Backstory: emotionally immature parents who try their best but are unable to give me any emotional support and raised me to people please. Selfish and mentally ill sibling (borderline personality). My extended family is a bunch of broken and highly avoidant people. My family relationships are superficial and fake and “everyone keeps up appearances” — they can’t or don’t want to form deep connections and be a “happy family.” I can’t be my true self around them including having to hide growing up that I dated the same sex sometimes. And as an adult having my interests and hobbies mocked (my family has 0 hobbies).
I’m an extrovert who highly values my friends, and I want those deep connections I can’t get from family. More often than not, the friendships end up tending one sided — I tend to become their therapists and discarded. I’ve had a long string of people utimately disappointing me, including my own maid of honor, a friend of over a decade, abandoning me 2 days before my wedding because of a combo of her own bipolar struggles, and being too embarrassed to admit she couldn’t afford the plane ticket. She ghosted me and I had to chase her for that info. That one was particularly brutal.
I had a wild time of partying in my early 20s and making mistakes to break away from my conservative and distant upbringing. Now I’m in my 30s and my life is stable, but find myself pretty lonely and I haven’t been able to heal from a lot of this. At my lowest I find myself mourning moments like the ones above. I’ve had therapy. I journal. I have hobbies and a dog and exercise. I try to go to friend meetups but no one has clicked yet. When I meet new people I can feel inside just how desperate I am for any support.
Currently my husband is military. He used to be my rock, but I need to be a support during these extremely stressful times in his career. Really all of this means I don’t have many outlets and I’m surprised I still have all this emotional baggage so many years later as a grown adult. It’s extremely difficult to support someone when you’re struggling yourself.
My default attachment is avoidant. How do I heal?