some help here, please

So, I'm a 29 y.o. male heterosexual virgin, blah blah. The entirety of my experience with women was three dates with the same girl I met off Okcupid last year; she flinched whenever I so much as brushed up against her and wouldn’t shut up about Dr. Who and steampunk conventions. I wanted to bludgeon her. That was 14 months ago and I haven't had a positive response from anyone there since.

I've had a late start with dating because, generally speaking, my life is a fuck. Since I was 4 or 5, I’ve been legitimately mentally ill. It didn’t start all at once; the obsessive compulsive disorder was the original problem. My first real memories are of imagining myself cutting off my own face with a knife. This would continue nonstop and I really felt like I should do it I invented rituals of repetition to distract from the compulsions and ended up in therapy throughout elementary school. Needless to say, I never made any little friends; even the teachers thought I was completely nuts. Each year, it was the same suggestions that I be sent to a 'special school'.

In junior high, the migraines started in. Those could drop me for days at a time with the blindness and nausea alone but far worse was the bipolar disorder which surfaced as well. The depressions caused me to miss months of school and were accompanied by suicidal ideations. The manic phases feel good but I can never tell when I’m in one;their downside is that I become self-destructive. I’ve cursed out teachers and professors, smashed up the cars of people who pissed me off, shoplifted, the works.

High school, I developed Crohn’s disease and the attendant arthritis in my knees and shoulders, plus rashes and ulcers on my face and back. I missed a couple years because I was in the hospital and I went permanently bald from the Prednisone I was given, which really was the last straw.

By college, I think something in my brain must have melted, because I started getting panic attacks constantly, 24/7. To this day, ten years later, if I don’t take a Klonopin every 6-8 hours, I start to feel as if I can’t control my body and (hopefully) pass out from hyperventilation soon after. I managed to get a Master's online, though by the time I was done I had suffered three nervous breakdowns.

Oh, I have severe asthma and I’m sterile too.

So, as you might imagine, all of that hampered my social skills a bit. I’ve been in therapy for 20 odd years; pills have stabilized me a bit but they have their nasty side effects. I have absolutely no energy (I’ve gotten in a carwreck because I fell asleep behind the wheel), frequently dizzy, very low metabolism, and lower than normal libido.

I feel trapped. I work two jobs, seven days a week, for a pittance (despite my graduate degree, in this field, I will barely break 20K this year). I’ve been looking for a full-time position for several years now but haha, no. The energy drain from sixteen pills/day makes job hunting virtually impossible on top of real work. I have no ‘free time’, no ‘social life’, certainly no friends. If you were to track my movements, it would be a straight line from work to bed for four years. Hell, I haven’t even left the city in more than a decade. I get sick so often that my vacation time always has to be used up recovering.

My sexuality is pretty fucked up. I don't see myself as sexual at all. I'm completely masochistic and submissive as far as it goes; I want to be beaten and laughed at by women for being so worthless. I feel like I'm going to be sick just writing about this.

I don't know what I could offer a girl besides trauma. This is likely to be as healthy as I ever get and I can still feel myself slipping towards another breakdown whenever I'm not distracted by work.

In case you're wondering, I cannot wean myself off the pills, its taken 20+ years to get them just right. The last time we tried, I almost ended up like David Foster Wallace. Also, without decent health insurance, my meds end up costing me a quarter my income each year. So, I'm even more strapped for cash than I would be otherwise. Finally, I know I seem dashing and brilliant from my writing but in person I'm an oaf. This is partly due to the very large dose of Topamax I take (it dulls your mind) and partly because I freeze up.

I need a realistic plan to get control of whats going on in my life. Therapists are useless, they keep asking their cute little open-ended questions and I keep getting older. Somebody tell me what to do because I'm not good with thinking.

Posted Feb 5, 2012, 11:00 PM UTC

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control101OPMiami•

Hey, are you my kid brother? That sounds almost exactly like something he would write, only much more coherent. He has a lot of the same mental issues I have but saw me struggle with pill dosages growing up and vowed never to take any sort of medication other than the 'natural' kind. Its hard to say if it's helping him at all but I tend to think he uses marijuana as a crutch in his own way. He really needs professional help; he can barely leave the house and just rants endlessly about how society is persecuting him.

Also, he punched my little sister, who has multiple sclerosis. That was the last time anyone contacted him.

As for me, pot just makes me paranoid, my neurosis is way too deep for something like marijuana to calm me down. It typically takes a couple Klonopin or a dose of Dilaudid before I can relax.

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werdunloaded•

That sucks, man. But bad dates are bad. You have them, and you have good dates. That's just the way it is. Keep at it.

Put and keep your (emotional) past behind you. Nothing is worse than digging up excuses from the past to keep you from a happier present and future. Then again, you might not be posting this except to provide some context, in which case, thanks! Have to cover my bases, though :)

Well, it seems your biggest obstacles are your conditions, which I personally won't be able to help with much (disorders aren't my specialty nor much of an interest of mine, but that may actually help here). Assuming one condition lead to another (one caused the next, etc.) you could visit a psychologist who could try to diagnose the causes to past mental trauma and work on those first (essentially hitting the problem at the roots). Migraines, Bipolar Disorder, and Panic Attacks can all have psychological sources.

