Can life have meaning if your dreams are unattainable?

Hah! 33 pages later everyone can read what an ass this guy really is.

Being drunk always brings out one's true personality as one is less inhibited and unable to keep up his guard (my father's wise words).

Which one?

Hehe, well, we established already what hawkeye is, Izzy, no need to elaborate on that again

Oh I hear you loud and clear--you're a drunk--you've got a serious drinking problem. And I seem to be the only person in this thread who is repeatedly addressing that elephant in this room. I've suggested you go to AA several times.

It's not unusual for people with serious emotional and personality problems, and poor coping mechanisms, to try to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. Unfortunately, not only does that not work, it compounds those emotional and personality problems and creates an additional addictive disorder to boot, making psychiatric treatment rather ineffective unless the addictive disorder is controlled first. For that reason, your first priority should be to stop drinking, if you really want to get the help you obviously need, and which you admit you need.

There is no doubt that your emotional and personality problems will interfere with your functioning, including your ability to form and maintain close relationships, and your ability to correctly evaluate reality, and your ability to think logically and rationally. Your psychiatric problems do make things harder for you than for people not burdened by such difficulties. But how other people manage to function, with whatever problems they do have, really is beside the point--your problems clearly hinder you. And those problems will not go away by themselves, nor will they be ameliorated by anything that anyone says to you in this thread. You have a mental illness, and an addictive problem, and you need professional help. Your difficulties forming relationships with women are simply one symptom of your psychiatric problems, perhaps the most glaring symptom, but they are really the red herring in this thread. Those problems with women exist in the context of your overall difficulties in functioning and, until those overall difficulties are addressed with psychiatric treatment, nothing will substantially change for you.

But I don't think you want help. You just want an audience for your drunken tale of self pity. And, when interest in this thread seems to lag, you play the suicide card and talk about bumping yourself off. That's a great manipulative ploy, MichaelJ, it's a great attention grabber, all that life or death drama. That's good for another several pages of people trying to help you, save you, soothe your ego, hold your hand, and basically enable you to keep on wallowing in self pity. And it also makes them more hesitant about confronting you more directly and honestly about how you come across, given how emotionally fragile you keep reminding them you are--it's a great manipulative and controlling ploy on your part.

Look, whether you choose to live or die, or go on drinking, or get yourself some psychiatric help will make no difference to me--it's your life, and you are responsible for it, not me. So I don't really care whether you agree with me or not. You're the one who is miserable, not me. If you'd rather contemplate suicide than try to straighten yourself out, go right ahead. Write more suicide notes and put them in that folder under your bed. All those goodbye notes to everyone who has pissed you off or to those who you want to leave feeling guilty that they didn't do enough to help you. That's what suicide is all about--it's an expression of anger designed to leave others feeling guilty and helpless. If you enjoy flirting around with fantasies like that, and you think that helps you in some way, you'll keep thinking that way, because, like everything else, you're "100% convinced" you're right. I think life is a precious gift, not a joke, and definitely not something to be thrown away. But what do I know, I'm only a "stupid bitch", right? If you don't want to make the attempt to salvage your own life, and get yourself the help you need, there's not much I can do about that.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not a man-hater, not in the slightest. I'm not a feminist either, and nothing you say about either me or women in general upsets me. I think those things just make you sound quite juvenile and rather frantic in your attempts to rationalize and deny the real source of your difficulties, which are the emotional and personality problems within yourself that significantly interfere with your functioning--in all areas of your life.

I'm not sure I envy your sister, who is apparently the latest person in your life who is going to try to rescue you. She'll have her hands full. But it is good that you will move in with her, for your sake. You do apparently trust her, so perhaps she will be able to convince you to get help for both your drinking and psychiatric problems, which I imagine she is well aware of.

I've already told you how you can go about finding low cost/no cost psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment, and you can use those same suggestions in your new location. Your life is your responsibility, not mine, and if you really are an intelligent man, and you really want to be helped, you will get yourself the professional help you need.

"



Everyone that takes the time to know, would.

Art man is not real, he is you.. So, you think you know yourself inside out.. No you don't, only you know you won't lie to yourself as you hate lying.

If Mary lied, then why did she allow you to take videos of her, that's pretty heavy and she said she did it for you. Love dies unless you know how to keep it alive.

