Drew in Zombieland

Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least

I have been entangled with a female friend/lover for 15 years and it has been 15 years of “come here, come here” mixed with a lot of ‘get away, get away’. And as the both of us have gotten better in our separate ACOA-type recoveries, I find that neither one of us can change or stop this dance and the roles are desperately hard to change.

The first five years she was in love with me but I was living with a girlfriend. I think that bind-ed her to me through rejection. Then 5 years later we come together again and for a year we were able to be lovers…but our recoveries ripped our intimacy apart and we went our ways. But we never let go fully, always keeping a line open.

Fast forward to the last 2 years and I am better but can’t let go of her. Things have swung and I am seeing her for the first time; the beauty, the passion, the friend, the lover - but of course, now she is reluctant and doesn’t care as much as I do…she wants to be the super close friends we always were but doesn’t want the lover I can be and want.

And on the cycle will go as two people spin their sick dance of intimacy, unable to break free and live their lives in the new way they have discovered through recovery and unable to take the relationship to a secure and safe place of love and support.

The good news is that I am finally a man in my heart and cannot (for the first time in 15 years) let this twisted, unsatisfying relationship continue like this. I confronted her and told her the truth. Of course she didn’t reciprocate and wants me to remain as a brother-type friend which I refuse to do. I broke off any friendship and am respecting hers and my boundaries.

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It’s just so frustrating to realize the last 15 years were wasted when I could have been experiencing relationships and love and all kinds of things that were lost to my scared mind that holds onto sick relationships like a junkie to his drug. Releasing her this last time is so hard and scary but for the first time in my life it is not a dreaded thing that will kill me. I will be okay and flourish but I worry that my weakness for her will lead me back down the path of this sick intimacy that her and I share.

But honestly, I know this sounds a little dark and truth be told, I am so much better than I ever was and so much more mature than at any time in my life. The air is cool and the sun shining. i will be fine.

Get out of that skin and get
into that freedom

strip down
nothing in my pockets

run much slicker, safer
open toed and barely strapped

Fling a thing away
I’m choking collars and belts

spitting teeth plated
enamel too heavy

I want em floating in haze

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Come on Universe, meet me half way. Feels like you’re not doing your part and letting me flounder about trying to manifest in a vacuum.

And I’m so lonely in my heart, so vacant in my love. Haven’t been touched enough, touch starved.

And no one holds me out as special, out above all else. I am just as unimportant to them as I used to be to myself. I don’t understand intimacy, I don’t know love and affection.

We all carry a certain amount of inundation in our bodies for the perceived world around us. This amount is like a water level that when exceeded cause us to fight or flight.

In Adult Children, this normal level of inundation is increased by a certain amount causing the person to be walking around on egg shells just waiting for the other shoe to drop and the fight/flight to kick in.

I am an Adult Child and I get inundated by the silliest things:

- I hate wrist watches because they’re too constricting

- I avoid wallets because they feel uncomfortable to sit on.

- I rip all my clothes off when I get home from work and wear my boxers because clothes are too constrictive.

Inundation cause people to run from relationships, avoid advancement as well as avoid groups and other people. Inundation is sometimes the culprit behind loners and lifetime bachelors as well as mid life crises and mental break downs.

Sometimes my cat inundates me when it wants to snuggle. When I realized that, I realized I had a problem.

I was at rock bottom when i started unearthing that ancient anger and pain from my childhood and as I gained strength to act on my own behalf, I was still at the maturity level of a young child and lashing out was all I knew.

That same Christmas I decided to let these two jerks (my parents) know exactly how I felt about their drinking and their drama. I got some big Christmas cards and in the ugliest magic-marker I could find I blasted them both back to the stone age.

I told them about themselves but good. I laid into their selfishness, their inability to make me feel safe, for all the years I had to be the parent, for the loss of my childhood, for the fact that I had to carry around a small pack in case I had to leave in a haste.

I got even nastier about their disgusting habit of drinking and cheating on each other. It was ugly and the magic markers made it look like a crazy person was stalking them-

My mom (who i am still close to) was devastated, but in a good way. She talked to me and held an ongoing conversation and this became the launching point for our further relationship. Dad said nothing. He never reaches out and I stopped trying. One for two…

Looking back I am so proud of the little boy who, even though he was scared and sad, still for the first time took charge and stuck up for me. He acted on my behalf and I will never forget what he did for me.

The anger I feel for what they did has totally subsided (coincidentally it has lessened at the same rate as my inner self-hate has lessened) But I will never forget what they did and never forget how I got out of that hell and became the man that I am…becoming.

Foster a good relationship with your inner self. There is a lot we don’t understand about head talk but one thing we do know is that the head talk is what leads us to decision making and if that talk is flawed, negative and angry (derogatory) then willpower will be diminished.

I went through a lot of new-ish recovery the last 10 years and can tell you from experience that if you clean up the head talk and eliminate the negative talk, habits will change quicker and easier.

I created a third person (healthy Gary) to talk to and be the parent to the scared voice and the negative voice in my head (negative is my mom and dad - scared is my true sad self) - slowly but surely I negotiated, very lovingly (lovingly even to the negative voice) the stuff the voices were saying and developed a dialog that helped create a sense of safety for the weak voice and a sense of love for the negative one.)

And my weak voice began to feel more safe and protected, changes started happening at an incredible rate and will power grew as well. With my inner voices all on the same page, I made deals with them all to get things done: Little (weak) Gary would do exercise because he wanted to meet girls. Negative Gary turned into ‘warning Gary’ as he realized he was just going over the top and we would listen if he toned it down.

