I think I can relate to how you're feeling. I used to have a very polarized view on comfort from others. On the one hand, it felt wrong when people offered comfort and kindness. It was really hard for me to hear, and even made me feel anger towards them. But on the other hand, I also longed to be comforted and seen. But what is there to see? I felt so worthless and like I could never belong anywhere, so I hid myself from others under several protective layers.

I have attachment issues from my childhood, like you. I'd say abandonment is my core issue. I grew up as an only child and my mother made it really clear from day one that she didn't want me. The fucking contempt radiating from her still lives in my body. I can feel her hatred inside of me 28 years later. I know she neglected me as an infant and left me to cry all the time. She did the bare minimum while my alcoholic dad picked up the slack when he wasn't passed out in front of the TV mutating into a cigarette from all the chain smoking.

When you're a child, your parents and household are basically the entire world. You have no way to look at abuse, neglect, abandonment, etc. as wrong. Your parents treat you like you're not important and don't deserve to be seen, so you have to believe it. The child inside of you who deserved to be loved, validated, seen, mirrored, and respected felt so much pain back then whenever they sought out those things, that you had to push those needs down and out of the way to protect yourself from ever feeling all that pain again. This is an unconscious process. But how are you going to survive living with people who don't see you unless you buy into their story?

My point is that you are currently totally enmeshed with that story and your protective parts of yourself that developed to keep your abandonment pain away are totally overwhelming you. This is to be expected. It's how you survived this long.

The job of a therapist is to build a relationship with you where you can learn how to see these "protectors" from a distance and a place of self-empathy. How horrible that you had to learn to attack yourself and feel like you didn't deserve to be seen or cared for. That's so fucked up. Children aren't born innately bad or unlovable. They grow up to think this about themselves because someone else taught them, either directly or indirectly, that they're not worth it.

It can take years to build trust with someone who is patient and caring and willing to help you peel back all the protective layers. My therapist likes to say that like 90% of therapy is working on "protectors". This is also why so many therapy approaches are mindfulness and body based. Coming to see all of this stuff from a distance really helps put it into perspective. I can tell you that I still experience a lot of abandonment pain and find it difficult to trust people, but I've been doing so much work to try and distance my sense of Self from these painful feelings and thoughts that I'm starting to learn how to ride the wave, so to speak, and accept them from a place of self-compassion. If something happens and I experience abandonment pain, I say to myself that I feel abandoned, but I am not being abandoned right now. It's a flashback to a really painful part of my life. I am safe now, and this feeling is just a body sensation. It can't hurt me. I'll be okay and it will end eventually.

I just want to validate that the pain you feel is insurmountable and it's very painful to work through it. I know it's hard to receive care after a lifetime of being taught that you're not worth it. But a lot of people go into helping professions, particularly therapists, because they themselves have experienced deep pain and have worked through it and found the light. They do this work because they want to help people like you and me who are struggling to understand ourselves. They know what it's like, and want to show you the path out of this. And there is a path out. Based on what you wrote, your therapist seems like someone who wants to help you. You don't have to trust her in a day. Just continue to show up, even if you're struggling to see why you should or if you think there aren't any immediate results. This stuff takes a really long time to heal. You've been hurt your entire life, you can expect a very long recovery process. But what else is there to do, besides trying to trust the process even if it doesn't feel good or you don't trust your therapist right away? There is no silver bullet or magic words that are going to take your pain or your protectors away. The only option is to take a leap of faith and wade through it all little by little.