Everything I could ever say about my father is said in this clip:
I don’t necessarily blame him because his father did the same to him but, without the ability to express it to him, this clip is all I have. Feelings of abandonment are the hardest to face. They reside in the darkest holes and deepest pits of our psyche. Thanks to the Fresh Prince, I can cry about it now.
Oh fuck dude, where do I begin? Lemme see….
You’re not at all fat! Actually as it turns out, you are very handsome but just got lied to by people that should have been protecting you but instead destroyed you. Keep repeating over and over until you believe it the truth: you are aren’t fat. You’re very handsome and a really good guy. I am so fucking proud of you. Do you know that?
And what do you want to be? What do you want to do? And I don’t mean smoke pot all the time and get drunk. What else? You’re a great writer but your still illiterate technically at 16. You’re writing is like a really creative mess. Ask for help. I want you to apply yourself and if you do you will be so happy, I promise. Apply yourself, please? If you do? You can still smoke pot. Okay?
And pretty soon you’re gonna need therapy and I want you to start whenever you feel up to it, okay? You’re depressive, buddy. A big cute depressive guy. I want you to get help, okay? Check out ACOA and IBP therapy…get a head start cause your 30ies will be a fucking ride and a half :-/
But I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of how you end up fighting through your depression and changed your life. I’m so proud of how good you are at heart and how you removed those defense mechanisms and let people love you. You can do anything buddy, so don’t ever sell yourself short and start writing more and you’ll be so happy.
I love you
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.
I need to explain myself and what is going on with me and in doing so I beg of you to just hear my words and understand it isn’t anything you did. It’s all my doing and all my stuff.
It has been really special for me to get to know you again (for the first time) and with that I am seeing how cool you are and good and sweet. It has also made me realize how much of our past issues was sprung from my childhood issues. So much of the pain I cause our friendship and our love was due to my applying of things my mom did to me to the people in my life – I am realizing with your wonderful help, how I inject her into my current life.
I see now how I attributed things she did to things you did, unfairly. Recently those things sprung up with a friend who is like a family member, a sister, so as we got closer my drama would start and get on her as well. So I finally could see what part was really me.
1. One of those issues leftover from my mom is feeling used. When I was young, I was my mom’s surrogate husband, hanging out, being best friends, always together but then she would fling me aside for weeks at a time when she made up with my dad or got a new friend and basically it felt like I was being used – really the truth was was that i had no business being her friend and really should have been out playing. But putting me in this position she was putting a child into the shoes of an adult – but I couldn’t deal with it.
Fast forward to adulthood and our relationship, and I misguidedly assume that everyone is trying to use me instead of just realizing that people do ask for favors (especially me). So thus, as I have gotten better, I am very careful not to let my childhood imagination go wild. When people ask me to get them some stuff, I always have to reassure myself that this isn’t my mom using me, this isn’t my mom using me and that I LOVE to go get for people I care about. So there is no problem.
And you are my friend so, I know you aren’t using me. But the struggle continues and I will have Victory over this ‘unilateral contract’ – remember that?
I know now, in my heart that it isn’t you, it’s me!! And that makes it go away.
2. Secondly comes the double whammy. My other worse thing I still carry around from childhood is my awful fears of being left behind. Mom used to always do that to me. leave me behind – see I was, in my mind, an adult and how dare she go out at night to a bar without me (I know it sounds so ridiculous, cuz I was fucking 8!)
But this is what I am finally facing. My poor friend sometimes dares to NOT go to lunch with me cause a friend will ask her to go and she gets a grumpy me for her troubles 
She has helped me learn that these are not things that are really happening, just an 8 year olds perspective.
YESTERDAY: But then all in one feel swoop I get a call from you asking for me to get some stuff so you take on a birthday camping trip I’m not going to. Needless to say, I hit the wall hard. this is what I do to all my friends – I even do it to Doug and he has learned to question me and make me think.
So I got upset and felt like I was being left behind. Silly huh?
So I say this to just reassure you that if I do get grumpy it isn’t you, it’s old habits that die hard – BUT DIE THEY WILL
I will be victorious over this ancient drama and I will strengthen my resolve to value and cultivate a wonderful friendship with you – a person that I am really coming to realize is a wonderful special friend.
So to summarize: I have these old things that I let surface and sometimes they hurt my buddies and I don’t want them to be hurt. I soooo appreciate all you have helped me with and love you very much.
Please understand you did nothing wrong and that I am sooo fucking happy that I can see this stuff happening and that with your beautiful friendship i can overcome!!!!
From a fascinating book called “Guyland – The Perilous World Where Guy Become Men” by Michael Kimmel comes a quick run down of the most popular responses to the author’s question of “What makes a man a man”:
Ugh. How fittingly this sums up most of the cognitive dissonance that has plagued me and the throngs of men that inhabit this day and age. Is this what makes a man? Is this the criteria that we want our young men, our little boys to use to determine what makes them a man?
In this day and age with normal societal markers that adolescents and adults use to determine adulthood mostly coming later and later, we are leaving our children, our boys to fend for themselves when it comes to emotional maturity. Working parents, latch-key kids, delayed marriage and delayed child-rearing, longer lifespans, and communities that offer zero support- is it any wonder that our boys, our adolescents are lost when it comes to approaching adulthood?
And then we have this code, handed down by other boys in a ritual of creating adult boys that have no real idea what it is to truly be a man. Adult children in a man’s body – Guyland is a place where the truth of a man is lost in the rush for identity.
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