I created a safe place for my voices to thrive. I know this sounds silly but this shit works like no one’s business. It helped me grow my internal age from about 13 emotionally to about 27.

That totally reminds me of my dad. All my life I hated the man and with good reason as he hit me and was drunk a lot and loved to make fun of my weight but there was always something really unnatural to the idea that I would hate my own father but I did with all my heart.

Later on in life, as I got better, I started to see the whole picture of my childhood more clearly. Because he was an alcoholic and less than the ideal husband for my mom, she turned me into her surrogate husband - I went everywhere with her, listen to her issues, her problems, commiserated with her about other men and especially about my dad. We would even go so far as ganging up on him and mocking him openly to his face. I would protect my mom at any price and he was no exception.

Now that I’m 40 and so much better inside and out, I can see how that dynamic ruined how I saw my father, how I ganged up on him for my mother and how her issues and inner hatred were transferred to me…a child who needed his father.

These days I have a horrible time relating to men which is all the more weird because I am heavily into sports and guy things but have very few guy friends. I am also rediscovering my ‘guy’ side and trying to do more guy things to offset this empty feeling I have for my father and for the absence of men in my life. I don’t blame my mom so much as she was doing what people do when abandoned by their alcoholic mate but I can now see how much stuff was put on my dad unfairly and without being true. My mom’s hatred became my hatred and my relationship to my dad has never been the same.

Now don’t get me wrong, he was a shithead for the most part but because of this sick and crappy dynamic of an alcoholic family, I was never able to see who he really was and I can now see that that guy was more than just a drunk - he was my dad.

PS - this exact same dynamic can happen in any dysfunctional family - not just for alcoholics.

I’m not special to anybody, not even myself.

I want to be special to somebody, to be there favorite person or the one they turn to when they need to turn to their closest person. I want to be loved and adored, to be the one that makes the other feel butterflies or shivers down their spine.

I honestly can’t remember what that’s like. I haven’t been with anyone for about 7 years and the weight of the loneliness is crushing. It creates a unease in my personality and a neediness that is clear for everyone to feel and see when they deal with me.

And really, I should be special to myself, shouldn’t I? I shouldn’t have to wait for someone outside of me to validate that I am indeed special. It should be my own means and my own good self-relationship that defines this self-esteem issue.

But the conflict goes on as I try and repair the horrible self-image, the brutal self-esteem and the negative voices in my head. To integrate the voices and the images I make for myself into a loving and supportive system is fucking hard.

I need a hug.

A child, your inner child - the one that hurts inside - doesn’t want to hear you being rational and calm. “Fuck them” he says and “fuck them for their selfish bullshit that ripped our family apart and ruined mine and my brother’s fucking lives”.

These parents, as wonderful as you need them to be, HURT these two children and left a HOLE, were gone in their lives where they needed adult supervision (think: latch key kids). And this hole in parenting led to another hole - a hole in their heart.

What the parents did could be rationalized all day long but it hurt you very much and look what it did to your brother! They pretty much, through their own selfish needs, screwed up your personalities.

Now, i say all that to make a point: you are both suffering and both need help. YOU CANNOT fix your brother, he has to do it himself and because people learn through example and not through being forced, the only real way to help him is showing him how it is done, how to heal.

Time for you to take the focus off him and start looking inward my friend. You have to save yourself first and then he will follow.

Sex with these dead people, without a lot of alcohol or drugs like X, would ultimately lead to them dissociating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder) and/or ‘getting in the head’, thinking too much about the act and the passion would die. The reason that they all had this very common problem was that they had all been molested at some point and because I am a man, they were women.

I was molested but only emotionally as my mom turned me into a surrogate husband (very common in alcoholic families.) She made me her buddy, her confidant and it felt like a relationship. She never touched me sex-wise (well, there were some slow dances that creeped me out…) but this relationship at such a young age set me on my path of manifesting, bringing into my life, immature women with no healthy boundaries.

My life has been filled with finding these emotionally stunted women so that I can take care of them like I did with my mom. And I know these women very clearly now. Some were alcoholics, drug addicts, one was an over eater/purger. My point is that they all needed saving and because they were ‘messed up’ they all had the attribute of dissociating during sex. At some point between 1-16 , they were molested in some way.

Children commonly use dissociation to protect them from horrible moments in their life. It’s this dissociation I saw in all of these injured eyes that I loved. It’s dissociation that helps someone forget how to feel their body, it’s this type of dissociation during a sexual moment that makes it impossible for some people to feel their feelings, their emotions and ultimately the body itself. Dissociation makes an orgasm a foreign idea.

I recognize my own dissociation when all of a sudden my mind is racing away from the moment, from the Now, obsessing over some train of thought and seemingly not in the room with whatever action is going on - like sex. In therapy, when I would approach terrifying subjects, I would dissociate and my therapist would whisper “Drew, where are you? Where did you go?” and as I got better I could battle to remain present.

I always hesitate to call women ‘frigid’ for it is rarely a decent enough word to encompass the truth of what is really going on with the other person. There is so much raw emotion usually around relationships that this word so easily missed. And for the record, guys that dissociate often have the opposite of ‘no orgasm’: premature ejaculation.

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo

Never before have I found myself so able to concentrate on things for periods of time. My whole life has been a short-attention span existence that frustrated me to no end when trying to write or study or even just stay in the moment.

But since I started Nichiren Buddhism and the twice a day chanting/practice, the amount of time I am able to concentrate has grown longer and longer.

This is not magic, this is habit and the veracity and quality of a 3000 year old practice. Cheers to Buddhism and Nichiren for a wonderful practice.