking and things like that, so… I don’t know. I guess this part doesn’t matter much and will never have a resolution, so it’s not worth thinking about.

I am sort of sinking into a weird pit of shame and insecurity. It’s entirely self-directed, of course, and it’s only because I opened up very genuinely in some ways for the first time in a long time. It’s become detached from the person and the relationship and is running its own system in my head. Nothing bad happened, technically, but exposure feels life-threatening to me, and my brain is latching onto every single thing that I did differently that is “bad;” I was too open, I was too blunt about the fact that I liked him, I got too close too soon, I did this, I did that… the feeling that the mask was only thick enough over text, and over a call, he saw that I’m not a real person and felt disgust and pity.

Anyway. Fully aware that this is old software running itself on new hardware. But there’s enough ambiguity that I can’t fully that it’s overreacting and inaccurate. There’s probably some truth to some things and some overreaction to others.

Part of my therapy involves the longterm goal of being able to be seen, being more comfortable with it, etc. This is probably going to eventually convert itself into being an important event (in a positive way) because despite its uncomfortable ending, I was witnessed and nothing life-threatening came from it… but in the moment, what am I supposed to do? It hurts a lot and the shame is intense. I feel deeply ashamed for thinking that someone could want to see me, or actually like what there is to see, and I feel like there’s just something wrong with me that I’m never going to be able to excise. Too weird to connect even with someone who is THAT similar to me, someone who even has their own trauma, because I had my soul removed a long time ago and it’s visible to everyone who looks. It’s less about what happened and more about the internal confirmation-feeling that this is how it’s going to be forever because there is something wrong with me.

I’ll live. I’ll feel better in a few days. I slept on it and called out of work and am letting it run its course. I just haven’t actually put myself out there in any real way in years, and I guess I just want to hear about similar experiences or advice or anything else. I feel very alone and like a freak, and I guess that I am looking for anything that might help me feel less like either of those things.

Thanks for listening.