The love joy (CW: mention of sexual abuse, explicit sexual descriptions)

I'm 16, in December 1977, and there's a woman who has caught my fancy, at first in Latin class but then in other social interactions. I already had a metaphorical language/omen/poetry kind of read on the world, and her last name was Lovejoy, so that added to the fascination. I was attracted to her self-confidence, intelligence, humor, brown eyes, hands. Out of some kind of weird momentary sense of courage, I asked her on a date, over the Christmas holiday. A cold, snowy night found us going to see Close Encounters in the theater- yeah, that's how old your pal Percy is. During the movie, I forget when, the wild sparking nervous sweaty-palmed moment came to hold hands, and her hand in mine felt like the wildest connection to another human being I had ever felt. 

We drove back to my house- I should say, she drove, since she was 17 and had her license and I did not yet. There was some very awkward fumbling and kissing in the car outside my house. Kissing was heaven. I lost any sense of shyness and put my hand down her shirt and felt her flat, smooth nipple tighten and then swell under my fingers, which devastated me. She seemed to enjoy that, but after a while both of us pulled apart and she said something about caution and I agreed, and off I went into my house, high as fuck on oxytocin.  

My prior sexual/romantic experiences had been very few indeed. I had engaged in some same sex play with a friend of mine a few years earlier, in 6th grade, in that weird experimental way that is mostly curious. He was hung like a horse, frankly, and that added some weird fascination to the interactions, which never resulted in orgasm for either one of us, and were mostly just touching. I am a survivor of same sex sexual abuse from within my family, so I think the same sex energies of my interactions with this friend had an additional charge of combined eros and shame. I had no idea when I was 13 that I had even been molested- it was an incident that happened when I was 6 and I had totally forgotten about it and wouldn't recall it and name it until I was in counseling, at age 28. 

I kissed a girl for a few hours when I was a little older- I don't recall her name. She had a small, skinny frame, but wide hips, and her mouth tasted amazing, and she was fierce with her tongue- sort of jamming it unexpectedly into my mouth. "Haven't you ever French kissed before?" she asked and of course I said "ha, are you kidding, like, all the time!" We were at some kind of construction site up near our junior high. There was a lot of heavy breathing and kissing and tongue jamming, but that was it. She was sort of awkwardly rubbing her hand over my jeans and  leaned in. "Do you want to put it in me?" she whispered in my ear and I was so startled and terrified by that, I instantly said "No, this is nice. Maybe another time?" I think that hurt her feelings, as my memory is we kind of disentangled and that was that. 

My first sexual experience was with the 19 year old sister of a friend of mine, when I was 15. It was strange to be in counseling later in life- I think I was 35 or so- and have the therapist flat out say " No wonder you have some of these issues around sex and intimacy, you were raped." That hit me pretty hard. I had never framed it that way, mostly because I was male and she was a woman- but also because I was incredibly horny at 15. I had been compulsively getting off a couple times a day for months. I had a few magazines with miraculously sexy naked women in them and just was utterly obsessed with women's bodies. Fantasies about women set me on fire every day all day. I had mistakenly equated this arousal as consent. 

The 19 year old, whose name I also forget, and I were hanging out a lot the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years. She had pale white skin, jet black hair, was kind of busty and very flirtatious. (I found out later she kept a little black book of "boys I've deflowered," as she put it). We were sitting on the sofa in her house one night and drinking red wine. We started kissing, and she stopped after a while and stared out the sliding glass doors to their patio and started to cry. I was deeply unsettled by this and my first thought was I had hurt her somehow. "No," she said,"I'm just so very lonely. I like you but liking you just intensifies how lonely and awful I feel. I've tried to kill myself you know. I hardly ever tell anyone that." I sat back a little and said something like "wow, I'm really sorry. We can just talk, we don't have to do anything." I had an enormous rager of an erection, but that wasn't so unusual back then. 

But she grabbed me and pulled me to her and said, "no, in fact, what I want you to do is fuck me." I felt so incredibly awkward- it was only after therapy that I got in touch with the plain facts that, first of all, I didn't want to fuck her- I just wanted to kiss and fool around, and I was totally not ready to have sex, and second of all, I was suddenly quite concerned about her emotional state and felt like I was harming her somehow. The therapist I was working with took note of that, believe me. "You didn't realize she was probably manipulating you? You didn't know you were in danger? You make it sound like you were the bad guy here. Maybe you should take a look at that."

I gave in against my will because I was curious. "Hey, you've been fantasizing about shit like this for two years. This could be great. You have to do it. You have to." That was one of the voices in my head. 

We went upstairs to her room. We made out on her bed a little, and she got partially undressed and took my pants down. I dissociated for much of this- I think we had smoked a little weed too- so part of my swirling confusion was that I was intoxicated. This was at the time where weed had started to fuck with me big time- I loved it for a few years, starting when I was 12, but right around 15 or so it just made me paranoid and anxious and it was a bad trip. She excused herself, went into the bathroom. I lay there, realizing that I was not turned on. I was scared and worried. It all felt strange and disconnected and dark and confused. I was erect like mad, but felt nothing. I felt like I was next to my own body. 

She returned. "I put a diaphragm in," she said. I was actually a little disappointed she hadn't changed her mind. I don't think I even really knew what a diaphragm was, but I kind of vaguely did. We started making out again and I suddenly had the urge to go down on her. I had been studying my parents' copy of The Joy of Sex- the old 1970's version with the sexy line drawing of beautiful white hippies doing all sorts of things to each other (which of course they had hidden in their closet, but of course I found it, snooping around)- and I had learned from there that one of the most mind-blowing and affectionate things a guy could do was to "eat the pussy" of "his lover." (true- but at 15?) I knew very little about the anatomy of the vulva at age 15 and had not explored it. But I ventured down there anyway. 

Cis het paradise, '70's style- these two, and the drawing of the woman in particular, probably shaped a huge part of my unconscious sexuality

She caught my arm and said "Thanks for thinking of that, but spermicide really doesn't taste all that great, I'm told." I was determined though and said "It's okay, I'm not bothered by it," pretending I had experience, and she let go. I went to kiss her vulva and try it and was overwhelmed by an unexpected very intense musky aroma combined with the chemical smell and taste of the spermicide. It was a surprise, how strong the smells were, and how she was absolutely right- spermicide is really not great. I gamely went at it, not having a damned clue how to properly engage in clitoral-oral stimulation, and it was pretty miserable. When I stopped I had gone limp and yet she drew me up again, touched me and I focused on her breasts instead, a part of a woman's anatomy that had consumed my fantasies for years. 

I was hard again but barely, still with an acrid chemical taste in my mouth, when she guided me into her. As I tried to fuck her, I realized I felt absolutely nothing- no physical pleasure at all but also no emotional connection, no connection of any kind. After years of fantasizing about sex, here it was- and it was empty and awkward, lonely and weird. She seemed to be kind of pretending to enjoy it. I started to panic however as I continued to feel nothing. "You last a long time," she said after like two minutes. I wanted to connect more with her so I went in to kiss her and she got angry and turned her head to the side and whispered "DON'T. DON'T kiss me, DO NOT kiss me."

