More on the past in my present
So, I'm working on interpreting my past these days. I feel like I've come up with some really solid things regarding my problems with being in a relationship.
Why the panic?
One thing I've always felt when I sense that someone really likes me is panic. I feel a bit sick to my stomach, I'm aware of my heart beating, I can't focus on what is happening. The long-term end result of this is that I destroy the potential for a relationship. I find a reason to be unhappy with the person, a reason why they aren't right for me. I can't stand the panic, and so I make it stop. The short-term result is that I probably am not as attentive back to the person, or that I'm freaking out inside, wondering how to escape. If I don't escape, I feel that I will disappear, that I will be overtaken, that I'll have no sense of self left.
The source is clear to me now: my parents, of course. A relationship with them was painful and they did indeed take away my sense of self. It wasn't okay to be a person around them. I couldn't express an opinion, especially if it conflicted with their own, my own thoughts were completely forced out of my own head and filled with the things they told me about myself, and by my attempts to figure out what they wanted from me, what might prevent them from being mean. As I spoke about in a previous post, intimacy meant bad, harmful, painful things.
Fear of being dumped = terror
As well, though, I think that by avoiding being close to someone, I've avoided being dumped by them. To be dumped by someone (which I was in fact just recently) is to be discarded, to be labeled as inadequate, to be shoved to the side while the cool people, the interesting and happy people walk by without noticing me. But this is from the past too, these feelings. I was indeed treated as inadequate, as not quite right, but not by the woman I'm dating at such or such a time. It was by my parents, and that's in the past.
My fear of being left, and therefore my discomfort with getting close, also has to do, I think, with my many sicknesses as a child. I was given last rights at birth. And that was just the beginning. To be left alone when I was a kid could mean that I would die.
And I was very often left alone.
My mother worked nights, and my father didn't care. One night, after a tonsilectomy, my stitches came undone in the middle of the night, and when my teenaged sister went to tell my father that I wasn't well, he told her to go back to bed, that I'd be fine (he never came to see if his 5 year old daughter was okay). I almost bled to death. By the time my mother came home from work in the morning, I was vomiting blood everywhere, and I had to be physically carried to the car and rushed to the emergency room where I received a transfusion. My parents abandoned me in a really big way. I've tried so hard to avoid being left again by not getting close.
I'm rehashing all this because enough is enough. It's all controlled me for so long, but I refuse to let it do so anymore.
The plan
The plan: to stick with the panic when my next woman is looking at me with love and promises of caring and nurturing. The panic will pass. That's the nature of panic. The panic will be replaced with feeling the feelings I've always longed for.
And I will sit with the uncertainty. The uncertainty of whether she's right for me or not. I've been unable to sit with that uncertainty in the past, accelerating the relationship by sleeping with her too quickly, or by ending it because she wasn't this or that, when this or that isn't something I even care about! It'll become evident in time whether she's right for me.
In the meantime, I'll enjoy her smiles, her touch, her tenderness. And hopefully those will become mine indefinitely.
jem
Why the panic?
One thing I've always felt when I sense that someone really likes me is panic. I feel a bit sick to my stomach, I'm aware of my heart beating, I can't focus on what is happening. The long-term end result of this is that I destroy the potential for a relationship. I find a reason to be unhappy with the person, a reason why they aren't right for me. I can't stand the panic, and so I make it stop. The short-term result is that I probably am not as attentive back to the person, or that I'm freaking out inside, wondering how to escape. If I don't escape, I feel that I will disappear, that I will be overtaken, that I'll have no sense of self left.
The source is clear to me now: my parents, of course. A relationship with them was painful and they did indeed take away my sense of self. It wasn't okay to be a person around them. I couldn't express an opinion, especially if it conflicted with their own, my own thoughts were completely forced out of my own head and filled with the things they told me about myself, and by my attempts to figure out what they wanted from me, what might prevent them from being mean. As I spoke about in a previous post, intimacy meant bad, harmful, painful things.
Fear of being dumped = terror
As well, though, I think that by avoiding being close to someone, I've avoided being dumped by them. To be dumped by someone (which I was in fact just recently) is to be discarded, to be labeled as inadequate, to be shoved to the side while the cool people, the interesting and happy people walk by without noticing me. But this is from the past too, these feelings. I was indeed treated as inadequate, as not quite right, but not by the woman I'm dating at such or such a time. It was by my parents, and that's in the past.
My fear of being left, and therefore my discomfort with getting close, also has to do, I think, with my many sicknesses as a child. I was given last rights at birth. And that was just the beginning. To be left alone when I was a kid could mean that I would die.
And I was very often left alone.
My mother worked nights, and my father didn't care. One night, after a tonsilectomy, my stitches came undone in the middle of the night, and when my teenaged sister went to tell my father that I wasn't well, he told her to go back to bed, that I'd be fine (he never came to see if his 5 year old daughter was okay). I almost bled to death. By the time my mother came home from work in the morning, I was vomiting blood everywhere, and I had to be physically carried to the car and rushed to the emergency room where I received a transfusion. My parents abandoned me in a really big way. I've tried so hard to avoid being left again by not getting close.
I'm rehashing all this because enough is enough. It's all controlled me for so long, but I refuse to let it do so anymore.
The plan
The plan: to stick with the panic when my next woman is looking at me with love and promises of caring and nurturing. The panic will pass. That's the nature of panic. The panic will be replaced with feeling the feelings I've always longed for.
And I will sit with the uncertainty. The uncertainty of whether she's right for me or not. I've been unable to sit with that uncertainty in the past, accelerating the relationship by sleeping with her too quickly, or by ending it because she wasn't this or that, when this or that isn't something I even care about! It'll become evident in time whether she's right for me.
In the meantime, I'll enjoy her smiles, her touch, her tenderness. And hopefully those will become mine indefinitely.
jem
posted by jemcollections at 9:38 PM
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