I'm on OKCupid talking to this girl and things are going fairly well. She says she's going to be busy for a while cause of work for about a week. We still talk, just not as much. Then about 3 days in I break down. It's late at night and I'm rereading the stream of messages sent and received rather than simply responding or just going to bed and doing that in the morning.

I start to feel like she isn't interested in me and isn't going to be and that it's not going to work out and go further and further down this slippery slope of negative thinking and send her a message that basically says I don't think she's going to like me and that I don't want to get hurt again but otherwise best of luck to her. I basically reject myself. And the thing is, I'm aware that I'm ruining it while I'm doing it [seemed like the lesser of two evils at the time, better to push her away than have it not work out and feel upset about it].


So, there's some girl I met at a bar. Sweet girl. After talking for a while she asked for my phone number. A few days later she texts saying she'd love to hang out sometime. We go to a bar and grab drinks and then she has to go to work but she doesn't text me for the next 2 days. I didn't really text her either. I send a message saying hello and she texts back ":) hey, how're you?" and we chat for a bit, then nothing. I suddenly feel down like it's not going to work out and tell her I can't do this [she hadn't shown enough interest in me yet, so I was feeling a lot of anxiety and pressure about it all. Like it would never work out, plus she was pretty hot so there was that making me feel nervous]. I ended up thinking of past events and just kinda did the same thing I did with the girl from OKC.


I do this A LOT. More so recently than any other time.
It gets even worse when I talk to a girl and get rejected, just reinforces the idea that no one will want me [which I even know is silly]. Despite knowing it's silly I still feel this way and still have this strong fear of rejection and keep pushing away all these girls. It was bad enough before when I just wasn't so great at meeting girls, but now I run away from anyone who I'm talking to.

I start thinking of Angel, a girl I liked a while ago that ended up banging my friend Erick and leading me on all the time. Or Angie [same deal], or Amy [she fucked everyone in the house I lived in and basically was the town whore but wouldn't fuck me], or Sarah [another girl who's been around the block quite a bit but was never interested in me], or Hayley [fucked me once and stopped talking to me completely] and all these other girls throughout my life that just weren't into me and made me feel really shitty and unwanted. Like really really horrible.


Before you post a response don't give out some brainless macho bullshit about just manning up and being an unemotional apathetic player. That's cool and all if you lack emotions are have a superman level resistance to emotional damage and trauma. Really, fucking great for you if you can keep getting rejected over and over and over and not feel a thing. You're probably affiliated with skynet if that's the case.

I'm not that unemotive. I've been through a lot and don't know how to get past it and it's becoming an issue.

_________________
I feel like the point of a community is to help where/when/however u can.
-Aceospades12

you already notice a pattern you want to change, so the change starts with you, you have already answered your own question for yourself about what you want to change, so then start working towards change

start immediately and implement a change in behavior, if you start now and continue, it will eventually become habitual

looking at things through a different perspective can also change how you feel about what you perceive, obviously you can start right away making noticeable changes in actions and behaviors but how you feel about what is happening can make these decisions to follow a different behavior pattern more natural

just know that all things are transient and one day it will be over, there is no reason to place attachment to these menial things and fear them, every new person met is a new opportunity to bring some love and fun to someone new, it is not your last fleeting chance to find love, you already know where to find love and it is inside yourself and you can give it to others

Hey man, the whole "man up" has it's time and place, but in general it's useless when it comes to deeper issues like the kind you are dealing with. I'm going to try to break down as simply as I can exactly what I think is going on with you, given the information of your post.

1) You have a consistent and irrational sense of impending rejection, no matter what the situation.

2) Your method of coping with this "sense of impending rejection" is with avoidance and self-sabotaging behavior.

3) The cause of this behavior and fear seems to be based around an identity of "defectiveness" – the feeling that one is defective, bad, unwanted, inferior, or that one would be unlovable to significant others if exposed.
It is also possible that you have a deep fear of abandonment on top of rejection. You might think that even if she doesn't reject you, she will eventually leave you.

Does any of this ring true at all?

Bare with me on this one...
For whatever reason as you grew up you formed this negative identity and perception of yourself (for the interest of saving time, I won't get into that).