How do you know art? Because you worked with "him" getting to know him, how he ticks, how he thinks. Same thing in how you get to know "a" woman as we are all different. Or same as you learn how to be a Director, practice, reading, learning, focusing....

LOL

I'm never going to stop drinking.

I like to drink. And that doesn't mean I HAVE to be drunk all the time, it just means I enjoy drinking. And I enjoy socializing with other people who drink. I don't drink every day. In fact there are plenty of times where I go multiple days without drinking. But the bottom line is that I like drinking, and I'm not going to stop. Ever.

And you ARE a stupid bitch. Because you accuse me of manipulating and controlling. When in fact all I've been doing is responding to what people have said in an honest manner. Honesty doesn't equal pandering to what people want to hear. I have nothing here to gain and nothing to lose. I stumbled on this site by accident. I could care less about having an audience. I've been trying to help myself. I was even stupid enough to use my real name.

You are a great manipulator firefly. Because it's oh so important for you to be right. You will do anything to try to sway the minds of those reading to agree with you. Even if that means contradicting your own words (which I've pointed out in very clear cut ways). What you do is you alternate between attacking me (then when I point out gaping holes in your logic), then imparting 'wisdom'. However your wisdom isn't very 'wise' at all. And you only stop attacking me and try to save face when I point out that you aren't making any sense. Only after you've written something nasty do you step back and try to save face. Which is almost always a pitiful attempt to show how much more 'level headed' you are.

That's manipulative.

It's obvious that you have problems with ANYBODY who points out the flaws in your logic. But I wouldn't be surprised in the least bit to find out that you do INDEED have a whole host of problems with men. Were you perhaps abused as a child? That would be my first guess. Either that or you perhaps were never quite the kind of woman who was able to catch the attention of men, and now you harbor all kinds of resentments about that.

And you think it's OK for women to cheat on their men. You've said this; that cheating is OK. You've also said that lying is OK if it's 'white lies'. And I got news for you honey, any lie that makes someone else feel bad about their self isn't a white lie. It's a deliberate deception fabricated in order to serve the selfish needs/wants of the liar.

Women lie. Lying is second nature to them. They spend so much of their lives lying that they don't even see anything wrong with it. It's like brushing their teeth, or eating, or breathing. It's part of their daily lives. Just the act of putting on makeup everyday is a lie. It's deceiving the rest of the world by covering up their real faces.

That girl in the coffee shop lied. Mary lied. My fiancee lied. Women lie. It's just fact.

As far as suicide goes, I think about that every single day. There's really not a whole lot keeping me in this world. Maybe I'd think "life is a precious gift", if I hadn't missed out on so much of what makes life precious. Life does appear to be a joke to me. How else can I view all the horrible things that happened to me in my youth? Starting in earnest with the deaths of my parents.

If I was sitting here right now next to a beautiful wife and child, maybe I'd think otherwise. In fact I really don't think I'd have had any of the major problems I've had in my recent life if I had gotten married at 25-26 or so like I should've. And if I hadn't have been alone all those years of my precious youth.

Nothing can ever make up for all those years of my youth when I had so many things going for me but was FORCED to be alone. Nothing can ever make up for those late teen/early twenties years where I had a positive attitude, good looks, and fire inside me, but was still forced to be alone no matter how many women I tried to get to know. Nothing can make up for the years my fiancee stole from me under the guise of it building towards a life together as a married couple. Nothing can make up for the years spent alone after her, even though I was still young and trying HARD to meet other women and make my dream of fatherhood and being a husband a reality. Nothing can make up for not being able to be married and a father at a young age when I was still in the prime of my life.

Nothing can make up for YEARS spent alone against my will no matter how hard I tried. When you spend years alone even though you're trying hard, it colors everything in your life a depressing shade. That's how learned helplessness starts. It makes you believe there's something wrong with you that you can't do anything about. Whether that's true or not. Those years, if I had even had one or two more girlfriends out of the probably hundreds of women I tried with, maybe then I'd feel differently about things. Those years spent alone weren't right.

The way women have treated me my entire life is where the root of my depression and all my big life problems lay. The way women have treated me my entire life has made me feel like I'm less than human. If I hadn't been alienated so badly my entire life, my whole world view would likely be different. I imagine it's similar to the way that black people felt during the height of racism in the 1950's/60's before the civil rights movement. They had been alienated, excluded. They were angry, and rightfully so.

