Sick of being used

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One last post, for real. People seem to have misinterpreted what I said to her and think I rudely ejected her out of my life, when in reality I had a calm conversation with her, voiced my opinions and told her that I'm putting our friendship on an indefinite hold for the sake of my emotional well being. I told her I care about her, but that I need to consider my own self interest in the end. I did not violently end the friendship, but tried my best to be up front about it and make it clear that there was a mutual discrepancy of interests which can't be rectified. I thank everyone who's responded to this post and provided many different points of view. The important thing now is that I learn and apply this to the future, in order to prevent such a thing from ever occurring again, and to increase my own chances of success in the dating realm.

Didn't you say in one of your previous posts that you intentionally tried to hurt her feelings to give her a taste of what you were feeling because you felt like she deserved that? That was the sentiment I was responding to when I said maybe don't treat your friends like s**t when you feel bad about something because that's not how adults deal with rejection or hurt feelings. I hope in future that one of the lessons you take away from this is that you refrain from reacting to people like that, because it is childish and malicious.

She didn't have the right to lead you on, it was wrong of her and you were right to call her out on it. Nobody should lead someone else on to inflate their ego or feel a sense of approval, it is ethically wrong on every level. It is easy for others to judge you in hindsight because they do not have emotions invested.

IMHO, it's only robots and psychopaths that can easily ignore rejection. Has nothing to do with being adult. People that can repeatedly handle rejection without being affected by it are the same one's that will move in and out of relationships and that cannot commit for real to anybody.

Everybody feels pain when they are rejected, that is a pretty universal human reaction because we all want to be accepted.

The important thing, the thing which is a determining factor in one's character, is how one chooses to deal with those feelings of pain from being rejected. If one is the sort of person who deals with emotional pain by lashing out at others, maybe one should have a thought for why that is and if that is the best way to react to something. We don't get to choose how we feel about things, but we do get to choose our behaviour in how we act out those feelings.

When I am feeling alone and rejected I go for a walk, I find both the exercise and the distraction helpful. What I'm saying is that there are various ways to deal with those kinds of feelings, and some are more healthy than others. Revenge and vindictiveness I would not classify as particularly healthy in most circumstances, and rather as emotionally immature and petty (I might make exceptions in cases of say if someone kills your dog and you punch them in the face--I might not judge you then for wanting a little revenge or not being able to control your anger in the moment and lashing out). But if lashing out is something you do regularly whenever you feel slighted, that's a pattern and indicates emotional immaturity.

The way I was brought up, I was taught to have a certain amount of emotional regulation as part of being a responsible adult. Maybe it's different where you are from.

Yeah, it's wrong and it's s**t. But also, I don't believe it happens very often with bad intentions. I'm sure some people do it to inflate their ego etc. but also some people really suck at rejecting people, and instead take the "easier" way out by being ambiguous and hopefully less hurtful. What this woman said is very common and could have been said be due to her wanting to inflate her ego, or due to her not wanting to hurt the other person, or due to her just generally not being very good at saying the right thing in the moment.

In a way it could be giving her too much credit to say that she intended to use those words and knew the effect they would have. Possibly she's just throwing out cliche lines because she doesn't have the advanced social skills to come up with anything better, or doesn't have the guts to be completely honest.

Being completely honest is a very scary thing for many people to do.

Lashing out typically happens when you have to handle too much bad things, like rejections, being bullied, not fitting in. In addition to that, there is also a personality dimension to it is so some people turn their anger towards themselves (and won't lash out, and instead get suicidal), while others have short tempers and my lash out or even explode. I think both extremes are pretty bad, and mostly controlling yourself is probably the best way to behave. You probably can control to some degree when you go from blaming yourself to lashing out, but the other factors, like how much rejections and other bad experience you have is mostly out of your control, and so is the tendency to become suicidal or explode.



It also depends on the rejection. For example, if somebody don't want to be my friend I'll take that pretty lightly, but if a girl flirts with me and leads me on for 3 months, and then dumps me, I won't take that lightly as I would probably have a deep crush at that point.

So, yes, a walk can work for some minor rejection, but it won't help much if you are in love and are dumped.



Revenge is a neurodiverse trait, so if you mess with neurodiverse people, you can expect it.



I don't think so. I was brought up like that too. Still, I'm unable to do certain emotional regulation in the expected and "responsible" way.

Nah. Even neurodiverse men can be quite obvious through their body language about their interest in a woman. I've been told that I have very loud body language.

Like many other skills in life, emotional regulation is something you have to both be taught while but also practice while growing up to get good at it. If your parents pass on the message that responsible adults are expected to be capable of a reasonable amount of emotional regulation but they don't teach you any specific ways to do that and you never practice actually regulating your emotions and reacting to them with healthy behaviours then you're not going to get very good at it, even if you recognise it as being ideal because it's what your parents told you was right.

When it comes to behaviour, you don't just have to have better options suggested to you by your parents, you also have to practice applying them in life for them to stick. When I say my parents taught me about emotional regulation, I don't just mean they told me that's what I should do, I mean my mother actually provided me with specific examples of how to do that (like walking away from someone if I feel really upset and like I might say something nasty, and coming back and talking to them at a later time when I have had a chance to think about my feelings and what I want to say to them) and then encouraged me to practice those healthier options as I grew up.

Lashing out at people, while it may be understandable as a sign of emotional immaturity, is still not acceptable or excusable. If everyone was constantly reacting emotionally without thinking and without any effort to regulate their emotions then civilisation would not be possible. It's really a very basic skill.

