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Thank you for replies. Any advice how I might make connections here? I'm used to sites that have a chat feature for a little more real-time community. Feeling so isolated...

I get along fine with people on a surface level, and seem to be well liked by people I meet for the most part. But I can't take it to the next level.

This sums it up for me. All of your post I relate to. But this point, it is agonizing. I feel like I grew up either learning to avoid closeness to avoid being seen for how messed up I was, or maybe I just never learned how to develop friendships in some normal way. But yeah, I meet people, they warm to me, like me, but every single friendship or relationship falls apart for one reason or another and I've found myself completely alone. It was traumas in my adulthood that finally pushed me off a cliff, including losing my family of origin. I feel like I may never get back on the horse and feel in the world again. I don't know if my response helps at all, but I do relate so much to all of it. I'm here hoping to make some friendships in the safety of knowing people may relate to all of it.

I can relate a lot. I'm new here, really hoping to find connections and help. I'm totally stuck in my life. I had a "functional" life for years, but it was as you describe, I had friends who would not reach out to me if I didn't, and who did not stick around when I needed them. I also have had relationships with emotionally unavailable people and narcissists, and yes, would fall into trap of trying to prove my worth, which only serves to make me feel that much more worthless when I'm discarded. I've become so shell shocked about all of it that I've avoided my way into a corner of total isolation. And like you say, I feel I'm worthy of love. I struggle to even figure out what I've done wrong overall. Is it choice of people? Is it chronic avoidance? Is it being prone to depression in ways that most people don't tolerate? I don't know.

So I just joined, and am really in a desperate place. I don't know how to sum up my story or my traumas, but I will try. The place I'm at though, which I've read is common for people with CPTSD, is totally isolated. I'm really hoping I can make friends here and get support for how to go be out in the world again.

I had a difficult childhood, parents separated when I was a baby, moved around a lot growing up, so always starting over as the new kid. Mom was emotionally abusive and dad, who wasn't too much in the picture, was very distant. I struggled for years with depression and anxiety but was never being consistently diagnosed.

As an adult I went through a series of traumatic events that included both parents getting dementia and dying, my marriage collapsing -- we divorced in 2015 -- and loss of my career. It's a long complicated story and I don't feel too safe opening up with it in my intro, but the upshot was I had to try to start over at 40 with no family and my social network basically evaporating on me as I was in such crisis.

I've found myself so isolated at this point I basically only know therapists and acquaintances from support groups. I'm a very smart person, compassionate, care about people. But I'm so overwhelmed and scared about how to be out in the world, fear that I will always be rejected and abandoned, fear that I'm not compatible with people in some fundamental way.

I'm really hoping others reading this may relate to any of it, hope you will be friendly to me. The lockdown of pandemic and a recent heartbreaking break-up, and the coming of winter -- I'm terrified I can't break the isolation and ever really be in the world again.