I distance myself from people randomly. It has been years since this phenomenon started, although I remember that even in childhood I would sometimes not "feel" like replying to some online friends from games we used to play. It felt like they chatted a lot more than I did, but it wasn't as bad as it became during adolescence.I remember that during adolescence I started sometimes taking days to reply to simple messages my friends sent. When I was 16, it was the first time I actually full-on ghosted a good friend of mine because I always felt "exhausted" and like I couldn't reply even to simple messages from him. It still hurts to think about because we were becoming such close friends and I blew it all away. I literally almost cry if I think about it too much, especially since it was my own fault, but whatever.It didn't go away later, either. I still took days to reply to some messages from other friends, with some of them even commenting IRL about how I hadn't replied to them in weeks and wondering if I had lost my phone or something.I'm an adult now, but it still hasn't gone away. Now it has made me not only barely talk to many people in general through WhatsApp or other platforms, but I've also noticed that even in online games I won't reply to some friends. I randomly stop and never come back most of the time, even though I sometimes randomly do feel like talking to them. For some reason, though, it just feels so much like a hassle.For online friends, it's even more apparent due to the circumstances and all, but nowadays it literally feels like I can't even handle a chatting session on Discord or something that's longer than half an hour. It's absolutely frustrating.I do have ADHD, but I have never found anyone, online or IRL, with this symptom due to it, at least not as extremely as I have it, so I'm not even sure if that's because of that.Anyone else dealt with something similar? Is there anything that helped you?
>>34849269This is textbook avoidant attachment. You assume interactions will go negatively by instinct, get drained by the thought of having to deal with a negative interaction, then avoid the interaction all together. What you miss is that people will have good interactions with you the closer you are to them because it feels to you like the closer they get the more likely or capable they are of hurting you.Ultimately this comes from a deep sense of inner fragility and the feeling that a truly bad experience with someone could crush your sense of yourself, likely because you never had space or healthy respectful people to build a self from, so what's there feels tiny and overly precious if it exists at all. Many bad things in childhood can cause this, such as being parentifide, being neglected, being pressured to achieve unnaturally well, and of course being yelled at or hit.You can only really heal this by having a dual treatment of developing your own self and a life that can function without others supporting it, and then inviting others into that life to see you and how you live as yourself while watching yourself for the inevitable paranoia and masking that will come up. You learned the patterns you're in by repetition and they can only be unlearned through repetition in the opposite direction, that is in the direction of connected and meaningful interactions with others where you don't run from either good experiences they offer you or avoid perceived negative ones coming for you.And yes, almost always, something bad will eventually happen between you and someone else, but if you know yourself and that you can return to a stable baseline without them, these things can happen without crushing you and there's no valid reason for paranoia over the unknown to the point of killing off your entire social life for.
>>34849269How do you even find yourself with people who keep talking to you. Just isolate and then build up connections with only people you decide to