And suicide isn't about anger at all firefly. It's about ending pain that can't be ended by any other means. That's where I'm at. That's why I think about it everyday.

Those goodbye notes in that folder under my bed; there's only one of them that has even the slightest hint of anger in it. That's in the letter to Mary. And even in that one, the majority of it is about how even though things ended up badly, I still think she's a beautiful person.

The rest of the letters are more or less apologies to people who would be hurt by me ending my life. They're letters telling them that it isn't their fault, and that I love them and am lucky to have known them for the time I did. They're letters of gratitude to the real friends who have touched my life.

The bottom line is that men do have chances for happiness. But women have a much higher likelihood of achieving that happiness, if happiness is measured by feeling 'wanted' or accepted by the world. Women have more power in almost every male/female relationship. It's just a fact.

Mary has just as many, if not more personal problems than I do. However, she doesn't have to make any changes at all in order for someone to want her and love her. That's a double standard, that's because she was born with a vagina.

Now maybe I CAN achieve happiness, but I know in order to achieve that happiness I'm going to have to work twice as hard as someone just like me only who's female.

It seems that my biggest challenge right now is trying to figure out if I have the inner strength to continue on and fight for what I want. If I think I'm strong enough to endure the hardships it will take to achieve my goals. I don't know that I am, but I know that I'm trying. I know that I'm taking small steps. I know that we live in an unjust world and I'm doing the best I can with unjust circumstances.

"How do you know art?"

I know art because it expresses what there is no human language to express.

It gives expression to feelings that can't be expressed otherwise.

Art is beauty. And it never lies...

sure it does, it just depends on the perspective, look at WWII propaganda posters, or religious art, some of the most beautiful art in the world (think michelangelo and the painting of the sistine chapel, to an atheist it's beautiful art that lies, or at best fantasy, look at escher, very little about his art is truthful, it's about playing with perspective, the fact that perception changes everything is the very antithesis of truth in my opinion

No, I never said any such thing.

But it's a good example of how you not only distort, you fabricate things, you just imagine them.

My posts have been addressed to you--and I am trying to help you understand that you have a mental illness for which you need professional help. I have no interest in whether other readers agree with me or not. It's your life which is on the line here, and I would sincerely like to see you get the help you need.

Only if that statement includes your mother. Prior to her death, how did your mother treat you? What was your relationship with her like?
Very early in this thread I said I thought you hadn't finished working through the emotional issues, and sense of abandonment, and trauma, of your parents' deaths, and I still think that is the case. But you've said very little, next to nothing, about your relationship with your mother, who, after all, was the primary female in your life during your early childhood.

Regardless of the root cause of your "big life problems", the current situation is that you have a mental illness, a personality disorder, that accounts for the sort of difficulties you have handling your own chaotic, and intense, and distressing, internal emotional states, and for your extremely illogical and irrational patterns of thought, and for the difficulties you have in forming and maintaining close relationships. And the symptoms of that personality disorder have been quite evident in this thread.

The content of what you are saying in your posts is considerably less important than what it reveals about the way you perceive, and think, and reason--and that's where your personality disorder is clearly revealed.

You consistently think in terms of extremes--everything is good/bad or black/white--there are no shades of grey, no tolerance for, or recognition of, any ambiguity.

You fluctuate wildly between idealizing and devaluing the same person--in this case, Mary--either she is a manipulative, evil, liar, and a slut, or she is the sweetest, most wonderful person you have ever known. These sorts of radical shifts are characteristic of your particular personality disorder.

You overgeneralize and draw inaccurate conclusions that are determined by your emotional state, rather than by logical thought or objective reality.

You often misinterpret the behavior of others, or overreact to relatively minor slights, or criticisms, while feeling that your inappropriately intense anger is fully justified.

You have difficulty forming and maintaining close inter-personal relationships, mainly because of your underlying emotional difficulties, and this will leave you feeling quite alienated and alone, but you fail to see that the source of the problem is within you--other people are simply reacting to those problems when they pull away from you.

