ME: I just showed the thing on my love life to a close friend who is a trained counselor and probably the most insightful person I know. She said that I finally see almost all of it, but that I needed to take one more step back to see it all. With very little prompting I saw it. All of the fears, all of the self lies, and all of the choices I made were serving a blueprint that I picked up very early in my development.
My parents divorced when I was five or so. I remember that it was finalized and Dad moved out during the beginning of kindergarten. I didn’t pick up on it consciously at the time, but mom had been fairly subtly mistreating my father for years before that (before I was born). And she is very good at mistreatment. She has a way of finding the exact right words to say to cause psychological damage while looking like she was innocent. My father is a good man (yes, even with how he treated me after this). He always plays things straight, and is very loving. He didn’t have a chance against her, or a real clue as to what was happening.
He’s told me stuff throughout the years that help me fill in the picture. She was using him to get what she wanted in life. She wanted a child (obviously she got one), but she wouldn’t let him touch her after she got pregnant. She had what she wanted though that didn’t stop her from having at least two affairs. She wanted a house in the country, he bought her one. She wanted to go to grad school, he paid for it. All while she demeaned him, and made him feel like he was a monster who was somehow abusing HER.
This all happened when I was between the ages of three and six when we are hard wired to see our fathers as the ideal men who we want to be like, our mothers as ideal women, and their relationship as “how it’s supposed to be”. Had it happened earlier or later, it might not have had the same effect on me.
Well, as soon as my father got done paying off her last semester of grad school, Mom filed for divorce. Dad got fired the same month he moved out. He was no longer useful to her, so she got rid of him.
Dad never got over it. I could tell that from that day to this, he was on one level still in love with her. And he’d also just lost his career, so he also thought of himself as a loser from then on. (Actually, I think the roots of two of my major problems lie in that event)
Here’s what that did to me. I was still in the hero worship of father phase, and I might have gotten stuck there for awhile because he needed me to (I thought). And I watched him continue to be in love with my mother who continued to play control games with him throughout my childhood. Dad never seriously dated again and openly said that the relationship failed because there was something wrong with him. Like he wasn’t good enough for Mom and it was his fault.
Dad had some of the same problems that I do. His view on dating was also to hold on to any woman who would have him. because he felt unworthy or something.
Don’t think I’m blaming my parents here. I’ve been an adult for a long time. It’s my mind, and everything that happens in it is entirely my responsibility.
So the entire story of my love life was about me trying to re enact my parent’s relationship and subconsciously be like my father. All the fears and lies to myself guided me along that path. Every girl I got attached to may not have been much like my mother, (I at least figured out to avoid that) but she played part of the same role in the repeating drama. That’s it. That’s why my love life was dysfunctional from top to bottom.
For the set of loops that I’m currently listening to, the goal is to get at the heart of why I have prevented myself from succeeding much above the bottom rung in academic, professional, and financial matters. I’ve been trying, and gained some understanding, but it’s like I hit a concrete wall at some point. The understanding is purely intellectual, and so far hasn’t rang true like that stuff on my love life. I expect that once that is exposed to daylight I will start to ROCK AND EFFING ROLL on executing the main thrust of the sub.
EDIT: Oh, and why did my subconscious fight so hard against me deviating from the blueprint? When this one hit me I thought that it cannot be this simple. Primal fear of the unknown. That blueprint that I had accepted unconsciously in my childhood was the map that showed me how to be a man in a relationship and how a relationship was supposed to work. I know how it’s supposed to work, how it’s supposed to end, and how that’s supposed to feel. While it sucks, a very deep part of me sees it as wandering away from the campfire into the woods that might be full of Sabre Tooth Tigers. And so it fights really hard, and layers self lie upon self lie in order to keep me with the devil I know because it’s terrified of forging a new path off the map. It’s a really deep primal terror too.