It was a shock. I almost immediately lost my erection. Ashamed, embarrassed, confused, feeling less than a man, diminished and bewildered, I lay next to her and apologized profusely. She apologized profusely also. "I just like to focus on...down there...I don't like to be kissed, during." I still didn't understand. After a little while I thought we should try again, but she said "Maybe another time, let's just go back downstairs. Don't worry. It was fun." 

No, it wasn't. I realized later that night that I had felt like I was using her, that I had been overwhelmed by the reality of a woman's body versus what I had seen in Playboy or whatever, and that I had "gone too far," way beyond where my sense of emotional connection or safety was. And I continued to feel embarrassed, ashamed, less than a man and weirdly defeated. I had heard stories of men just fucking women they felt nothing for, and I figured a real man didn't need to have any sense of connection in order to make it all work. So I thought the worst thing wrong with me was not only that I couldn't keep it up but also that I was unable to just fuck without feeling anything. Looking back at that, well, it says a lot about gender roles, sex, expectations and the culture I grew up in. 

She and I made out one more time. We had gone to see a James Bond movie in the theater and she spent much of the movie lightly touching the underside of my forearm with her fingernails and nuzzling my neck, kissing my ear. I felt hotter and more connected during all of that than I had when we were naked together- it seemed much more intimate. When we got back to her house, we made out a little and she tried to get me off via her hand, but again, numbness set in, I felt nothing, I lost my erection. She never said anything shaming about either time, for which I am thankful. Of course, she didn't have to. I left those two experiences being convinced, deep down, that I was sexually broken. I wondered if I were actually more into guys, which, when you're a 15 year old in 1976, was terrifying. I wondered why the disconnect between my masturbatory fantasies and actual contact with her was so profound. I heard stories from my male friends about their successful sexual exploits and felt increasingly diminished. 

So, back to Lovejoy and me. The sense of connection, arising out of months of friendship, and, for both of us, intense isolation and loneliness, hit me like an avalanche. I was obsessively fantasizing about her. I couldn't wait to make out with her more. I finally felt like the intervening two years of sexual self doubt and misery had a chance of getting some closure. In addition to intense feelings of sexual attraction to Lovejoy, I also began romantically perseverating over her. Thinking about her laugh, her smile, her mind. So I went fairly quickly from a weird barren lonely isolation to my first experience of crushing on a woman. I had zero framework for understanding what was happening, no relationship skills of any kind, and no preparation for the magnesium white hot feelings and heart-melting fondness I was feeling. I fell very, very quickly, from a great and gruesome height, as Dar Williams says. 

According to her at the time, so did she. I forget the exact progression of our sexual relationship, but I know that the first time I was able to have an orgasm with her, also with her using her hand, felt like a huge breakthrough for me. I know we made out a lot before that and I was just not able to get there via her attentions. I also recall the first time we had PIV sex. The whole experience was cloaked in my lie to her that she was the first. This is a weird thing, this virginity stuff. I imagined it was incredibly important to her that I had never been inside another woman. It was her first time, according to her. Since I guessed that her being the first for me also was so important, I lied. Our connection was strong enough that, in spite of my disconnection as a result of lying, and my slight shock at the sight of blood on both of us. I still had an orgasm. I look back ruefully at how good for both of us it would have been for me to tell her, honestly, what had happened before (except of course I had no language to tell what had happened to me). I could probably mark my codependency starting that very minute, when, instead of being vulnerable, risking her disappointment or anger and just owning my story, I lied "to protect her feelings." I also had that feeling of really wanting it to be true, and we all know how dangerous that can be. 

One thing that is weird for me to look back on is that, for the months that Lovejoy and I were sexually active, from December 1977 to August 1978, I have no idea if she ever had an orgasm. I was so naive and untrained, I may not even have known where the clitoris was and may have taken her pleasure when we made out to be the same as orgasm. I have no idea. I was a product of my patriarchal culture, although even then, I was trying to be different, thanks to the good old Joy of Sex. 

By February, after a couple months, she and I were talking about being soulmates, about getting married, about having three children. I was having a sacred experience of divine love, is how it felt. It was a secret, sacred initiation. She was my goddess. I adored her. When we were not together, I thought about her all the time. During the epic blizzard of 1978, we spent nights making out in front of the fireplace in her parents' den. I went down on her all the time, but still probably without skill. She hated going down on me but I didn't care. I adored her, worshiped her, obsessed over her. I recall feeling like I had found the very meaning of life itself in my love for her. I felt like our union with each other could change my life and change the world. I felt like our sex was sacred and cosmic and inviolably private and secret. I was intoxicated and lovesick, profoundly changed and deeply moved, completely transformed, at age 16. 

We spent several weeks apart in the summer, when I was at a six week summer music program for jazz studies in the far northeastern US and she was in the hot southwest with her family, as her father was a visiting researcher at an observatory there (he was an astronomer). It was torment, being away from her. I wrote letters several times a week and so did she. We were only able to talk on the phone a couple times- back in the day of land lines, long distance charges and payphones. She started telling me about a guy she had made friends with who had an amazing record collection- "you'd love all of his jazz records!" I instantly became insanely jealous (pace Robyn Hitchcock) and was convinced she was fucking the guy. I felt burning, killing jealousy- searing and corrosive. I sent her a letter accusing her of being untrue. She tried to reassure me but I couldn't be convinced. Meanwhile there was a wild looking woman on my dorm floor who didn't wear a bra and you could see her nipples through her shirt al the time and I fantasized about her- and felt awful, guilty, as if I had actually betrayed Lovejoy. By the time we reunited in our home town, with only ten days until she went off to "the Princeton of the South" for her first year of college and I had to start my senior year of high school, there was wariness and tension and mistrust. She felt like I was crazy- I felt like she was lying to me. We decided, in the midst of this intensity, to vow that we would stay together forever, that we would never break up, that as soon as I graduated from high school I would move down to her college town, that we'd love each other forever. 

Looking back, I felt like we went to this fierce level of intensity at ages 16 (me) and 17 (her) because we valued our connection with each other and KNEW it was going to be torn apart by the ordinary and ineluctable vicissitudes of life. Our way of responding to that deep knowing was to make vows that we would never let it happen. We were a couple of terrified kids, in way over our heads, sick with a series of emotional attachments that we had no skills to handle, truly fond of each other and good friends, but having brought layers and layers of our weird culture and abusive pasts into it. 

It didn't help matters that I had grown up with the Family Mythology of the great almost-tragedy of my parents' love affair when they were kids. Gender roles reversed, my mother still had her senior year to do in high school (16 years old); my father was off to a university in the Midwest (17 years old), thousands of miles away. They made the vow to make it work, but they broke up during my father's first year. My mother was heartbroken and devastated. She went to college, fairly uncommon back then. The way she told it to me, she had decided to live the rest of her life as a spinster school teacher, since she had lost the love of her life. But, miracle of miracles, they got back together the summer after my father's second year, and she dropped out of college, and they got married. So I had that whole story playing around the Lovejoy, and who knows, maybe epigenetically as well, in my blood. 

