Hating myself for being myself

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I am so obsessing tonight over how I hurt people without meaning to and drive people out of my life that mean so much to me because of things I can't seems to control. My behaviorisms. My correcting people in their grammar even though my own is not immaculate. My criticizing peoples interests and beliefs for ridiculous reasons that should not be in my concern realm. My being so fastidious about things that only concern my own existence. Too many incidents in my daily existence that cause discomfort or grief to others which just pop out of me as part of some obsessiveness that I somewhat recognize at the time they occur but seem totally unable to prevent what is going on/ And then obsess compulsively over for the next 3-4 days, to even the point of having internal discussions regarding my offenses.

And on and on and on. I hardly think I am alone in this, but its so hard to find ways to express.

I hope sometime to meet someone with similar issues and situations, form an unlikely bond of trust and mutual respect that we can study and analyze our issues and use our combined experience, knowledge and resources to help each other. maybe repair some long dormant issues that are causing problems which will rise in the examination of all the contributing factors.

This is just a rudimentary. completely abstract proposal for an alliance to do some good, for each other, and maybe on a community level, should some folks have the patience, and the willingness to work as a team to deal with some problems I am sure we are all experiencing.

I can relate to that feeling. A lot of my thoughts during the day are regrets over relationships that I have damaged unknowingly. I try not to get too obsessed about it because then I get all anxious and shutdown. After all, I can't change the past. I can just learn from my mistakes. I like coming here because people talk about what the social rules are. I have learned more coming here for the last few months than I have learned in many years about how things work in social world. Normal people don't talk about this stuff because they implicitly understand the rules. We have to figure it out using logic and trial-and-error. Unfortunately, we usually learn by making mistakes and hating ourselves for making those mistakes. It has had a huge impact on my self-esteem, to the point where I often think the best thing to do is minimize my contact with others. Then I feel guilty because there are a lot of people who like me and love me. They get offended if I disappear and stop contacting them. To be honest, the only reason I don't commit suicide is because I know others love me and it would hurt them greatly if I killed myself.

@khaoz: I think I understand what you're going through. Sometimes it's enough just to let my mind wander and suddenly I'm reliving various mistakes, embarrassments and instances of unacceptable behaviour. I feel ashamed and frustrated that I can't go back and change things (spent a lot of time playing computer games over the years; I know it's silly and infantile, but sometimes it feels unfair that life lacks a Quicksave function.) And then I just begin to hate myself for being the kind of person that would get things wrong to such a degree and I experience strong self-harm urges and vivid thoughts of suicide.

Like em_tsuj here, what stops me indulging in those is the presence of someone who loves me and cares about me in spite of my numerous flaws. My experience of that kind of introspection is that it borders on the masochistic: sometimes I think I'm trying to figure out a solution to a problem, but really I'm just torturing myself, in the hope that such punishment will make me better somehow. It's a vicious circle.

Something that helps to bring me out of it is the idea that people you care about, the ones you hurt with your behaviour (this is a general 'you' BTW, I just think 'one' sounds silly)? If they care about you too, they have no interest in you feeling bad about yourself. Hating yourself does them no good, in fact seeing will probably hurt them more: they want you to do something about it, like apologising or doing something nice for them to make them feel better, ideally to find some way to modify your behaviour so that you don't hurt them again in the same way... Blimey, that sounds a bit preachy, sorry. TBH, I suck at remembering this stuff at the right moment, but it does help me to keep going the rest of the time.