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How do you deal with losing?

Agreed. 3 posters have suggested a psychiatrist. I suggested trying Go Fish.
I deal with losing by entering my mistakes in a database of mistakes.
Going through the database of shame from time to time has two benefits:
First : improvement
Second: temporary deflation of ego. Once I am reminded how bad I really am, I tend to assess my chess strength more realistically.
It is then easier to accept new losses because the gap between my perceived strength and my real strength has diminished.
Of course, the effect is only temporary and things go quickly back to normal, i.e. when I win, it feels normal because I am awesome, and when I lose, it's agony :)

"The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat"...
A picture of Eddie the ski jumper, taking a flying nose dive off the downhill ramp, head over heels, lives on into eternity in our minds.
I appreciate all the suggestions from everyone who took the time to read this. I acknowledge what I wrote initially was an example of what some may see as a "TL;DR," but I hope I can offer my assurance that what I said is sincere. A few people seem to think I was trolling by writing that, and think I'm only seeking attention, when actually I was seeking for the very thing that I got: Advice. I'll do my best to take this in stride, but what I really need is some way to disconnect the stigma from Chess, and just take losses in stride. We all win and lose, and that's just part of it. I'm disappointed that some people recommend I quit, when hundreds of dollars has gone into my own improvement with various books, and coachings sessions., but I can't blame you for suggesting that because self harm just seems flat out ridiculous, even though it's a struggle that I deal with. To those who suggested professional help, I had been seeing a therapist about it for some time, with not much progress, and ultimately gave up.
All good players are sore losers.
Look at videos of Kasparov losing.
When Fischer lost against Spassky at Mar del Plata 1960, he analysed his own refutation 3...d6 to the King's Gambit. Also on other occasions he stayed up all night analysing where he went wrong.

You should analyse your losses, not only the pure chess aspect but also dig deeper in other circumstances. Say you lost because you missed a fork. What were you thinking then? Were you distracted or bored with the game or were you waiting for him to resign? Were you in time trouble? How much time did you spend on your losing move? If you were in time trouble, where did you spend all that time on before?

It is important for you to overcome your anxiety, not only for chess, but also for other things in your life. In fact if you cope with anxiety regarding chess, you may benefit from that. I notice you play a lot of casual games. Are you anxious to play rated games and lose?
That your main concern is over a monetary loss, that your investment has "not paid off" in a higher rating than you expect, is crystal clear you are playing chess for the wrong reason. Play rated games instead of casual ones. A loss is still a loss. Man up. Clearly your anxiety is your "rating" and how it appears and has little to do with actually losing a game, you've done that 100's of games.
Now you attempt to have us believe you "gave up" on a therapist who offered no help. Was he/she a chess player ?
Nice try, but no cigar. Btw... free advice in a forum may be harmful for your health, stick to the pro's.

Instead of looking at each game as individual events, perhaps view each game as part of a larger game in your life. There is a theory that minimizing events into smaller details in a larger event helps remove our over emotional investment into something. An example is how babies react so intensely to things seemingly so trivial, or a toddler who melts down in a store because they didn't get to put an item into the basket. As we get older we naturally begin to understand how most events are minor blimps in our lifespan and our emotional investment of them becomes more easily managed resulting from that. However we can always work on it, and some needing to. When you have less emotional reactions your rationalization of the situation is more powerful, which gives us grwater power to manage our situations appropriately.

TL;DR; Focus on viewing chess games as a small part of playing chess in your life. By reducing events as small details of a much larger event you are able to reduce the emotional intensity of that event, allowing you to rationalize those events more appropriately and manage your over all reactions to events like that. Cheers!

-Jordan
Hey there @Pat6578, this is a problem that a lot of people have.

Losing can be taugh, but when it comes to this magnitude it is a problem.

There might be many causes to what you are experiencing right now, but I'd say that commonly it starts during childhood and has to do with your parents being tremendously perfectionists and showing you love expressions only when you have acomplished something, for example, the bests grades in school, good results in sports... and maybe even punishing you once you have comitted a mistake or you didn't get the expected results.

This pattern of only feeling loved when you get something, can make you feel really inadecuate and undeserving and set up pretty deep fears as years go by repeating the same patterns.

If that's your case (might not be), you could try to desensitize through exposing yourself to that stimuli which generates anxiety or bad sensations inside you, meaning, you could go and try to lose as many games as possible.

Might be hard at the beginning, but eventually you'll realize that your fear makes no sense, that losing is not so much of a big deal especially in something as meaningless as chess, the more you lose, the less you should feel that losing is something important, and if you find out that you are afraid or feel bad when you do lose in some other activities, might work as well.

You can get an idea of it here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desensitization_(psychology)

Hope that makes sense

Paul.

This is not advice, but it's related to the discussion. Along with chess, I play many sports because I basically love competing in general. I don't know exactly why, but I've noticed that losing in chess hurts a lot more than losing in, for example, tennis. If I lose a close tennis match, we shake hands over the net and smile. I would rather have won, but I'm still happy that I got to play and have fun. For some reason, playing chess is only fun when you're winning (or think you're winning) and it can be extremely frustrating when you're losing and your opponent gracefully thwarts all of your plans that you worked so hard in calculating. Has anybody else noticed this? Does anybody have an idea for why losing a chess game sucks so much more than losing at other things?
It's a Board game. What's to get upset about???
We are not professionals.

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