What a setup, right? Traced through the 19 year old, to a couple years of compulsive autoeroticism combined with feeling broken and weird, to the great conflagration of Lovejoy, to the summer apart, the terror it would be ruined, the impending separation. 

On my birthday in September of 1978, the Lovejoy called to wish me a happy birthday- I vividly recall taking the call in the dark of the basement of my childhood home. Twisting the cord in my hand. Her voice sounding off somehow. Her birthday wish sounding tentative. It sounded like "Happy birthday and I'm sorry but...." A million alarm bells started to go off. Prior to this, in the three weeks she had been gone, I had only gotten two, not very romantic, newsy letters. Maybe one other phone call. There was a long pause that felt like my entire puberty rolled into the dark. "What's wrong?" I asked. She replied, in an unexpectedly steely cold knife-like voice (perhaps trying to keep herself together, maybe trying to keep from going tender toward me and losing her resolve, maybe angry at the fucking reality, maybe angry at me for caring so much, who knows) "I can't do this anymore. It's over. I'm seeing someone. I'll always love you, but there's no way this will work." 

I can't describe how I felt, really. I know I started crying, and I recall that my physical reaction was that my palms were soaked, my stomach twisted, the air everywhere was actually ringing, and my mouth suddenly went completely dry. I felt physically cut, like a kind of sword slash around my guts. I wanted to talk about it more but she wouldn't. "Are you sure? Why? Why? Please don't. Please. Please don't." "I can't talk anymore. It's best if we just do not communicate anymore at all. Please don't write. I won't be contacting you. Maybe someday in the future, like years in the future, we can be together. But I just can't do this. Goodbye." And she hung up. 

My 17th birthday. Mere weeks after all those vows, behind which both of us suspected that it would come to this, but completely unconsciously. I was not only heartbroken and tossed into all kinds of intense emotions. I had a complete rupture of the soul in that moment. The main reason was not the rejection, or the pain of losing her. Or the idea that we would never see each other again or speak. The rupture went like this: "She and I are meant to be. It's obvious- we are fated to be together. We are soulmates." That conviction combined with the plain fact that we *would not be together* undid the total existential ground of my being. It's not possible- it's the worst and darkest paradox- when what is meant to be cannot be. It's not possible to hold both of those things in the same space. This can't be true, since the two of us were obviously put together by the universe. How can we not be together? 

None of this coalesced in my mind at the time, but it was the essence of how I felt. 

What is meant to be cannot be. You live in a universe where it is possible that what is meant to be cannot be. (So it must not have been meant to be. But- it obviously was meant to be. But it cannot be. For months in my mind). 

This is not a great place for an 17 year old to dwell. It should be a time of life that's just full of possibilities, a sense of personal agency, plans and ideas, hopes and excitement. Instead, and I realize this sounds dramatic (a rare lapse for me), I honestly felt like my life ended in that moment, at least any life that would matter, because the entire universe shifted, and what was supposed to happen did not happen and would never happen. I didn't for one second feel okay. I had none of "you are great, a great guy, this isn't about you. She is doing what she needs to do. Just grieve and move on and maybe get to know some other women." Not even a scintilla of that consciousness. I was 100% canceled. 

My wife, the mother of my children, my life partner- heavy, heavy things to think of someone else when one is 17. I had fantasized about the two of us being in our 70's, looking back on more than 50 years of life. I thought fondly of her with grey hair, I thought of being a father, I thought of our grandchildren. I thought of being a musician and having her support that, and her being a scientist and me supporting that, and the two of us making an epic pact, and living it out, for better or worse. How often I talked myself down from all of these thoughts by telling myself, come on, you're only 16/17. And how strongly our culture supports the idea that 16 year olds are incapable of having profound love, as well as suffering profound loss, and not just loss, but the belief in total existential annihilation of life purpose. 

Torn in two, with no support system, no counseling (teenagers didn't go to counseling much in 1978), no understanding adults to talk with (I tried to talk with the youth minister at my church and he said I was going to hell for having sex outside of marriage unless I got on my knees every day and prayed for forgiveness and that he wasn't surprised by how much I was suffering because that's the fate of those who disobey God's commandments), my best friend also away at his first year of college, faced with slogging through my senior year at a high school I fucking detested, where I had few deep connections, among people I thought were horrifying, stuck in my childhood home and deeply estranged from my parents who totally disapproved (ironically? knowingly?) of the relationship with Lovejoy anyway, being reminded of Lovejoy all the time, missing her, but hating her and being furiously jealous, but feeling tender, but unable to stop experiencing excruciatingly painful imaginings of her fucking her new boyfriend, but etc. 

I was so deeply traumatized that I spent many nights wandering around my suburban neighborhood at 3 or 4 in the morning. I woke up a few nights and worked myself up so much thinking about her fucking her new boyfriend, I had to go into the bathroom and vomit. I recall walking along the hallway at my high school, feeling like the fluorescent lights were burning, as the hallway crowded with peers, tears coming into my eyes. All I could do was stop and touch the wall. The cool tile felt okay. I walked down the hall tracing the tile with my fingers. Most of the time I felt like I wasn't going to make it. I would find myself waiting to hear from her. Then I would be furious for that, since she had made it clear it was not going to happen. I would find myself imagining calling her and saying exactly the right thing and having her be in love with me again. Then I would get furious at that, of course. 





October made a lot of sense to me. Death month. Autumn hit me like ice blades. As evocative as that time of year can be- leaves turning, the smoky snap in the air, the night sky cold on the phone line- the month and I knew each other and got along very well indeed. 

I'll save more of the story for the next post or two, but I will add here that it was at this time that I began to write plays, poetry, fiction, music. The existential rupture had me bleeding out stories. I had never thought of myself as a poet or writer before, only as a musician- although I had always loved writing. But that autumn, the rupture changed me at the core. When I look back, it appears very clearly that it was the time that I was fertilized by the dark serpent of the shadow. 

Mandala courtesy one of C. G. Jung's patients

Recovery Patterns

Overall, moving relatively quickly from the focus being "out there" on U, to bringing it back to me. What can I do? How can I respond to the situation with healing and recovery? This is the attitudinal shift represented in the Serenity Prayer- accepting what I can't change (U, the situation, the reality), changing what I can (myself, my attitudes, my behavior) and cultivating at least some wisdom about where the line is.

One thing that time in recovery seems to help with is that the behaviors that cause suffering turn around more quickly than they used to. I like cultivating that resilience. It's crucial for my well being. Since there is a murderous and resigned part of me that seems to want me dead, it's great to also have some ways to move differently through the world.  

The welter of self hatred is where a lot of my reactions to situations start. 

"If only I were more cool. If only I could just relax and not care so much. If only I were not so insecure and needy. If only- I could have continued to pretend, why not? why the fuck do I have to be so sensitive and demanding?"

