I know this disorder - sometimes I'm embarrassed just by being alive, I mean, an acute sense of shame about even existing. I cry when people praise me & I cry when people criticise me, because I just wish they hadn't noticed me at all. I sometimes make rude or unreasonable remarks so I can enjoy the pain of regretting them. I reject before I am rejected, and quickly. I feel alternately superior & inferior. I feel special & non-special. I feel the world owes me something but I work as though it didn't. I am beautiful but I am ugly as sin.
The approach of cognitive therapy is to examine these feelings as they occur - to log them and their frequency and analyse the circumstances which prompted them. It can be very successful, if you get a good counsellor. I found this disorder so tied to my interior and intellectual life that I couldn't bear to part with it. It was useful to me in a creative sense and I didn't want to lose the occasional 'special' feeling I had so that I might feel 'non-special' all the time.
It is entirely up to you, Tauge, whether you feel you can let go of it and get the help you obviously deserve. I wasn't able or willing to empower myself that way. I had gotten to enjoy my ivory tower.
About women - it is possible to hide these feelings from them for short periods of time, but not in the long term. They manifest themselves in an ardent wish to be alone and most relationships can't survive that wish. That's why I find myself alone at 30.
