Lack of a self-identity makes being alone torture. But I have to love being alone to survive. Sure...

You have an identity, everyone does, maybe you don’t know enough about it, maybe you don’t like it. CPTSD has a negative effect on one’s personality, and it needs work. Try Jordan Peterson’s “understand myself .com” to learn about your personality. Try the “future authoring” to build a new self. Do your therapeutic work as well, do radical “self-care” and “self-love”, really treat yourself as someone you really care about, and then, maybe, you’ll meet someone who wants you to treat them like you treat yourself.

That last part is super-important: treat yourself the way you’d like someone close/intimate to treat you; that way, when you meet this person, they’ll see how you treat yourself and maybe wish you’d treat them just like that too; this sets up the expectations of the intimacy between you.

One long term negative effect of neglect is that it encourages self-abandonment, and you can fight against the abuse by doing the opposite: radical self-care, self-ownership, self-parenting. Try making creating your own happiness your hobby, your pet-project, experiment with it, try out some different things, try some new things just to discover your unique pleasures, and leave that self-abandonment behind in the past, in the dust, with the abusers, a long way behind you, a distant memory.

/r/CPTSD Thread