But resilience shifts that fairly quickly, although not in a linear way, but- 

"You feel things deeply, it's who you are. It's okay. You can just accept it or even embrace it. It's natural to have wanted more interaction- it's a significant source of joy, pleasure and intellectual stimulation. The two of us fit together very well and it was great experiencing being met that way. It's a rare thing, to be met like that. To get it. It's natural to want to have that in one's life."

Self hatred to self acceptance is so valuable for me, since my default first self talk and feel is hate. I need the skills to talk myself down from that cruel voice and be kind to myself. I'm glad I'm developing and practicing those skills, because, as an echo of what felt like murderous rage in my childhood home, my internalized self hatred just wants me to fucking die. 

Part of self hatred is in comparison also. "I wish I could be as detached and functional as her. I wish I weren't so pathetic. She's moved on, she's super strong and capable, she's handling this shit. Why can't I?" But, again, easing out of the comparison, which good old Teddy Roosevelt called "the thief of joy," is a great help. She is who she is, handling her life the way she needs to and is able to, having her experience in the way she is meant to have it. You are you, living your life the way you live it, having your own experience. There's nothing necessarily better about her way, and nothing characteristically pathological or sick about your way, or vice versa (since part of comparison is to feel superior as well). 

Where I am in recovery now is that my initial reactions to many situations are identical to what they have been my entire life, largely problematic, causing suffering for myself and others, and arising out of trauma. But the deployment of skills that I am practicing and tools of recovery is relatively quick now, and at least there's a way out of the searing hatred and difficulty of the initial storm. 

It's too bad all of this romantic and relationship pain coincides with the almost total isolation of writing the dissertation. I have committed to getting myself to at least one meeting a day- the best time is around sunset, a time of day I have felt emotionally destroyed by for a while now. My sentimentality, tenderness and longing peaks at sunset. I keep remembering Nina Simone's simple dictum:

Simone is not talking about other people here, at the core. It's about self love, so to speak. A sense of self worth that insists on love having a place in one's life where it is generous, reliable, reciprocal to the degree that is possible, kind, supportive and based on shared experiences. 

But here's a little glimpse of what it's like to be me, and why these processes are so very difficult for me sometimes: Last night at CoDA, I glanced at the hands of the woman sitting next to me. My associative and suggestible mind immediately recalled, in vivid detail, U's hands. "What the hell can I do with that?" I wondered. Confused and frustrated at first, angry that an uninvited recall had completely taken over my consciousness, frustrated by my own attachment. But I tried to practice going to acceptance. And I found myself thinking, here's to those hands weaving the best life. I recalled vividly also sitting across from U at a diner, eating pie a la mode, and taking pictures of her gesturing hands, pictures I cherished for weeks afterward. Here's to those hands, long may they be free. Here's to those hands, with gratitude for having held them. Here's to those hands that are sort of somehow equaling U, symbol and sign, numinous and bright. May she be well, because those hands are well.  

Sure, I still wish my consciousness didn't ring so loud and weird with metaphor and sentiment and memory all the damn time- it has gotten even more pronounced as I have aged. It's become even more important, as a result, to practice yet more acceptance around it. 

Mindfulness also helps. Instead of being completely immolated by these things, I can observe. "You're in love, it's just what it is. Watch it roil around, as it arises, and remember, the experience of the reminder and the numinous metaphor will also naturally subside. This is just what it is like at this time. These things arise, burn bright, and then subside. You don't have to do anything about it. Just watch and don't become attached."

Challenging, and admittedly sometimes exhausting, but at least marginally achievable for me, some of the time. 

Lying to myself

To clarify: it does not, on the face of things, constitute being "ghosted" when someone greatly reduces interaction for two days. It's just a trigger for me- and it isn't the disappearance itself, but my enduring need for a cue of some kind. With U, she stepped up about 10 days ago and said "I may disappear for a bit," and I appreciated that tremendously and it "enabled" me to provide space. For myself, as much as for her. But she went away again recently, this time with no cue, and it turns out it was in reaction to my writing here how madly in love I still am, which seems unfortunate to me, but whatever. Anyway, my shit kicked in and I pursued the avenue of telling her I felt off about it and she pushed back. 

Her push suddenly made crystal clear to me that I have, all this time, since she ended our romance, been hoping against hope that she and I would be able to find a way to be together. This feels really sad and somewhat disturbing to me- as I had myself completely convinced that I was over it and that we were in contact only because I wanted to be friends. I mean, I do, and I enjoyed our interactions. But a lot of my denial and dishonesty with myself came crashing down when she was super clear and firm. 

The opening script for CoDA says "Codependency is a most deeply rooted and compulsive behavior," and I truly got that in my guts when I realized I had been, at least in part and at intermittent intervals, pretending to be okay with things simply so I could continue to be in U's life, with the hope that she would wake up one day and snap to how awesome I am and say "I want to do this." Ugh. The shame, disappointment, negative self talk, ego deflation and general collapse the realization brought is still intense. A bottoming out sensation of not being able to trust myself. I gathered myself up and went to my old Sunday night CoDA meeting. Grateful these groups are out there and that I remain in relationship recovery. 

Of course, an outsider would have easily been able to at least ask and probably did)- "are you sure you aren't staying in contact at least partly because you want to be lovers and partners?" It wouldn't have mattered. People generally sense that it's a bad idea to try to be friends with someone one is still in love with. But that wisdom is not always available for the lover. Or there is a different wisdom available for the lover. The wisdom of the Fool rather than the wisdom of the Emperor. It's still also true that I was at least experimenting with not being black and white. But the pain of being rejected (kindly) did push me to black and white anyway, and realize I am probably best served by a stop to interaction, as unwanted as that is for me. Disentangling from Facebook in particular, where things always hit me hard, like pics and interactions, etc. 



I am heartbroken, yet again, or the same heartbreak for months, underneath my self judgment. Do we find that pathetic? One of the things I admired about our interaction is that she admired me and I admired her- and now I feel less than admirable. To put it mildly. Like I am a burden and a trial and a fuck up and if I could just, if I could only, if I could this or that. I'll have to work on that one, since it isn't helping. 

It's been a series of these things. I think the first time we broke up was December 2017. It looks like maybe we broke up a few times after, and again in November 2018, and then of course again in December- with finality. Yet even with finality, as recently as about 10 days ago, fire kindled up again between us- taking to heart being called her person- and just as quickly, the door slammed shut. 

That angry voice in my mind: "you ruined things, you couldn't just be cool for once in your life?" Working today on just accepting myself as a lover. At being a person who prefers cues. Forgiveness for still feeling, in spite of everything. Maybe I can reframe some of these things from defects to assets. I do know that I would rather have a blazing heart than a dead frozen or wooden one, as tempting as it is for me to kill my feelings and although I am sure those are not the only two options. 

Ugh what a trip this whole thing has been. I'm still grateful for it. I just wish it didn't hurt so much. And I do wish I were more skilled at being honest with myself- it would have helped me if I had been able to acknowledge that I was lying to myself while she and I were in communication, since I was pretending I was "fine" and in fact had the secret hope that she would change her mind somehow, conncected to the secret hope that I could somehow *do something* or *say something* that would cause that to happen. It doesn't seem easy for me to let go of that hope. Especially, I just have very little practice at this kind of intensity of love for someone. Truly, in spite of some heartbreak over the past decades, the whole deal is a tricky and new-ish area for me. 

