Intense Pain

[seeker5]

Hi.

I need help in dealing with this intense emotional pain I'm going through that is related to relationship and also beliefs about myself. I'd like to get some suggestions on how I can deal with it, and overcome my issues. However, most important, I need the most help in being held accountable that I do work through the pain and that I do face the underlying bad belief I have about myself and maybe people or whatever I need to face to deal with this emotional pain instead of just burying the pain so that it resurfaces in uglier forms later on.

For too long I've had this tendency of frequently running away from my bad emotional feelings - I try to ignore them and when they get bad, then I just bury them by incessantly playing computer games, reading the news online for hours at a time, or even sometimes just browsing through this forum mindlessly. When I do this, I also invariably disconnect from those close to me and from myself as well so I'm gone from anyone close to me. I also shut down completely socially and don't keep any of my social commitments, so I isolate myself at home. Worst of all, the underlying issues are still there, and it does nothing but get worst over time. I've been hit so much this past few days about how by not facing this earlier, I've allowed this issue to cause so much loss, and if I don't deal with it now, it'll be even worst.

Ok. I think the issue is this emotional trigger belief that I'm a loser in a number of areas, especially relationship and social situations (and to a lesser degree career). It's not something I go around feeling all the time, but certain situations bring that out in me. Intellectualizing it away does not help - I know I'm not a loser, but yet, lately, as I've been focused on overcoming a lot of my social fears, this has come up a lot. It also came up tremendously during the Christmas period when I was trying to figure out what to do next in my career (that is return to school or not), and I feel it hasn't really left me. That is, normally, in a relationship, I'd be non-clingy, let the other person have so much freedom, be more cheerful. However, I can see now looking back this past month and a half, because I've let this long time belief influence me subconsciously, I've been a lot more clingy, more holding on to the other person, more needing the other person to validate me which is all crazy and not who I am really normally in relationships. I feel too that because I'd let this belief influence over me, I've been a lot less loving then I normally would have.

Anyhow, this loving relationship I've been kind of involved is at least a question mark and I'm not able to communicate with the other person about it. This has thus surfaced all of those issues, and in a way it's a great gift for me because I do need to deal with this issue of feeling like a loser, and this limiting belief that "it's dangerous and stupid for me to show to others that I may be cared for" that comes up with people I'm not close to (while that latter belief is not related to the existing relationship, it is related in that it has a big hand in making forming new relationship very hard). The pain has been so intense the past few days, that I have no choice but to deal with these underlying deep issues I've kind of ignored or tried to smooth over by using the previous method of playing computer games/reading news/etc.

I've been doing Katie Byron's The Work, and it's helped a lot, but even last night after spending some time on it, I thought I'd be ok. But I wasn't able to fall asleep, and pain just kept on coming over me. I probably managed to only get one or two hour of solid sleep and the pain woke me up two hours before my alarm clock was set to go off. So, sorry if I'm kind of rambling, I'm not sure how to structure this post, but I wanted to go ahead and post it before I go to my first class.