Some people are going to take pot shots at this one, too?

Why? To prove how "evolved" they are? How really, REALLY well socialized? Or to prove that they have exceptionally acute reading skills and a flair for Norman Lear-style putdown? (Or better yet, to pretend they have a Deep Appreciation for Third World problems?)

You can't take a pass this time, can you? Give it a rest? Let it go?

If it were to turn out that LW is, in fact, a self-absorbed, infantile, drama queen of a bitch, then she isn't so alone after all.

Perhaps that is a consolation, albeit an unintended one.

(Note to LW: You must use this occasion to practice not giving a fuck what anyone thinks of you. This opportunity for a little character development is far too good to pass up.)

Like you, LW, I was orphaned early -- at 14 in my case. For years I did the same thing you're doing, of ferociously locking people out of my pain while at the same time obsessively longing to meet and be loved by a man who would comfort me. I didn't see how inconsistent I was being. At around age 28 or 29, after several DISASTROUS relationships, I finally decided it was my fate to spend the rest of my life locked in a black box of agony -- I further decided this was actually the baseline human condition, so it was no use even trying to improve my situation.

Fast forward five years... now I'm happily and safely married to a man who reminds me of my mother (not a typo, this is a good thing, a VERY good thing).

Sometimes, you have to give up trying before the world can give you what you need.

Good luck, honey. And remember... the older you get, the more fellow-orphans there are. In your teens, being an orphan makes you a horribly pitied freak. In your thirties? It makes you ordinary.

When you begin to look and listen, you find all these terribly painful experiences that the regular people around have been through. They may not have been teenage orphans but they had two seriously schizophrenic siblings. Or they lived with an abusively alcoholic mother and no father. Or a mother or father who committed suicide. Or they grew up with a bunch of different foster parents. Or had a father in prison and a mother who couldn't cope. It's just amazing what people have been through.

Others grew up in stable homes with no deaths or illnesses but had parents who were cold and unloving. It does sound like your parents loved you and cared for you well.

Not everybody, by any means. Not even most. But plenty of them. Enough that it's entirely possible to realize that your pain and trauma is shared, in different varieties, by many, many others. Then you could try finding them and talking with them and they are very likely to understand, even if the details are different. They might even need some understanding of their own.

Not technically an orphan, but father passed when I was 18 and mother was diagnosed with a chronic disease and may as well have passed in many ways. Same routine of the catching and falling with men.

What changed my lot was, well, dumb luck, but also looking more critically at the partners I was choosing. In the past, I'd always succumbed to the love/lust pull, and then find out nine months later (or sooner) that the gentleman was just not set up for an intimate relationship.

At one point I said, "I've had it!" and decided that from thereonin, I was going to regard each man with a wary eye before I allowed him into my heart. This meant going on some pretty rotten dates (or not). For instance, I was set up on blind date with a friend's friend, and he seemed like a real catch: got along with his mother, funny, rich, cute. When he cancelled our first date because he had to go to the store to buy bug spray (I kid you not), that was the end of it.

I met a wonderful man, also through a blind date....and he still ribs me about the hard time I gave him at first, eight years later. But nice guys ultimately don't mind and in fact seem to respect that a woman doesn't lay everything at his feet from the start. Understand that you're worth more than trips for bug spray and broken promises of a more serious stripe. Good luck!

To supplement Cary's extremely good advice, I would suggest you obtain and read a copy of "If the Buddha Dated" by Charlotte Kasl, along with a copy of "No Death, No Fear" by Thich Nach Hahn.

Buddhist philosphy can really help you control your thoughts and changing your interpretation of events. Thich Nach Hahn's books are tremendously helpful, however as a Buddhist monk he does not touch on the issues specific to romantic relationships and heartbreak, whereas Charlotte Kasl dives right in, in a manner that is compassionate and groundbreaking.

I am so sorry that you lost your parents at such a young age. But, if it can give you some hope, realize that Cary is right-- your approach to relationships and rejection is overblown and possibly not so much in response to your parents' death and fear of feeling abandoned.

Lots of people have had trouble with romantic rejection and loss who were not orphans at the time they were sorting it all out.

I am confident you will be able to sort it all out in good time, and when the time is right, you will be able to enter into a loving relationship as a whole person, an equal.

The vivid examples given in this letter (crashing to the ground in free-fall without a net) certainly sound like PTSD-type re-experiencing to me.

I found a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist very helpful in dealing with the loss of my entire family, plus abuse and neglect, by age 18.

Antidepressants help a lot, too.

By the time I tried these, I'd had PTSD about 40 years. Wish I'd done it before. Life is much pleasanter now, and so is my marriage, now that I'm not bombarded by flashbacks.