       A woman at the meeting last night talked about her assumption that just sitting in the pain would eventually be healing. How she had years of knowing that was not the case, but she still assumed it. But how, the other day, she realized that, without trying to medicate or kill the pain, she could just be in the present. Instead of stewing in the pain believing it had healing power, she could sit in the present instead. I took note of that, as "taking refuge in the present" is one of the skills of Refuge Recovery. When I realized I had still been hoping that U and I would be together (even still hoping we would just rekindle the affair, even just for one measly visit, in spite of all the difficulties there, or even just message each other romantically), I was unwillingly thrown into an avalanche of memories of being with her, as well as a vortex of what-if thinking about the future. The present went completely dark. But the woman's share at the meeting reminded me to practice that skill, to let go of the past and to stop projecting, to whatever degree I am able, to take refuge in the present. 

The memories are particularly difficult. And it has been the case that I am not going looking. They arrive on their own. Practicing being grateful and saying yes yes, that was great and letting them move on. It's challenging.  

Blake tumbled into my world last night also: 

Thanks for the reminder, old friend. It's still what it is. And no one owns my bliss. It was the spirit of that quotation that got me into this transforming encounter in the first place. 

Actions and words

I have this way of judging people as "bad communicators" when they perhaps rely on behavior to do their talking for them, instead of using words to explain their behavior. For example, I have a lot of judgment about feeling like I am being ghosted. I always want to pursue the person and find out what is going on. Of course, if I am being ghosted, I am always free to take my power back by removing myself from caring. Not so easy for me, however. 

I recently posted something on Facebook from an Instagram account called Truth Potato- silly thing where a potato speaks "hard truths." This one said "No one is too busy to respond to you." I was struck by a young woman's reply (and U's heart reaction) that this attitude was "bordering on incel," and her assertion that "no one is entitled to my time." This is obviously true- no one is entitled to my time. I don't think the truth of it makes for a very happy way to operate in the world, however. The fucking potato was not saying "no one is too busy to interact with you and get into a conversation, or go out to have coffee with you." Of course, we are often too busy for those things. The key word in the stupid meme is "respond." Just say "I'm overwhelmed, tired and don't have time. Thanks for contacting me though. Maybe we can connect later." Or even more boldly "I just don't want to be in communication with you right now. Thanks though." It's funny/painful when someone we care about says "I'm too busy" but has all the time in the world for interacting with others, apparently. 

No one may be entitled to my time, but there are people who are worth it because of what they mean to me, the gifts that have already been exchanged, the trust on which we are operating. If I suddenly find myself adopting the attitude of feeling they are an imposition or a burden, what is going on? Maybe they seem to expect too much from me. Can I just say that to them? If not, why not? Maybe I am not interested in them anymore and find them boring or have lost my desire to be in interaction with them. Could I say that in some compassionate way? Simply disappearing definitely says it. But it says a lot- most of it probably fictional. It's weird how there is this dagger-like ability of people who ghost to choose people to ghost who are probably the worst people to ghost. 

I've ghosted women, for sure. In particular, about a decade ago, after the breakup with the Poetess. Here was my thinking at the time: every time we are in contact, it seems to hurt her. Also, she keeps bringing up how much she wants us to get back together. I feel like shit after these interactions and I think she does too. So I'll just totally ignore her and I bet she'll get over me and move on. 

That's a rationale for sure, but it leaves out a very important piece: the intermediate communication of saying, directly to her: "I feel like every time we interact, it is painful for you. I don't feel we are going to get back together, and my perception is you keep hoping we are and our contact makes it worse. The situation has me thinking maybe total disconnection between us would be best, at least for a while?" No- instead- just the cruel and indifferent-seeming silence, which is itself a lie, because during the time I was totally ghosting her, of course I thought of her and wished her well and would have liked to be friends. Meanwhile, when we finally did talk for a couple hours about a year later, she broke my heart anyway by saying that she used to sit in her place and envision me coming over to visit, and telling her I had been wrong and I wanted to try again. So, what I thought was my best effort to "help her get over me" had zero effect anyway, and may have made things even worse. 

     It's a definite characteristic of my codependency that I unilaterally decide what is best for people and then do that, without even having a conversation with them. One story I am thinking is that U probably thinks that I "would be better off" with less communication. I do not think that is true, and it would be an interesting conversation to have. Edit: the conversation was had, and in fact, I am better off without any communication at all, for however long it takes. This change warrants a whole other post, but that will have to wait. 

However, here's the thing: actions are a very powerful form of communication. Sure, without explanation and exchange, many actions leave it up to us to construct the attendant story, which can be very painful- for me, usually far more painful than just being told the truth. Now, if I could stop at the observation of facts only and cease the storytelling, especially all the ways that the story is a form of me taking everything personally forever and ever, that would be great. I am getting better at it. But it is damned hard. 

I do not read silence well, at all. I am not skilled at cleanly responding to actions without words. I always want to have "the conversation" about "what is going on." But I'm also trying to practice the skill of not pursuing that which retreats from me, but echoing the retreat. It feels outside in, and like a performance I have to force myself to do, and I don't feel skilled at it. 

It reminds me of the Al-Anon saying: get off of their backs, get out of their way, get on with your life. 

So easily said. If someone asked me today what superhero power I would have if I could- it would be that. The power to get off of their backs, get out of their way, get on with my life. 

Peeling that is not appealing

Onion

Delving into CoDA's pamphlet, "Peeling the Onion: Characteristics of Codependents Revisited," as an adjunct to doing Steps 1-3 out of the CoDA step and tradition workbook. 

The goal of this booklet: "In order to gain a deeper understanding of our codependency, we look inward, continuing the emotional work of "peeling the onion." The onion represents the pain of our childhoods and the realization of how this has adversely impacted the very fiber of our lives. Our goal is to gently arrive at a new level of understanding of the pain we still carry, but have not yet been "recovered" enough to approach until now."

It's an...appealing image (haha), and it resonates with my past experiences doing step work, where, over the four times that I have taken that trip, the process has gone "deeper" each time. It's hard to explain exactly what "deeper" means in this regard, but I know it when I feel it. Part of it, for sure, is the willingness to look at aspects of the self and my personal history that I didn't look at in prior trips. There's also been a repeated experience of being able to see clearly the significance of various events in my life. 

I had been meaning to work closely with this little booklet for a long time. It's a funny one in the CoDA groups, because whenever anyone suggests "hey, let's read from 'Peeling the Onion'" at a literature meeting, many others groan or roll their eyes or express discomfort with how heavy and intense it is. 

