afraid

[thepiercedrose]

I'm afraid to ask for what I need from more that a few select people. Because I'm afraid that if I ask I'm going to get laughed at, teased or completely ignored. I'm afraid I won't be taken seriously. And until now I've always considered it easier to sit in a corner and hope that someone would notice what I really needed because I couldn't bear

Comments

[treebones]

Some of this sounds familiar, but you're different enough for me that I have no idea if what I had to do will apply to you.

I had to learn to ask for what I wanted; it was necessary not only for my needs, but for my growth and development as a human being. It really hurt to ask and not get it. It is the nature of things that sometimes, you truly won't be given what you ask for. I couldn't fix that. So what I had to work on was learning, deep down, a few things:

a) most of the time, the reasons for being turned down weren't actually about me. Usually, rejection truly isn't personal. People are tired, busy, and emotionally available to other people much of the time, usually for reasons that are *all* about them and not at all about *me*. However, I still felt hurt and upset when it happened. So -
b) I had to learn how to perform generic self-soothing actions while repeating to myself the factors which were not about me that caused it to happen;
c) while problem-solving ways to increase my success frequency, so I could feel like, even if it was going to happen, and even if it was going to hurt, it would happen less often.

There's probably more to this than that. The good things are, being able to do this for rejections which *aren't* about you also allows you to apply them to things that partially or completely *are*, to take the edge off them.

I have no idea if this will be helpful. If not, feel free to ignore it.