Emotional masochists are people who are at ease in misery and are interested in deliberately engaging in adverse behaviors. These people tend to have a self-destructive personality, leading to them having lives being highlighted by emotional pain and discomfort. But the real problem is the detrimental effect that they have on those near to them. Being an emotional masochist doesn’t mean that these people enjoy pain in a dramatic or metaphorical sense. It actually implies that they revel in pain on the psychological level. The truly baffling part is that these people have developed a tendency for such pain and derive comfort, safety, and even a sense of identity from it. There are subtle signs that reveal when a person is an emotional masochist. If you want to learn about these signs, then read on.
Mistaking Intensity for Intimacy
You are the kind of person who conflates intimacy with intensity. You consider drama to be a vividly palpable scale for expressing intimacy. This is chaos and not chemistry, but you can’t seem to get the hang of this fact. For you, it feels vibrant and alive, while you find calm to be boring.
Going Back to People Who Hurt You
You realize that these are the ones who hurt you and can be detrimental to your peace. But something about them and the pain that they inflict feels incredibly attractive to you. It isn’t love that drives you, but rather the pain that they impart.
You Tend to Apologize Excessively
You are prone to apologizing profusely, even when you are not to blame. It is a way via which you subconsciously hamper yourself from attaining peace or protecting your self-dignity and worth.
You Desire Validation from People Who aren’t Forthcoming with It
You diligently strive to prove your worth to people who are immensely hard to please. You crave validation from them, and they are never generous when it comes to giving it. For you, praise from them is like a life force; you can’t subsist without it.
You Keep Reminiscing about Painful Memories Repeatedly
Even in solitude, you keep replaying the painful and hurtful moments of your life. You derive pleasure or some kind of twisted satisfaction from this reminiscing. There is no meaning to be found here, and no matter how much you remember, you won’t control the outcome.
You Attract People Who are Emotionally Withdrawn
You are drawn towards people who are emotionally detached and can’t impart love or support to you in this regard. They can and will hurt you, but you don’t care because deep in your psyche, you have created this perspective that love should be agonizing and cause you pain.
You Conflate Strength with Suffering
You think that having a high tolerance of pain without objection is a sign of strength or nobility. That is anything but the truth. Most of the time, this is just you neglecting yourself, which you have mistaken or misconstrued as resilience.
You Sabotage Healthy Relationships
You are likely to experience discomfort and unease when a healthy functioning person enters your life. You don’t like it when they treat you with respect and kindness. So, you push them away by picking fights over trivial matters and generally pulling away from them.
You can’t Tolerate Being Happy for Extended Periods
You start to get anxious and suspicious when things start going your way for too long. You inadvertently wait for, no expect, something to go terribly wrong. That is because you are pessimistic by nature and want things to go wrong, as they always have in the past. You just can’t handle extended periods of happiness or peace.
You Downplay Your Suffering
You are the kind of person who minimizes his pain and downplays it. This is a way for you to invalidate your suffering and belittle your worth as a person.
You Love the Emotionally Charged Songs or Movies
You are fixated on movies and songs that embody emotionally charged lyrics and music. They provide your brain with the nostalgic pangs of heartbreak that you so desperately crave.
You Want to Fix People
You are the kind of person who probably has a savior complex. You fall for emotionally broken people whom you believe you can fix. However, this is a mentally and emotionally exhausting endeavor, and you are far too eager and pleased to engage in it. You want to be broken, and this complex affords you a golden chance at becoming so.
You Confuse Rejection with Challenge
You are the kind of person who enhances the frequency and intensity of attempts to win over a person if the latter repudiates your advances. You begin confusing rejection for challenge and strive even harder to continue the chase. That is because it is the incessant, intense pursuit that has now become the prize for you.
You are Contrite when Things Go Right
You are the kind of person who feels guilty when things, like love, career, peace, and so on, finally work out and go right. You feel like you don’t deserve this, and naturally, you start looking for ways to sabotage it.
You have Trouble Setting Boundaries.
You can’t seem to set boundaries or say no to something that infringes on them. You find refusal to be a cruel concept and are prone to self-sacrifice. That is because you falsely equate it to kindness.
You Become Attached Too Quickly
You are the kind of person who dives head over heels into a relationship far too early. You also form intense attachments too early. This can result in rejection, and even then, the intense pain you experience feels so good and satisfying.
You Think Heartbreaks Make You Special
You are prone to romanticizing your heartbreaks as if they are a component of your soul and personality. You consider yourself special for having survived so many of them, while in reality, this just means you love pain and can’t seem to hold onto a healthy relationship for your life.
You Feel Hollow without Emotional Chaos
You are the person who loves being in the midst of emotional chaos and drama and misses them intensely in moments of peace. The latter feels strange, unsettling, and too calm for your tastes.
You Mistake Self-Pity for Self-Awareness
You are the kind of person who continuously ruminates over pain but never seeks to break the patterns that led to it. Experiencing this pain, savoring it, is something that drives you and keeps you from trying to fix it.
You Label Self-Abandonment as Love
You might call it love, but it is nothing more than self-deprecation and abandonment. You constantly forgive, endure, and stay with a person who doesn’t deserve it. That simply implies that you are the kind of person who seeks to love without loving yourself, and that in itself is contradictory and profoundly ironic.
Final Thoughts
You aren’t irrevocably broken or irredeemable, just simply misguided. You have begun to confuse pain for peace and designated it as your comfort zone. You need to realize that this is unhealthy and that love is supposed to feel calm and satisfying. It shouldn’t hurt and not hurl you into unmitigated chaos or drama. You should strive to mend your ways and position yourself on the path to healing.
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