Lo and behold, as a big old segue from Gorski, the first section of the booklet is about relationship addiction. The main aspects outlined here are:

1. Fear of not being enough

2. Fear of our feelings

3. Fear of being alone

1. For me, personally, this has always been a powerfully toxic hook. Women paying attention to me, admiring me, wanting me and falling in love with me have played an important part of my being reassured that I am an okay man. That I am enough. When I have been betrayed sexually, it has probably stabbed the deepest around my insecurities- that I am not enough. It was pointed out to me by the counselor several months ago that my imagination of a sexual partner cheating on me with another man always depicts their sex as far more mind blowing, powerful, and pleasurable than the sex she was having with me. That's revealing, for sure, especially considering how rarely the same has been true for me. Usually, betrayal sex that I have had is sort of sad, lonely, shabby, perfunctory, has a little bit of a desperate quality to it and does not in the least provide me with the boost or sense of "being enough" that I am looking for. 

2. The booklet elucidates: "We may engage in inappropriate behaviors to avoid painful and overwhelming feelings. In sex addiction, we may use sexual acts such as extramarital affairs, going to strip clubs, use of porn, or excessive masturbation rather than experience our feelings. As shame-based adults, we fear true intimacy, afraid of being engulfed or controlled by our partner. Instead, through sexually acting out, we control and manipulate others." There's more, but that's a great start. It's always weird how a lot of defenses go up around all of this, or how people say it is sex negative, or shaming in itself. I think this is because people miss the key point: all of these acting out behaviors are *to avoid feeling our feelings*. It's exactly the same as getting drunk, or eating sugar, or gambling. We use sex and romance to avoid having an authentic encounter with our own emotional life. 

3. fear of being alone often haunts me immediately after social interaction- sometimes it is at its worst right after an AA or CoDA meeting, for example. "In relationship addiction, we stay in the relationship no matter how unsatisfying, because we cannot tolerate being alone. We are afraid of change, do not know how to let go, or how to move on with our lives unless we have another relationship lined up." Again, there's more, but that has definitely been operative for me at times in my life. It isn't operating now- a couple of women have been flirty or outright said they wanted to "date" and I am not into it, nope, nope, nope. When U ended our romance back in December, I worked on not pursuing her, asking her to rethink her decision or trying to force us back together, although our interactions rekindled the flames a few times and I did try to rekindle things a couple times. I do look back on those interactions and feel like I could have had better boundaries and respected hers more. She definitely has an undoing effect on my resolve, if we get close. But it hasn't felt addictive. It's been painful, but there's been letting go and a sense of re-establishing the ground of simply being friends and not "coloring outside the lines." 

Fear of being alone oddly enough sometimes enforces my isolation, since it is a lot more emotionally stable to be consistently alone and, as a result, not experience the let down of re-entering alone time. 

The next section of the booklet outlines something Gorski doesn't even touch on, and an entire set of behaviors that actually get a lot of praise both from our culture and from people in other 12 step programs: Relationship Avoidance. One of the things that appeals to me about CoDA is that it acknowledges that a form of codependency that is equally painful as over-attachment is what is sometimes called "codependency anorexia," the complete elimination of all intimacy or connection from our hearts. The booklet outlines it this way:

1. Love anorexia

2. Sexual anorexia

3. Relationship anorexia

4. Fear of intimacy

The three anorexias are fairly obvious, just from their names. Causes that are suggested include having had parents with terrible boundaries who got their emotional needs met through us as surrogate partners, sexual abuse, sexual shame, promiscuous parents (especially of the same sex as us) whom we observed and resolved not to be like, and, in regard to relationship anorexia, we tend to practice all sorts of avoidance behavior in an attempt not to become attached, and to protect ourselves from being hurt. 

I'm as much an avoidant person as I am addicted, it seems, with sharp oscillations between these maladaptive strategies. Women have been frustrated by my tendency to be wide open emotionally at the beginning, but then to gradually withdraw and become, ultimately, completely inaccessible. I definitely have tried to avoid intimacy while still "being in love" and having a sexual relationship. As much as I rush in passionately, I also fearfully hold back and avoid interaction. It's been a real yo-yo pattern for decades. 

Fear of intimacy is shame-based. If intimacy is defined as sharing vulnerabilities and needs, the fear is stirred by my vulnerability and needs having been shamed when I was a kid. It was true that all emotions were inconvenient in my family system, and I feel I was shamed for feeling and for being "too sensitive." It can sometimes actually feel physically painful when I contemplate a romantic partner actually seeing me- my opening up and being vulnerable. In particular, this jumps into fierce and walled-off operation around "negative feelings" such as loneliness, jealousy, anger and boredom. I do have the kind of "soft male" background of "being in touch with my feelings" with women when it comes to more romantic emotions such as sadness, tenderness, ardor, joy, etc. But the real gritty intimacy of being honest about the dark shit, I have tended to avoid. 

After this primer on relationship addiction and avoidance, the booklet goes back through the patterns and characteristics of codependents (outlined here) but with more detailed stories and examples. I already did some inventory around this, and wrote about it on this blog, although at the moment I can't find those posts. I'll have to go back and find them because I think my writing was fairly exhaustive at the time. 

Having looked back over the descriptions of relationship addiction and avoidance, I can clearly see two years of CoDA progress in many of my reactions to situations involving sex, love, romance and communication. For one thing, I have gotten at least a tad better at creating space. 

In All Our Affairs

Gorski really has me examining everything related to the way I have operated in romantic relationships. I started thinking about a lot of my longer term partnerships and posted this to Facebook yesterday:

The existential drama is a chronic low level tragedy that no one even notices- like Willy Loman although not even worth a play- maybe one of those steely cold and aimless short stories in the New Yorker about apathetic, anomic rich white people cheating on each other with other apathetic anomic white people and not even really caring much when it's discovered.

You can live your own story as best as you are able, or you can play a role in someone else's, and put most of your energy into being the person in their story that they wish they were living. When we make a deal to be the character in someone else's story that makes their (fake) life come true, we might as well go jump off a bridge.

Living your own story whether it "makes other people happy" or not (which we can't fucking do anyway no matter how hard we try) is painful because it means saying fuck you to the world to the degree that the world tries to force you to exist for others and their fantasies and their ideas of what their lives ought to be like.

The latter, being the person someone else needs you to be for their life to look like what they think it should, is the weakest sauce there is, however, and the saddest part of all is that the person for whom you are playing the role in order for their story to be true ultimately does not care about you in the least. You are merely a means to the end of them living what looks like the life they think they should live. You are only useful to the degree that you help them look good to their family and friends, and most of all, to themselves- to the degree that you are helping them live the life they think they should be living. To the degree that you are their good wife, good husband, happy householder, reliable bread winner, to the degree that you keep yourself out of sight at any and all times when revealing anything authentic about yourself would scratch that look good.

Everyone is telling a story with you in it. Even if you are one of their main characters, if you are just a fucking plot device, well, that's misery and loneliness.

Have a great Wednesday!"

Finishing up Gorski's book, it feels like his analysis of "healthy" relationships and their characteristics outline the core beliefs of a combination of the human potential movement, family system therapy, 12 step recovery and cis-heteronormative default monogamous ethics. It's always somewhat of a let down for me when the "solution" for the difficulties in my life ends up feeling relatively shallow. There's so much tautology in the "self help" movement that goes sort of like this: 1. My self is broken. 2. I will benefit from inventorying all the ways my self is broken. 3. Here are the totally reasonable ways my self can fix itself. 4. I am now better. 