It’s also complete and utter HORSE HOCKEY! This part of the mind developed to keep our ancestors from being eaten or falling off a cliff in the dark. For whatever reason, it’s being applied to modern first world problems. The worst thing that could happen from me breaking that pattern is I find a new and different type of bad relationship to have. SMOKE.
My parents divorced when I was five or so. I remember that it was finalized and Dad moved out during the beginning of kindergarten. I didn’t pick up on it consciously at the time, but mom had been fairly subtly mistreating my father for years before that (before I was born). And she is very good at mistreatment. She has a way of finding the exact right words to say to cause psychological damage while looking like she was innocent. My father is a good man (yes, even with how he treated me after this). He always plays things straight, and is very loving. He didn’t have a chance against her, or a real clue as to what was happening.
He’s told me stuff throughout the years that help me fill in the picture. She was using him to get what she wanted in life. She wanted a child (obviously she got one), but she wouldn’t let him touch her after she got pregnant. She had what she wanted though that didn’t stop her from having at least two affairs. She wanted a house in the country, he bought her one. She wanted to go to grad school, he paid for it. All while she demeaned him, and made him feel like he was a monster who was somehow abusing HER.
This all happened when I was between the ages of three and six when we are hard wired to see our fathers as the ideal men who we want to be like, our mothers as ideal women, and their relationship as “how it’s supposed to be”. Had it happened earlier or later, it might not have had the same effect on me.
Well, as soon as my father got done paying off her last semester of grad school, Mom filed for divorce. Dad got fired the same month he moved out. He was no longer useful to her, so she got rid of him.
Dad never got over it. I could tell that from that day to this, he was on one level still in love with her. And he’d also just lost his career, so he also thought of himself as a loser from then on. (Actually, I think the roots of two of my major problems lie in that event)
Here’s what that did to me. I was still in the hero worship of father phase, and I might have gotten stuck there for awhile because he needed me to (I thought). And I watched him continue to be in love with my mother who continued to play control games with him throughout my childhood. Dad never seriously dated again and openly said that the relationship failed because there was something wrong with him. Like he wasn’t good enough for Mom and it was his fault.
Dad had some of the same problems that I do. His view on dating was also to hold on to any woman who would have him. because he felt unworthy or something.
Don’t think I’m blaming my parents here. I’ve been an adult for a long time. It’s my mind, and everything that happens in it is entirely my responsibility.
So the entire story of my love life was about me trying to re enact my parent’s relationship and subconsciously be like my father. All the fears and lies to myself guided me along that path. Every girl I got attached to may not have been much like my mother, (I at least figured out to avoid that) but she played part of the same role in the repeating drama. That’s it. That’s why my love life was dysfunctional from top to bottom.
For the set of loops that I’m currently listening to, the goal is to get at the heart of why I have prevented myself from succeeding much above the bottom rung in academic, professional, and financial matters. I’ve been trying, and gained some understanding, but it’s like I hit a concrete wall at some point. The understanding is purely intellectual, and so far hasn’t rang true like that stuff on my love life. I expect that once that is exposed to daylight I will start to ROCK AND EFFING ROLL on executing the main thrust of the sub.
EDIT: Oh, and why did my subconscious fight so hard against me deviating from the blueprint? When this one hit me I thought that it cannot be this simple. Primal fear of the unknown. That blueprint that I had accepted unconsciously in my childhood was the map that showed me how to be a man in a relationship and how a relationship was supposed to work. I know how it’s supposed to work, how it’s supposed to end, and how that’s supposed to feel. While it sucks, a very deep part of me sees it as wandering away from the campfire into the woods that might be full of Sabre Tooth Tigers. And so it fights really hard, and layers self lie upon self lie in order to keep me with the devil I know because it’s terrified of forging a new path off the map. It’s a really deep primal terror too.
It’s also complete and utter HORSE HOCKEY! This part of the mind developed to keep our ancestors from being eaten or falling off a cliff in the dark. For whatever reason, it’s being applied to modern first world problems. The worst thing that could happen from me breaking that pattern is I find a new and different type of bad relationship to have. SMOKE.