Unfortunately, even with a poor identity, as adults our brains constantly seek out evidence that reaffirms how we perceive ourselves. Our brain is more concerned with consistency than it is with improving or feeling better. So even if you don't consciously want to be rejected, on a subconscious level you feel like you should be rejected, because that would maintain your identity. So in your examples, you had women that were clearly into you, yet you are constantly looking for anything to prove this untrue. So when you find this so-called evidence that she is going to reject you (or just plain make up evidence) your brain has it's little "I knew it! I told you so!" moment. Sure you are left lonely and miserable, but at least your identity feels safe.
To make matters even worse, during this entire process of seeking out evidence that these new girls are going to reject you, you are pulling up old memories of when other women rejected you that ALSO support this shitty identity.

So what the hell do you do about this?
Luckily for you, the way you perceive yourself, your identity, it CAN be changed. It's a lengthy and difficult struggle, but it is possible. You will need to break a lot of behavior patterns.
Start with the way you talk to yourself, the way you think about yourself. Take control with your self-talk and only allow you to say positive things to yourself. If you find yourself thinking "Oh she is going to reject me." or "She isn't going to like me." STOP yourself in your tracks.
Replace these thoughts with positive ones like, "I'm a nice guy, people like me." or "I am attractive and worthy of love." or "I have many wonderful things to offer other people, there are plenty of reasons for someone to want me in their life." You can even be as simple as thinking "I'm awesome!"
If you're struggling with finding nice things to say to yourself, sit down and make a list of evidence that counters this negatively you have. List things about yourself that you like and that others like about you. List people in your life that love you or have loved you, or women that have been attracted to you, desired you or had sex with you. Anything that challenges your bullshit identity, put it on the list. This can be very difficult for some people, but stick to it.
What you also need to do is constantly monitor yourself so you can catch yourself in your self-destructive behavior (preferably before you do it) and stop yourself. So before you send that next text or that next Okcupid message, you need to question your behavior and motive. If you stop sabotaging yourself, you will start gaining experiences that challenge your defective identity and thus will help change it.

A lot of this may sound small or even pointless at the time, but it adds up. Every time you say something nice to yourself instead of shitting on yourself, it adds up. Every time you allow a girl to continue to like you instead of forcing rejection, it adds up. You want to bombard your brain with positive evidence so it will be forced to adapt and change. Evolution, mate.

P.S. I just noticed some of what I said here is very similar to what pumpington ^ said, and slightly redundant. But he knows his shit, so if we are both saying it, you should damn well listen!
Good luck on your journey

......This is a bit vague.
I appreciate the attempt to offer a helping hand, however.

Basically I know what the pattern is and know that I'd just need to stop saying and doing what I'm doing, but the way I feel more and more over time dictates my actions to the point where I'm acting on emotion and fear rather than what actually makes sense to me.

This is what I do not know how to change: the influence of emotion over my actions, especially when it's this strong. I don't know how to change how I feel about any of this either, I even rationalize that those things in the past don't matter and are in the past and this makes perfect logical sense to me. Despite me thinking it makes sense, you saying it makes sense, and it actually making fucking sense, I still feel strongly about those events and they still hold control over me and my will slowly breaks down. This is what I don't know how to stop.

_________________
I feel like the point of a community is to help where/when/however u can.
-Aceospades12

the thing about habits is, they are sometimes compulsory, they become engrained into your system, just like if someone gets addicted to smoking, they may realize and rationalize that smoking is bad, every day when they wake up they say to themselves, ''I'm going to quit smoking today'', but then around noon they start to feel that craving set in and they fold and grab a smoke, some people how ever really focus on the action of smoking and try to change the compulsion by changing the action, it just happens one day at a time, one day they don't smoke, the next day they don't smoke until eventually the new habit of not smoking is formed, eventually they don't feel the same way about smoking because they no longer have that strong compulsion to smoke
it is really hard to break a habitual behavior pattern, for some harder then for others and it obviously depends on the habit, simply trying to re-frame why you are doing something can help change how you feel about it, so for example if you look at these girls as a challenge to see how well you can give and express love without a need for anything in return and you just treat it like a fun game where you are trying to better you skills rather then succeed or fail, then the idea of failure or something not going well might hold less emotional relevance when you are more focused on how can you make that better, obviously common sense should be used and you shouldn't harass women, but a girl who might not sleep with you but is still open to talking with you, is a girl you can still work on flirting with

you can change your focus to how can you flirt better, how can you make her day better, how can you have more fun for yourself, rather then how are you doing and does she like me, and if she doesn't, you don't sweat it, you improve your ability instead of worrying about the semantics of specifics, assuming you can hold that focus, you can even change the idea to how many different people you can meet and how well you can open up strangers to talking with you and continue that into how well you can follow up and create friendships where people actually want to invest in spending time with you