#and he’s stuck in this pattern where he sabotages his own romantic relationships

[daydreamerdrew]

Iron Man (1968) #58

[pxrxllel]

inner child trauma (11/12/20)

Today was filled with epiphanies, and I’m a mix of excited, at peace, and anxious about all the answers they’re providing.

Yesterday I watched a webinar on self-love and self-sabotaging in the context of romantic relationships, and here were some of the key points:

Who did you crave love and approval from the most as a child?

Your relationship with your parents and your needs being met/unmet subconsciously create emotional patterns that you take into your adult relationships. Therefore, your relationships are a reflection of how your needs were met by your parents.

When you have a wounded inner child, you are fixated on ensuring the outcome that you expect. The energy you take into the relationship is based on fear and control.

You’re trying to protect your wounded Inner Child by controlling the outcome, to avoid being hurt again.

I’ve taken the attachment styles quiz and for the most part, I come out as being anxious. I know I definitely tend to take on the role of the mother/therapist/fixer upper in my relationships (which has usually ended up with me becoming avoidant after a while due to resentment), but I’ve also had some where I didn’t feel the need to and I became clingy instead. So maybe that’s me yoyo-ing between the two, which I think the webinar described as being disorganised. 

I’m keenly aware that I have a rich history of needing external validation, because approval was never received from my parents. I was never emotionally applauded for anything I did - in fact, my parents nitpicked me to the point where I was made to feel innately wrong. It’s hard to not be angry about it, but it’s even worse to hold that against them because it won’t help me make progress. A large part of the validation was being called fat and ugly, which may be why I’ve been so reliant on compliments about my appearance all throughout my life, and even still since I’ve become objectively attractive. My father and some extended family always framed it as not being pretty enough to attract boys, which I’ve previously established as the key reason why I clung onto compliments and relationships and used sexual attention from men as a metric for self-worth. I’m just also starting to realise that perhaps it’s why I took sexual rejection from my previous relationship so personally - I was still unconvinced that he was attracted to me and the rejection only confirmed that I wasn’t desirable in that way (or that’s how my mind attributed it anyway). 

I think I made that realisation about my dependence on external validation in 2018/19. Since then, I’ve actively worked to disempower that, and I’ve largely been successful. I hardly ever use my appearance or compliments as a success metric anymore. I don’t fish for compliments or check for likes half as much as I used to. And it’s sort of been a self-fulfilling prophecy; the less I cared, the more they came and I genuinely feel OK about myself. I believe people now when they say nice things about me.

The point about fear and control is really interesting to me because looking back, I definitely was trying to be the ‘perfect’ girlfriend and looked for verbal validation (in the form of compliments, how much it seemed like he was into me) that I was doing a good job. I used to be so sensitive to any changes in the temperature of the relationship, and would melt down easily and take it personally if his demeanour cooled down even in the slightest. When I felt him slipping, I would hastily try to overcompensate out of fear for losing him, which I now know is a recipe for backfire. It’s also interesting because I’ve realised that I’m modelling ‘perfect girlfriend’ after my mother. My mother is a voice of reason/wisdom, emotional support cushion, physical support cushion, service-oriented, problem solver, domestic goddess, and all around superstar. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those things, and not necessarily wrong for me to aspire to those things, but maybe it’s wrong for me to uphold that as the be all and end all of girlfriend material and then get annoyed when it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. 

Speaking of mirroring, it’s really interesting how accurate it is... a bit too much that it’s creepy. I never heeded it much before, and especially not when my therapist brought it up as something to flag, but I’ve come to the realisation that mine and Jarek’s relationship almost exactly mirrors my parents’ marriage. The long distance thing, and the fact that I feel like my parents aren’t each other’s soulmates. They care about each other a lot obviously, but I feel like my mom relies on my dad for practical reasons (kids and money - she’s much more comfortable playing the role of a mother than a wife) and my dad relies on her for emotional support and all the reasons listed above. Don’t get me wrong, they clearly enjoy each other’s company and get along, but I don’t think they have the X factor that I observe in other couples and what I think I look for. They don’t really have the natural, seamless, deep, almost magical affinity that I’ve been so lucky to experience a handful of times in my life. They don’t naturally understand each other. I think perhaps pragmatic marriages are more common or accepted in Asian cultures and worldviews, but for those of us that grew up in Western cultures, we see the romanticised version of these things and can’t help but want for more. It’s also interesting because I’ve always wondered what it would have been like if my parents weren’t in a long distance marriage/what it’ll be like when they retire and move in together. I always thought that maybe they would get sick of each other and argue more, but I can’t say for sure (plus, they’ve mellowed out a lot as they’ve aged). 