Your depression is also a symptom of your personality disorder, as is your chronic suicidal ideation. You feel helpless about gaining control over your own intense, and distressing emotional states, and you use excessive alcohol consumption to try to blunt those emotions because you have failed to develop more adequate coping mechanisms. Similarly, your difficulties with women are another symptom of your personality disorder rather than the cause of it.

And your personality disorder will not get better, or just go away, unless you get yourself professional help.

Your previous therapy experiences, including the last one with the therapist who gave up after 2 years, are not atypical for someone with the sort of personality disorder you have, because it is a particularly difficult psychiatric condition to treat, and is often very frustrating for the therapist, particularly if the patient views the therapist as an adversary rather than an ally, which is what I think you did with your therapists.

If you sincerely want to get help, so you can change, and so that you are not at the mercy of your own internal distressing emotions, and so that you can think more objectively, and rationally, and logically, and so that you can experience more satisfying relationships, you first have to recognize you have the problem--that's it's inside of you--that the problem is the way you emotionally react and think. And then you have to be fully willing to cooperate with a therapist--you both have to be working toward the same goal.

You can be helped with treatment, and there is one type of treatment which has been shown to have more effectiveness with your type of personality disorder than some other methods. And the therapists who use that method would likely have a higher tolerance for dealing with your type of personality problem, and better ways of responding to it.

If any of this sinks in with you, the time I've spent responding to you in this thread won't have been a total waste.

"Quote:
The way women have treated me my entire life is where the root of my depression and all my big life problems lay."

"Only if that statement includes your mother. But you've said very little, next to nothing, about your relationship with your mother, who, after all, was the primary female in your life during your early childhood."

I haven't talked about my mother because then everybody would point fingers and go "Look, see! that's why."

It's very easy to do that and then just brush away all the other bad experiences with women as merely extensions of attitudes formed based on my experiences with my mother. That's simply not been the case of my life. It wasn't all her fault.

I will say this, I haven't talked about the circumstances surrounding my parents deaths either. And I will be honest and tell you that I fibbed about them dying at the same time. My father died first, when I was 12. My mother died later. If I told you what happened all you'd do is blame everything on my mom. Which is something I've done myself. But I also know that I loved my mom even though I also hate her. I'm obviously not an idiot. I know how both their deaths have affected my mental state throughout my life.

I had no choice in the circumstances surrounding their deaths. Every single day I think of something I want to talk to my Dad about, but I can't.

So yeah, life is a joke to me. Can you really blame me?

You can say that my problems are based on mental illness or whatever all you want. The truth is that I wasn't always the way I am now. I was considerably more positive in my outlook on life, even after the deaths and circumstances in my youth.

Do you understand that I tried and tried and tried with women all throughout my youth? All that trying, but still being forced to be alone makes you believe there's something wrong with you. That's not right. I can't ever get those years back.

Women are the root of all the major problems in my life.

And I'm not "distorting" the FACT that Mary, and my fiancee, and every other woman I've been involved with has lied to me.

Women lie.

And they cheat.

And it's not right.

Off course you won't get those years back, but you sure as Hell can have another 55 if you want.. What are you going to do with those? Throughout those 33 years, you had women and you had two lengthy relationships of value to you as well.. Isn't that better than never having a serious relationship, that all relationships were meaningless? That is not what happened to you.

You can speak to your Dad... Just speak.. It's obvious that any child would have immense difficulty losing both parents. Even 20 years later, 25, my Mother still can't handle losing her Mother when she was shy of 50.. You will be no different. Love is an amazing thing and that's your problem. You have to differentuate love, in what is past is past, present, present and future, future whilst still never forgetting the love you had.. If you hold the past into your present how are you going to get to the future?

I don't know what your Mother did but you are wrong, we won't judge you on it, it wouldn't have been bought up if Firefly didn't want you to let everything out, here after all you are anonymous Michael.. Things are better out than in, in all aspects/respect, well except for sex

Why don't you talk to us.. Do you think you are alone? Do you not think that most of us has had something horrible happen in our lives, somewhere along the way, without closure you can't deal with it. If you don't deal with it, it manifests...

They are not your brain, and they do not control your brain. You own & are your brain - so no - they are not the root of any problems in your life - you are. Your mind is entirely yours to control and be responsible for.

