If you want to find love, you have to be willing to face challenges and work to overcome them, not look at them and say “welp, no point in even trying I guess”
You’ve rejected yourself before you even talked to someone because you won’t accept the possibility of success, just varying degrees of failure.
Breaking this cycle is going to depend on an important factor: assuming that maybe, just maybe you’re wrong. You’re wrong about not being able to meet people, that you’re wrong about not being able to get around as freely as others, that you’re wrong about the limitations you have. Work and your friends’ ages aren’t the hard boundaries of your life, nor are they the only ways you can meet people. They’re frequently the most convenient, but not the only way.
If you want to start having more success at meeting people, you have to start looking at these supposed limitations as challenges at worst, not impossibilities. And that’s assuming that you’re even correct in the first place. People can and do date while also having to rely on public transport after all – not just in Chicago or New York or San Francisco and the like.
But let’s zero back onto the whole “trauma dumping” thing, the vulnerability and the feeling that you’re still stuck in the same place, mentally.
It’s entirely possible to open up to people and express that it’s frustrating being single and that dating can be a nightmare without backing up The Trauma Truck and pouring everything out on them
We’ll start with what trauma dumping is. Trauma dumping isn’t venting or going on an occasional rant because something’s been bugging you and you need to let it out. Venting is opening up and expressing yourself in a one-sided manner in a way that respects the time, feelings and boundaries of the listener. Trauma dumping, on the other hand, is dropping all of those feelings and traumatic events on another person with no consideration for their feelings or needs or even whether they were ready to hear all of that.
That sort of behavior is inconsiderate to others and it runs the risk of causing its own problems for the other person, especially if they weren’t ready or expecting all of that. Being on the receiving end of the Firehose of Feelings can be a lot. And if it’s a regular occurrence with someone… well, there comes a point where folks are going to cut ties, if only for their own emotional security.
You say that you’re afraid to open up and be vulnerable about your loneliness because of the way things went with your friends post break-up Part of the issue here is that you seem to be self-aware enough to know that you had been trauma dumping… but somehow that doesn’t translate to knowing or being able to not do that. That’s something I think you need to dig into.
You don’t have to shotgun every single feeling and thought and disappointment when you discuss the topic. You can just say “this shit sucks and I hate omdirigeras hit it” without then giving a blow by blow, play by play of every single feel and anxiety. If that requires a superhuman level of control form you, then that’s the bigger issue at hand.
There’s also the desire to want to keep chewing over these feelings over and over again. That, to me, sounds like things aren’t feeling resolved in some way, shape or form and you’re looking for an answer or a way to at least deal with them. Either they’re unresolved, or there’s something you’re getting out of this psychic self-harm you keep doing to yourself.