This relates to me and Jarek because I feel like our dynamic is really similar. I care about him so deeply and the way that it manifests is that I treat him the same way my mom treats my dad. I’m definitely more of a mom/therapist to him than I’d like to be - I’m sick of taking on the role of the fixer, although I think it’s neat to help people become self-aware of certain things or issues affecting them, I don’t really want to be the one holding their hand through their journey. And I think maybe the reason why I’m so stubborn about this relationship is that he represents what my dad is to my mom: Material security, stability, a comfortable life, America, all the boxes ticked. Even if he doesn’t understand me, and even if he doesn’t absolutely light me on fire, I’ve been accepting of it because I see how it works with my parents. And with them I know it can work, if I stay committed to the path. And I’ll be rewarded with my needs for security and safety and permanence met, which were not present for me emotionally as child - see how I’ve looped back to the beginning of this piece? And that’s also why I guess I feel so stable in this relationship: I know it well, I know how it goes and how it can end up, and I’m not grasping at fear or control to try to maintain the outcome because I already know what the outcome is. 

Jarek himself has a lot of childhood trauma too and his level of anxious attachment is far more severe than mine (I think I’m secure in some ways, too, esp ever since I actively worked on myself). His parents have a loveless marriage and he’s been emotionally neglected and felt unsafe in his family his whole life, so that’s something for him to work on and I honestly am not sure if we would be able to have a functional relationship if we were both still stuck in our ways.

I really truly think that because of this fixing issue I have, deep down I believe that until that’s cured, I can only be loved at arm’s length. Because if I get too close, I become too suffocating and overwhelming to be around because my fear kicks in and I start becoming controlling. So it would make sense then that the relationships I get tired of are the long distance ones and then everyone I do get (properly) close to in real life are the people I scare away with my intensity. This pattern makes total sense when taken into consideration with my childhood and how my parents are with each other. 

I would like to ask my mom these questions:

Do you think you and dad understand each other?

Why do you love him?

How do you think your marriage would be different if you weren’t long distance?

Have you ever wanted more from the marriage?

I’m quite proud of myself for coming to these conclusions without therapy, and I have a strong gut feeling I’m not wrong with any of these as it makes complete logical sense. And while it’s so good to have some clarity, context, explanations, and answers about all this, it doesn’t necessarily inform my next steps (although it can provide a guide). Knowing about these subconscious patterns and my emotional makeup means I can check myself according to my personal goals, but it doesn’t provide a template for my decision-making. I think that’s something I need to chew on more, as to where to go from here. I still need to figure out what I really want and what’s best for me and will make me happy. It’s hard because I don’t have a healthy relationship to look at and view as a model, so I don’t know what it should be like apart from relying on my gut and perceptions.

However, I accept that although the answers may be not what I want and I may have to make some tough decisions, it’s ultimately the right thing to do for my own wellbeing and happiness, and that of everyone else as well.

[maybegrayblog-blog]