That said - all of us have let any number of things sink into our subconscious (to become habit/automatic) that don't serve us well. Unfortunately you have let a rather larger volume of things that don't serve you well, sink into your subconscious. You probably need help replacing the poorly serving 'programs' with attachments/programs/habits that better serve you.

There is no blame, only responsibility. If life is a joke to you - you are responsible for that attitude. Others will have faced similar trials to you, with different results, and different attitudes.

What you are unwilling to face is that you can CHOOSE to have a different attitude. What you are unwilling to face is that you have a huge number of programs to keep reinforcing your attitude, and you have to distentangle & remove those programs so that you can have an easier time of adopting a new attitude.

And if you'd spent your time also looking after who you were during those years, not one of them would seem wasted to you...because you would have got something out of each and every one of them.

So stop blaming 'wasted years' on others - you are responsible for your wastng them, not others. What you do with your time is your responsbility, and the value you get out of what you do with your time is also your responsibility.

But you already know all this - it's been said to you enough times.

"Love is an amazing thing and that's your problem. You have to differentuate love, in what is past is past, present, present and future, future whilst still never forgetting the love you had.. If you hold the past into your present how are you going to get to the future? "

I've had a reoccurring dream for years, since probably my late teens. There's this old fashioned diner at the end of a long and winding dirt road. I'm always driving there late at night in this dream and I never think I'm going to get there because the road goes on for so long, and I'm really REALLY hungry. All I can think about is how great the food is going to be. When I get there, I walk inside and everybody I've ever known in my life is in there, eating and drinking and laughing. Everybody's there, including dead people and living people. And I get really excited because I see my dad and I go over to talk to him. But dad won't talk to me and when I look closer at him I can't see his face even though he's sitting right in front of me. Then I realize that no one will talk to me, and I start to shout and try to get their attention but it doesn't work. I walk outside and look back at the road I drove up on. Then I turn around and the diner is gone.

firefly said in an earlier post that if I have the capacity to love one person than I have the capacity to love many people. If that's true then it kind of makes loving anyone sort of ridiculous, because they can just be replaced. Mary replaced me. My fiancee replaced me. Neither one of them ever think about me or miss me.

I think if people can just be replaced than it makes whatever love was there in the first place seem meaningless. And it makes me feel stupid because every person I've ever loved inhabits a specific place in my mind that is their's and their's only. When I lose people in my life it makes me sick to my stomach, so much that I can't eat. I remember losing about 25 pounds or so right after my fiancee left, and my best friend died.

Michael dreams have meanings and it's not always the way that they are played out. You are fortunate to have imagination, as an artist as well. Let's look at that, everyone that is in your life, living or dead are at this diner. They are drinking, laughing, you are starving, excited to see them all and your Dad... But, you can't see his face.. Let's stop there because your interpretation of your dream goes haywire from there.

When you lose someone you get sick to your stomach... You lose weight... At some point you got starving hungry again, for food and life and you started to re-gain some if not all of those pounds... You remember, the pain and heartache and so food becomes an important thing to you...

In your dream, it's a diner, food. Your Father is highly important to you, you are probably angry at losing him so young and I think you are angry with your Mother, that you blame her somewhat for his death.. I'd like you to tell that story if you feel up to it. In, any event as your Father and all these people in your life, living or dead are there and are so important to you, you dream of them all in one place, a happy place where drink (which you do) and food, (which has an importance to you) is there. You are finally home, wanted, needed and with love ones. Only none of them can see you, and you are not allowed to see the face of your Father, he has passed... Theory has it, that way.. And so the place disappears after you get mad... It disappears because you reject it's possible. It's possible to be in this place on day in the near future, a simular place with alot of people that you like and love, with the wish of the deceased there... It ends, because you have no Faith in yourself and so, you talk yourself out of this reality of a dream and so it vanishes.


The fact you can see all of this in a dream, means it's real... That being it can happen... It again, is you stopping it.

As, I said though, you will not see your Father's face... I had a simular experience when I was 11, only I was awake... I did not see her face either, as she turned realising I sat up and then she vanished.

I'm not asking you to believe in after life, or Ghosts but those that do believe in both, do believe that you can not see a "ghost's" face, but you can feel or see them present, in life, or a dream... As, they try to let you know they are there.

Tell us about your Mother.