None of it works that way, in my experience, at least not reliably. It's too much like the old joke, "doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, stop doing that."

For example, Gorski goes back to one of the great and I think shaming and frustrating cliches about relationships and love: "The possibility of healthy intimacy starts with the self, This is a fundamental principle of healthy love. You must first develop a healthy self before you develop a healthy relationship. You will only attract to you for an intimate relationship someone who approximates the level of emotional health that you have yourself. This makes it very difficult."

Yeah, this is fucking bullshit. It's a form of therapy/recovery extortion- because of course, if I just try harder, if I just work harder to "become better," I will finally "attract" the "right person" for me. It's not only dangerous because it sounds so reasonable, it's also toxic. It also leads to all sorts of therapy/recovery manipulation of other people, identifying our own "level" of emotional "health" by measuring other people's. I just do not think life really works very well like this. I think the reality is MESSY, as I have said before, and there is simply no way in hell that I can "work on myself" enough to be "worthy" of a "healthy partner.". 

There are some bits of good advice in Gorski's otherwise disappointing tautologies and platitudes- have a program of recovery for yourself, learn how to get out of relationships, do things together, have a wide circle of individual and couple friends, etc. But these all ring hollow to me- like superficial look good kinds of suggestions. He doesn't mention discovering much, experimenting, risk taking, taking time apart, being sure to directly and honestly encounter each other on a regular basis- making the relationship important. Nowhere, not onece, does he mention being sure to fight, to express anger and sadness, learning how to grieve together, etc. It feels like his version of "healthy" is mostly that the relationship is really not that important, and definitely is not "as important" as one's self is. I think this may or may not be satisfying for superficial people who use relationships as a *part* of their lives, and who are self absorbed enough that all other people, including their primary partner, basically exist *for them*. I find this framework essentially narcissistic and not appealing to me. 

If one's goal in life, however, is to be SAFE, and if "healthy" looks rational, well defined, transactional and can be reasonably explained to others, then a lot of these therapy/recovery ideas of romantic relationships are great. In my experience- and this may well be supported by the evidence of, for example, so many of the therapy/recovery relationship gurus getting divorced, having all kinds of relationship problems, even if they are authentically trying to live their own talk- this intimate partnering is a mystery, risky, an adventure, a huge step toward letting go of control and entering into the whitewater, rather than just canoeing along on a pond. 

"Healthy" for me has to encompass devotion, access to the sacred, to a sense of adventure and story, to the depth of feeling that acknowledges mystery at the core of how we come together, and how we come apart. It feels to me like this adventure is available to all- including traumatized people, codependent people, "dysfunctional" people, etc. And it seems like a shame to me that the suggested remedy for addictive relationships is a reductionist, protective, rationalized framework of reasonable decisions and behaviors. This is already all too black and white, and all too tempting for those of us in recovery who are sometimes tempted to equate our feelings of safety with our feelings of having "gotten it right" or "being healthy." 

At the same time, of course, it feels to me like relationship recovery offers the promise of reduced agony, increased satisfaction. It feels like there are a lot of ways to have a healthy relationship, some of which, or some phases of which, do indeed involve the kind of rationalist clarity that Gorski and others offer. But too much sanity is insanity, and to think I can lead much of a fulfilling and rich life according to rule based or diminishing behaviors seems delusional. 

I think, ultimately, what is even more helpful for people to learn is the range of skills necessary to adventurously navigate the irrationality, unpredictability, mysterious secrets, inexplicable passion, feeling of destiny, adoration, devotion, attention, heartbreak, fear and basic insanity of intimacy. Instead of trying to bleach it all out through perfectly reasonable suggestions, let's assume we simply embrace the entire huge fucking mess, and what we really need to learn is how to navigate that with skill, compassion, tenderness and enthusiasm. That seems truly healthy to me. 

Gorski and yet more Gorski- part 4- of 5

I've given myself two more posts to cover Gorski's thinking on addictive relationships, in his booklet "Addictive Relationships: Why Love Goes Wrong in Recovery," because I think there's a lot more specific unpacking I'll be doing around my own patterns, not so much his more general framework. 

Yesterday's post listed the features of an addictive relationship: magical thinking, instant gratification, dishonesty, compulsive and obsessive control, lack of trust, alternating doubts, isolation and a repeating cycle of pain. Aspects of this litany that are lower level or even not operating for me anymore are: magical thinking, instant gratification, alternating doubts, isolation. Items that are huge for me still, presenting serious challenges: dishonest, compulsive control, lack of trust and a repeating cycle of pain. 

remember the good old Karpman drama triangle?

Dishonesty usually has the form he describes- I can't possibly express my authentic self- how I am feeling and thinking, or what I want- because then I won't be loved. I am working with this one. I think all it takes, behaviorally, to break through is to demote other people to being less important than my higher power, my recovery and myself. So other people are 4th on the list, and if they can't or won't love me after I am authentic, then at least I am only losing 4th place, rather than how it feels sometimes- 1st place. This is a sure sign that I have made people my higher power, so to speak, since the very ground of my survival seems to rest on what they think of me, and how they act. 

Compulsive control and lack of trust go hand in hand now. It's a strange feeling that I haven't had to deal with in a long time. I am fraught with the deep suspicion that things are happening that I am not privy to. I often feel gaslighted, by a few different people. This in a context where I have no evidence for any of my suspicions. A clear, direct sign that these are issues that are up for me right now, not situational but emerging from things that happened a long, long time ago. 

The repeating cycle of pain has been alleviated recently, but when it is operating, it consists of connection, followed by disappearance, with my abandonment shit coming up, followed by connection. The outer circumstances are all entirely normal for the most part, just ordinary life and a relationship between friends, for example. But my inner life gets severely buffeted as I am enthused by connection and then feel isolated, alone and abandoned when it disappears. Rather than being a glaring, repeated cycle of pain (such as that arising from abuse), this feels more like my own instability regarding intermittent reinforcement. I take the interaction to heart and I'm uplifted by it and enjoy it- I take the disappearance to heart, and I'm confused and feel lonely. 

The highs and lows have definitely calmed down a lot, a sine wave with a much lower amplitude. I am grateful for that. 

So, as I said in last night's CoDA meeting, I am not in an addictive relationship now, but I could be, and I sometimes feel "half-addicted," with some fragment of old patterns and attitudes at play. 

In the last post from Gorski, I'll look at his concept of a "healthy" relationship. The features are basically the opposite of the above- realistic expectations, delayed gratification, honesty, letting go of control and obsession, voluntary and free-flowing cooperation, social integration and a cycle of deepening contentment. Again, Gorski identifies the major culprit in creating an addictive relationship as sex, especially sexual behavior early in getting to know someone. I disagree, pretty much completely, but I'll have to take a closer look at my values and experiences in that area. Next time. 