Also, it doesn't sound like your sexuality is at all fucked up; you've just grown up punishing yourself and your conditions for everything bad that has happened to you. You want to be hurt because it's the one feeling you've grown accustomed to and comfortable with. Again, psychological source. You need to start rewarding yourself a lot more for the good things you do. Give yourself a lot of credit! There are tons of reasons to reward yourself, and every time something good happens to you or you do something good, reward yourself. Make yourself more important than what you do now. You are the center of your world (now don't go and develop narcissism over this, lol)

It sounds like you don't know how to handle yourself outside of responsibility. Your jobs are keeping you from thinking about and addressing the core issues of insecurities that have stemmed from years of, much of it being self-inflicted, trauma (mentally, not physically).

Here's the plan. I don't know how many therapists you've been to, but there has to be a therapist that specializes in psychological trauma somewhere in your area. Heck, find someone that specializes in PTSD. They might have a different perspective from the people you're currently seeing.

Are you using therapists as a crutch? Many people do it. They call their therapist if anything's going wrong in their life, hoping to just vent. Then they make it a habit. Try not to do this if you are. It doesn't help.

You definitely need to find a way to wean yourself from the pills. Try the above suggestion. Also, read up on stress relief and practice it religiously. This should at least help with the depression and panic attacks.

I'm not a certified Therapist of any kind. I'm a psychology and communication major at my college and my passion is self-improvement. But by no means does this make me qualified to tell you what to do. However, my advice is genuine and based on 5 years of educating myself in behavior/personality. It's not a lot, but it's what I can do to help.

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control101OPMiami•

Seen four therapists since I was a kid. I definately don't rely on them; it's painful to even speak with them about myself. The psychiatrist is the only one to help me; thanks to his regime of drugs I'm not obsessing over killing myself or others most of the time and I can reliably leave my darkened bedroom most days to get to work.

The doctors have tried weaning me off the pills multiple times but I'm now as low as they feel is safe. If we lower the Effexor any more the manic-depressive symptoms recur; lowering the Klonopin or Lexapro causes panic attacks and generalized anxiety; lowereing the Topamax brings back the migraines and causes weight gain from the other pills. I don't even remember what the Buspar does but I know that when we tried to lower it all the other doses had to be increased. So, that's bad. And the Rowasa is a suppository, so I would really love to stop taking that one but the alternative is likely a colostomy bag, so no dice. Besides, the pills are the only thing keeping me sane. I would die without them.

I've been sent to do bio-feedback, yoga, acupuncture, and breathing exercises for relaxation and all they all ended up with me asleep. No less stressed, just quickly passed out. Then I wake up and they expect me to pay them. Not very satisfying.

You are absolutely right though that I cannot handle myself outside of a strict set of rules. As long as work occupies me completely, I can ignore the life and slave away. When I'm home (still living with parents, of course) is when I realize all the ways I'm a miserable drain on my family.

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werdunloaded•

Do you like reading? If so, there are hundreds of books for self improvement that target specific issues like anxiety, depression, etc without requiring pills. This is how i broke out of my anxiety and depression. They should also keep you occupied when you have down time at home. I really like self-improvement so that helped me the most, and it could be different for you; who knows? Give it a shot. I would recommend reading a book or two on overcoming anxiety first, then use what you learn and move up to treating your depression.

Also, try to find something meaningful to you in life besides work. It can be a pet, a hobby, anything. Varying your responsibilities could also help.

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control101OPMiami•

I should make clear that I am not a nervous person. I don't seem negative or particularly shy most of the time. If I were talking to you I would likely seem mostly normal, if a bit off in my gaze and how I held myself. Sexually, however, I have no idea where to even start. The idea of flirting makes me feel ill.

The bipolar symptoms are entirely the result of the medicines I take, not any existing pathology. I have had mood swings associated with other meds I've taken as well, particularly Prednisone. They are horrible but I still prefer risking them than living how I was just 6 years ago, consumed with OCD thoughts of killing, brain wracked with migraines, and pounded by constant panic.

Compared to that time, I'm living the dream. My health is still completely shit by the standards of a normal 29 year old but I know how much worse it could be.

So, I can't accept any plan that suggests tapering off the pills. And I don't know how much self-help would benefit, seeing as I don't know how much any particular symptom is even psychological in origin and how much it is caused by medications. Obviously, I've tried before, with quelling the panic attacks in this case and the three books I read did less than nothing for it.

My parents have five large dogs who I am fond of, though they serve as another drain on time and energy. I used to collect action figures and put on little shows for my sister with them but that is retardedly expensive and pointless. I don't really have a hobby, nothing interests me anymore. Everything is meaningless

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