There is something wrong with you--that's what I've been trying to tell you.
You have a mental illness--a personality disorder-- that affects your ability to form and maintain relationships. And that problem would not be confined to your relationships with women.

It's not just that you don't have a positive outlook, there are serious distortions in the way you perceive, evaluate, and think about reality--your emotional states result in thinking that is not rational or logical, and you are unable to see that. I spelled this out for you in my previous post, with examples of your distorted thinking--i.e. seeing everything in terms of extremes good/evil, black/white, love/hate. And all of these cognitive problems, as well as your rather chaotic and intense emotions, are clearly on display in this thread.

You have displayed so many possible indications of a Borderline Personality Disorder in this thread that an abnormal psych prof could probably assign it to students to read so they could get a fairly good understanding of how someone with BPD thinks and reacts. You are almost a textbook example of BPD in terms of the way you think. And probably because you are so often drunk when you post, and less guarded, your symptomatology emerges quite clearly.

It's not a question of blaming your mother, it's more a matter of really understanding how she affected you, and how this might continue to affect your adult relationships with women. It's not just your attitudes she would have affected, it's also your sense of basic trust, your expectation (or lack of it) that your needs would be considered and fulfilled, your anxieties about a whole host of things, your ability to understand and regulate your own emotional responses, etc. And, obviously, from what you are saying, there were problems in the relationship with your mother. What you have to understand, possibly through therapy, is how those problems, and the methods you developed for coping and dealing with them, continue to affect you now, in the present, and how you might develop better coping mechanisms.

And, even about that relationship, you think in extremes--you love/hate your mother--your thinking and emotions are both extreme--and that is, again, characteristic of Borderline Personality Disorder, and it is dysfunctional thinking.

The only one who might be at the root is your mother. Your subsequent and later relationships with women would not result in a personality disorder or the sort of cognitive and emotional problems you manifest--the already developed personality disorder would have affected those later relationships, and how you reacted to them, not the other way around. The longer your problems go untreated, and the more failure experiences you go through, the more discouraged and despondent you will get, and the more you will feel you are in a perpetual state of crisis, and the more you will probably think about suicide. You need professional help if you want to stop all of that and salvage your life.

Since you've already seen more than one therapist, you should have some idea that you do suffer from a mental illness, and should have some awareness that your mental illness interferes with your functioning--it even wound up interfering with your therapy.

Sitting around, getting drunk, and blaming women for your problems, will not help you one bit. You have a mental illness that requires treatment. If you had untreated diabetes you'd feel lousy too until you consulted a doctor and got on a proper treatment regimen. You have dysfunctional emotional reactions, and dysfunctional patterns of thought, as well as a problem with alcohol abuse, and you need to develop better, and more adaptive, methods of coping--for your own well-being--because it is what goes on inside of you, and inside your head, that is making you feel so miserable and also interferes with your functioning. If you are able to ameliorate your problems through therapy, your entire life will improve, including your relationships with women. And it is possible for that to happen.

Start now to look for a therapist in the area near your sister, preferably a therapist who specializes in treating Borderline Personality Disorder using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (not cognitive/behavioral therapy, specifically DBT) and combines individual sessions with group sessions, or someone who specializes in treating Borderline Personality Disorder with Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) . If you do that, I think you will maximize your chances for a more effective and positive therapeutic outcome this time around. But first, you must recognize that the problems are within you, and you must be motivated to change--sincerely motivated to want to change how you respond and think, so you can gain better emotional control over yourself and function more effectively--and you must be willing to cooperate with the therapist.
And, if you can't stop drinking, which would be preferable, you must be totally honest with the therapist about your alcohol intake, otherwise you will be wasting your time and sabotaging another therapy experience.

Help is out there--seek it out.

Is any of this sinking in, MichaelJ?

You should pay attention as this is from a woman who is androphile herself.

With all due respect, if someone typed this out to me, and said it 10 times in one post, I'd not come back, be pizzzzzed off and question what would you know, just from typed words...

I'd prefer someone to say, "hey, you have issues and it could stem from your Mother, want to talk about that? " followed by, "you have to mend your heart"...

Telling someone they have a mental illness and a personality disorder and to get help for it, I'd be very rebellious on that note from a stranger....

I know you are going to say that he is not listening. . But, I prefer to "listen" and ask him to keep talking.. Sometimes that's the best therapy you know.