No News is ALWAYS Bad News, when ya have ADD traits.
It doesn’t matter how healthy our self-esteem is, when we don’t get a reply from someone we care about, it always feels excruciating. Much as we might try not to personalize their lack of responsiveness, we can’t help but blame and mentally eviscerate ourselves.
Even if our rational mind can convince us another’s non-reply has nothing whatsoever to do with us, there’s still doubt and it hurts. Add’ers are better than most, at imagining what they might have said or done wrong, to catalyze a ‘ghosting’ incident, regardless of whether or not it’s actually merited.
We might mentally search thru weeks or months of interactions with a friend to reluctantly justify what feels like their departure from our life. We ask ourselves over and over again, HAVE we deserved to be abandoned~ and if so, might just one oversight or failing have the power to wipe out years/decades of friendship??
It’s human nature to wanna hurt back, when we’re feeling hurt or disappointed. Some people, like a longtime platonic friend would amputate you out of his life if ya pissed him off, rather than verbally express his hurt or angry feelings, because he dreaded confrontation of any kind. Once his drawbridge was closed, there was no getting back into his good graces, no matter how hard you tried to mend the rupture that triggered his excising you from his existence like a cancerous growth.
I had a gal pal for many years (dead now) whose moods were somewhat labile. She was born under the sign of Cancer, and I had to learn thru trial and error that when she wasn’t responsive to my outreach, it had nothing whatsoever to do with Me. Like the crab that her sun sign was known for, she’d routinely hide away under a rock until whatever dark cloud she struggled with overhead passed by, and she once again felt light, sociable and conversant. She also had BPD traits, and this behavior pattern often sits under that umbrella.
Never does someone like this consider how their reclusive actions painfully impact others~ even when one is pathologically Codependent, as was my friend. She’d give ya the shirt off her back~ but only when it was mood-congruent for her to do so. Otherwise, she’d hide under her rock for weeks or months, no matter how much ya needed her.
Super-givers have an obligation and right to recharge their batteries for as long as it takes! In truth, ya can’t give someone a drink of water from an empty well. And even though this might be understood intellectually by people with Codependent traits, it’s seldom integrated on an emotional and cellular level in their body, which can leave ‘em short on empathy.
Empathy is very different from sympathy. Sympathy is the ability to feel sorry for another, which is the emotion that drives most Codependents to give to others what they themselves, have never been able to receive. Empathy is the capacity to identify with and relate to another’s inner-experiences, perspectives and pain.
People who’ve largely distanced from their own emotional pain thru various means (staying overly-busy or over-analytical, engaging in addictive compulsive behaviors with food, drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, gambling, relationships, etc.) cannot authentically connect with and relate to another’s distress and respond empathically, because they’ve gotten too good at sidestepping their own. Bottom line, if you can’t feel sympathy and compassion for your own pain, you sure as hell can’t relate and be responsive to someone else’s.
Perhaps this is just something to store on your stove’s backburner for future reference. Pass it along to a friend who might benefit from peering into their own mirror and recognizing something in themselves that’s fixable.