The Perils of Happiness

The last couple of days have been terrifyingly happy. Happiness is pretty foreign territory to me. I would say that during my childhood I found myself disconnected from the things that made me feel happy because they were not "good". Being "good" was more important than being happy, because I needed my parents to love me to keep me alive and being happy was dangerous if it was "misbehaviour" which risked their affections. In platonic and romantic relationships throughout my life, from severely unhealthy to relatively (if not exceptionally) healthy, I have repeated this pattern. I have confused praise and acceptance for happiness and self-worth. My earliest memories of being happy, by the way, were moments where I was full of pride in my ideas, my emotions, myself. I remember being called "stuck up", "bossy", "obsessive" and "naive" and thus developed fear of having self esteem, being assertive, having passions and trying new things. My earliest memories of self-love trigger my earliest memories of judgement and abandonment. Especially as I became an adolescent and a young adult, pleasure was replaced by the anticipation of pain. Pain, in comparison, felt stable. Safe and familiar and functional and low. I suffered an extreme fear of emotional heights. I imagine it's unsurprising that developing a resistance to positive sensations on top of our evolutionary aversion to negative sensations created an exhausting, distressing and ultimately suicidal downward spiral. I have endured many treatments and continue to focus my life pretty entirely on a number of therapies. One of which has specifically addressed and challenged the tendency I share with many others to resist emotions, even those that are "positive". I have been studying a spiritual transformation program by a Swiss pick up artist. Yeah, sounds like a bad idea. Even worse when I mention that it's Julien Blanc, whose career exploded in a sexist media scandal. But Jesus Christ, the son of God, was just a man too, and Julien Blanc puts out his content in videos using millennial slang so I don't have to navigate a respectable spiritual text. I digress. It is very common due to the trauma inherent to childhood that many of us harbour a subconscious sort of shame. A limiting self-concept that whispers "you don't deserve what you want." So, although consciously you may allow yourself to set goals and progress towards them, there may appear to be a sort of spiritual asymptote. A level of well-being you will approach without accepting that you will sabotage if it gets too near. Blanc describes his as the "struggling artist" who needs to be lost and miserable to be relevant. I dreamed since I was a little girl of being the "damsel in distress" who needs to be saved by some outside force because she is helpless to change her own lot in life. In order to break our dependence on these self-concepts, we need to embark on a journey of radical self-acceptance so we can endure a greater level of well-being without feelings of shame or guilt. Today I got to model. I had my hair and makeup done and I posed naked and in lingerie and felt beautiful and amazing and safe and passionate. I was collaborating as an artist. I'm an amateur, so I haven't gotten paid yet, but it's worth it just to open up more opportunities. My partner is seeing a trauma therapist while I sit and write this in the coffee shop next door. He goes there as a caregiver because he loves me, and they teach him how to help me with my recovery. He is an incredible listener, an incredible learner, and we have a deeply meaningful spiritual connection. We have a relationship that is committed and loving and deliberate, yet still respects our polyamorous sexualities and my bisexual orientation. It excites me to be in a place in my life where I have so many things I never let myself hope for and the possibilities for adventure and passion and growth in my future seem to stretch out endlessly. And I am so happy. I am so happy about who I am and what I am doing with my life right now and the courage I have found in myself. I am in love with my partner and I am giddy about new connections I am making in this new life he and I share together. I am so happy to be young and undergoing a spiritual awakening and remembering and openness and humbleness about myself with which I can face this adversity with more grace. I am so excited to be seeing myself more clearly, even if I don't always look better for it. It wasn't that uncomfortable to write that. I remember a time when it would have been. A time when any self-affirmation felt forced and the idea of liking myself from a place that was authentic seemed impossible. So I see that I have grown. But there's a strange nagging feeling now when I am being photographed in perfect lighting in a hand-bra or when my DMs are unanimous that I'm a "total babe" or when I'm feeling Iike maybe things are going to be more than ok, more like amazing. When reality starts to double down on my newfound self-esteem it makes me woozy. The nagging feeling says "you can't maintain this", "you didn't earn this", "they will see through you and they will take the love away", "you will lose something and without it, you will not be enough." And so even as I am so extra-terrestrially happy, I am worried about how I am taking time off to do trauma therapy instead of getting a job right out of leaving university. I am worried about if maybe my diet has been not great and I'm not so active since it's been winter and what if maybe I gain weight soon. I am worried about what I smoke and what I drink and what I buy and what I do today and what I plan for later. I am worried when I'm tired. I'm worried when I'm horny. I'm worried when I'm not. I am looking to make myself wrong. I am looking for the pin that will pop my happy balloon this time. Because there has always been a pin, and I have always tried to find it. And of course there is a pin coming. I am not experiencing anything at 23 years old that is going to be so enlightening and transformative that I land myself in a state of permanent transcendental bliss. Thank god, because it would make me totally not relatable. I am going to be happy for a while because I am breaking patterns that held me back and I am seeing new heights and I am daring to experience them as fully as I can. I am daring to let the worries go as quickly as they come and return to my childish, giddy, arrogant, joy. I am daring to know there is a pin and not look out to brace myself for it. Happiness takes balls, friends. Be brave with me.