We can hurt people when we lash out, verbally or physically, I can't process things in a rational fashion when I'm having a meltdown; what I can do is walk away, remove myself from whatever is causing this. I do this because I don't want to lash out, it's a short-term solution which causes even more long-term problems. I hate hurting people, I don't physically but quite often do it verbally and I feel completely wretched when I do, even if it's a stranger or someone I have no positive feelings for.
Even when someone has caused you to feel absolute shite, it's no excuse to lash out at them.
It's difficult not to, I have in the past and will probably do so again, but always try to resist the urge to hurt back.

I think I have the perfect example in my family that it's not as easy as that. Me and daughter will almost never lash out at anybody while wife and son both have short tempers and a very hard time thinking before acting. Our children have gotten the same parenting, yet they apparently have very different ways to deal with this. I'd say I'm a lot more impressed with people that have short tempers that manage not to lash out, than with people like me that simply will not do this even without any parenting or cultural pressure at all.

OTOH, if somebody is acting like a real jerk long-term to me, then I'll give them the silent treatment for life. So my rib is very high, but once it's reached, people will get a lot more than just lashing out.



That's good advice. That's a tactic I sometimes use when I'm triggered by people. Especially when somebody makes silly arguments about something that is part of my special interests.

I think this is almost a "school-book" example of how the neurodiverse relationship preferences go wrong, and especially when combined with neurotypical girls.

I'm sure you did this more or less naturally, and you actually didn't do anything wrong, other than mixing it up with the NT friend concept. Mixing it up with friendship will fool your system into thinking you already are very close to the girl, and thus triggers a super-fast attachment process. That in itself might not be so bad, except in this case you did it with a NT-girl that wasn't even sure she wanted to have anything to do with you.

I still think you can do this, but then you need to be much more observant about what the girl does. For one, if she asks you about being a friend, or talks about what kind of association you want with her, then run quickly. You also should make sure NOT to discuss your expectations with her either, rather you should communicate that nonverbally by flirting and the eye-contact game. When the girl isn't sure about your expectations, and she notices you are flirting with her, she cannot assume you want a friendship, so you are never friendzoned. Thus, if she continues to reciprocate or hang-out with you, she knows she is leading you on. The advantage of this is that the girl initially doesn't need to see you as a potential partner, but if she continues to show you interest, it means your chances increase and not just that she hasn't found somebody better meanwhile. This mostly works because showing long-term interest / persistence does work with some neurodiverse people, and that's why you have a natural inclination to do that. You just need to make sure you do it with the right girls.

Genau!

And also, some people who can handle rejection repeatedly without being affected by it are those who have no desire for intimate relationships nor real connections with other people. And people like that I say are quite lucky because they are more emotionally adaptable and that is what is required to handle relationships without being plagued by a broken heart.

Haven't you heard of something called Borderline Personality Disorder? Individuals afflicted with it cannot regulate their emotions and do not handle stress well. I seriously do wonder about the comorbidity of autism and borderline because these conditions have certain similarities. The majority of adult MEN definitely have the capability for emotional regulation and exercise it. But a lot of women have less of it and in many cultures it's not expected of them.

I say it's a no-win situation for anyone and you might as well just get it over with. Even though guys often lash out verbally, the majority of us do not stalk or commit any sort of violence. We blow off steam and move along.

Once again, it's not about not being effected by feelings or feelings not being strong.

I have very powerful emotional experiences (sometimes too powerful)--but when I was a child I was taught ways to deal with powerful emotions without lashing out at others. Instead, I go to be alone and let the feelings wash over me, cry and yell if I need to, punch pillows, exercise angrily, etc. until I have wrestled with the feelings sufficiently to figure them out and to figure out what I want to do about them (like talk to the other person if that is necessary/if another person is why I was upset in the first place).

There have been times when I have been completely crushed by rejection to the point of considering what's the point of going on--the difference is, I didn't take out that heartbreak on the person who rejected me. I dealt with it myself because that is what adults do, and the people who rejected me were perfectly within their rights to not want to be around me, no matter how much that might hurt me. I can't force them to want to be around me so there is no point aiming my heartbreak at them and trying to hurt them back. It accomplishes nothing and ultimately just made me feel worse when I acted like that when I was little (because guilt would be piled on top of feeling hurt and alone).

Learning to cope with emotions doesn't make them any less powerful, it just means learning how to behave without reactionary emotions completely dictating your actions. Sometimes it is more appropriate to keep your feelings (whatever they are and however strong they might be) to yourself. It can be as simple as saying "I need to be alone right now, I'll come back and talk to you in a while when I am able to do so rationally." That only takes a second and it can save you the mistake of saying all kinds of nasty things that you don't really want to say or that you will regret later. Having self control doesn't mean you don't have strong feelings, it just means you can cope with strong feelings.

Of course I have heard of personality disorders like BPD and I am aware that many people struggle with emotional regulation. But it is every person's choice whether they want to bother with people who can't regulate their emotions and strike out at others when they can't control themselves.

There are many things a person can do who struggles with emotional regulation to the point that it effects the way they treat others (especially if it makes them dangerous or emotionally abusive to those around them): there are the various strategies like my parents taught me like walking away form a situation and giving oneself the time to sort through one's feelings before talking about it, there is therapy where if one's parents didn't teach one those skills one can learn them from a psychologist, there are activities like meditation/yoga/tai chi/martial arts that can teach one skills of how to cope with and process one's emotions and how to relax and think about things rationally, and also medications to help with the same.

It is exhausting being around someone who can't regulate themselves and chooses not to try to learn. My father was a very angry person and was constantly lashing out at my siblings and I whenever he lost control (which was all the time), and he would say very mean and abusive things to us. I choose now not to have a relationship with him because he never bothered to even try to learn how to control his anger even when specifically asked to because of how much he was hurting those around him who loved him. We gave him years worth of chances to try to change, he chose not to bother even putting any sort of effort and so I chose not to have him in my life anymore.