My dad left me with rejection issues

Where do I start?

My father left me feeling utterly rejected, to the point where I yearn for acceptance every day from any male boss I work with.

Although my partner seems to love me on paper I feel so lonely and as though I let him down all the time.

I see his point of view but I feel unheard by him. Am I selfish?

When we have core beliefs, howsoever they come about, they often define who we are, how we see ourselves and how we feel about things. Depending on what those beliefs are, sometimes that’s a positive. So for example, accepting that you’re a good person, someone worth knowing who contributes positively to their own life and that of other people is likely to mean you can create helpful and healthy boundaries, ask for your needs to be met and be accepting of the needs of friends and partners. When the opposite is true though, it can also create the gaping hole you allude to whereby you’re constantly on the alert for approval, recognition and perhaps even love from people with whom in the normal course of events a working or business relationship would be the expected norm. It can also create problems such as finding boundaries difficult to establish. Sometimes the unscrupulous take advantage of that which of course is then likely to lead to further distress and feeling used and ultimately rejected. 

Without a shadow of a doubt, I would warmly recommend that you seek out some personal counselling. Sometimes accessing professional help for issues such as you describe feels so daunting. It’s entirely natural to think that ‘just talking’ to a complete stranger is very unlikely to help heal the loss you’re experiencing.  Because that’s really what is so often at the root of issues like this. It’s the loss of what you hoped for, needed and should have been able to expect. Sometimes we might start to blame ourselves for what someone else did. Sometimes we end up thinking we don’t really deserve to be loved.... 

Working with a qualified therapist might help you to make sense of what happened, how it’s affected you and from that, to how you positively move on from the sadness and loss you currently feel. That doesn’t mean forgetting painful experiences, just that making sure what happened back then no longer controls who you are and how you feel about yourself.

So to finish, please consider counselling. It may not be an easy journey but it may well enable that lonely person you describe to actually believe they really are a truly wonderful human being.