The Gospel According to Gorski Part the Third

I am so goddamned in love it's silly. But dealing with the plain  fact that there's no arena for it. This goes to how I always have experienced "romantic" love- as a more general pull to the sacred. Dante and Beatrice always made perfect sense to me, as does Borges and his story The Aleph. In having no human and direct arena for being in love the way I am, I am forced to be creative and find ways to "sublimate" it or whatever. I hate it, to tell the truth. I can change my behavior, and I can redirect my mind as often as I am able, but there's honestly nothing I can do about being in love the way I am. That's how it is. I am by turns frustrated, offended (in that sense of having unwanted feelings fuck with me), tender, yearning, accepting, etc. In my past incarnations, I have tried to control, eradicate, avoid, even going so far as to hate the object of my affections. And all of that manipulative behavior was in response to feelings far, far less powerful than these, where Blake's dictum comes to mind: "Those who restrain their desire do so only because it is weak enough to be restrained." 

Anyway, I am quite sure the good people of recovery would see my heart-state as problematic, to say the least. But maybe many would not. Maybe instead the truth is that I am accepting what I can't change, that I have the courage to change what I can, and that I'm developing the wisdom to know the difference. Maybe sometimes we grow the most in the most uncomfortable and seemingly irrational fires. 

Back to Gorski: statement of the day: "If sexuality is the primary foundation of a relationship it will lead you into a dysfunctional relationship 90 percent of the time." This leads to the typical sex negative lines of thinking around relationships that I often find shaming, dismissive, white cis, heteronormative and with a default set of unexamined values that underpin a lot of the "help" that's on offer. On the other hand, certainly for me, an aspect of intense involvement from early stages of relationships with women arises out of early sexual engagement. I have always had a more culturally "feminine" experience of the connection between sex and emotions, finding it difficult not to become emotionally atached to women if we've had sex. I am told many men, and people in general, do not experience any necessarily intense emotional bond with people with whom they have sex, and that interests me. In my active sex addiction at a low bottom in connection also with a conflagration of alcoholism, when I was seeing sex workers, I even romanticized them. I seem wired that sex and "girlfriend" go together, and found it amusing that some sex workers actually sell something the abbreviation for which is "GFE," that is, "girlfriend experience." 

So I do get a lot of the cautionary wisdom about sex. I have never employed such wisdom in my behavior however. And in my current case of being in love with the woman I know intuitively is the love of my life (cynicism be damned), it would not have mattered- gradual acquaintance leading to deeper intimacy or sudden intense conflagration, it would have al led to the exact same place. There may or may not be other reasons sexual behavior was damaging for her and me, but the timing or spacing out of it absolutely does not come into play.

Again, I feel like there's wisdom and then there's just what people do. Sometimes we are wise, and sometimes we hide behind wisdom or morality or ethics in order to avoid terrifying changes that might actually be great for us. Sometimes we just do our best and mess shit up and grow as much as possible as a result. It seems funny to me in a larger sense that the emphasis Groski puts on this process is "staying safe," when it seems to me that no matter what, this stuff is never, ever safe. It's painful by necessity. That doesn't mean we ought to dump a shit ton of kerosene on what is already risky by nature, of course, but it does mean that the stately, slow development of a romantic relationship arising from a gradual experience of the other levels- superficial to companionship to friendship to sex- is going to be "safe." I mentioned to a friend of mine, a woman I've known for 25 years, that maybe I should wait to get sexual with potential partners, take it more slowly and really become friends first. She said "Sounds nice in theory, but what if you are sexually incompatible? I like to find out fright away if that basic absolute necessity is there." There's wisdom in this also.

Having said that, for now I will list Gorski's characteristics of an addictive relationship, and leave a lot of the exploration of these ideas for another post, because I have to get back to work. 

1. Magical or unrealistic expectations
2. Instant gratification
3. Dishonesty
4. Compulsive and obsessive overcontrol or avoidance
5. Lack of trust
6. Alternating criticism of partner or self
7. Isolation (of the two people together- isolation of the relationship)
8. A repeating cycle of pain

Definitely a painful list, absolutely familiar to me from years of experience. I think the most glaring things for me at the moment are dishonesty- the tendency to not express what I am actually thinking and feeling when I sense something is at stake- and lack of trust- this is nearly universal for me right now. I have been experiencing truly a lack of trust in the entire universe for the past two years, basically. It manifests in specific ways of course, but it is a global feeling that nothing whatsoever has my back. 

More when able. For now, this from one of my all time favorite writers:

"I took the Metro to Cité. I walked past Notre-Dame and thought of the hunchback Quasimodo swinging his misshapen body across the bell-ropes of love for Esmerelda. Quasimodo was a deaf mute. Cupid is blind. Freud called love an "overestimation of the object." But I would swing through the ringing world for you."


~ Jeanette Winterson, from 'All I Know About Gertrude Stein"

The Gospel According to Gorski, pt. 2

I am feeling incredibly irascible, disappointed and frustrated today, so it's a good day to do things besides the internet and social media, where I often find even more reasons to be agitated. But I've got a certain momentum around Gorski's "Addictive Relationships: Why Love Goes Wrong in Recovery," and the energy is more cathartic than annoying, so here I am. 

The next section of Gorski's talk is about levels of relationship. He says: "People from dysfunctional families often fail to recognize that healthy relationships can operate on a number of different levels. Problems occur when one person is operating at one level of a relationship and the other person is operating at a different level of relationship." Connected to this idea is the extreme nature of a lot of relationships that people from dysfunctional families get into, which Gorski calls "pain and abandonment." "Most people from dysfunctional families learn early on that they have two relationship options: intense painful involvement or isolation and abandonment. 'I can choose to be totally dysfunctional and intensely involved with a human being until it hurts so bad I can't stand it or I can be so completely alone that I hurt so bad I can't stand it.' Life becomes a vacillation between painful loneliness and painful involvement."

So a few words on that pattern, which is certainly true for me at various times and to varying degrees, although somewhat less so after two years of CoDA. Primarily, at this point, what comes up for me regarding this black and white situation of loneliness or enmeshment is that I miss a lot of cues, or misread things. Since involvement is totally consuming for me, I misinterpret when people are interested in a much less intense connection. And since I feel like the way to protect myself is isolation, I miss chances for new, looser connections with people on a variety of levels. More on that in a minute, around Gorski's idea of "levels" of relationship. 

Another aspect to this extremism is that, in a kind of Hegelian dialectic (oooh fancy), every involvement contains a seed of terror in it, because I expect to be abandoned and to suffer, and a lot of alone time contains a seed of terror in it, because I expect I will never be involved again if I stay alone. No intimacy, from this perspective, exists on any solid ground, because it is always either a terrible risk or an agonizing lack. Much as Bill W outlines on page 53 of the 12 and 12, there is no chance for a legitimate meeting of another separate person within this extreme context. I am quite glad that I no longer exist in such a stark place, while recognizing of course that there is more growth for me around these extremes. Probably in the triage of early recovery in CoDA, the very first thing I experienced was an amelioration of this black and white world. When it kicks in again now it is instantly recognizable and I know right away that I need to get into self care around it. 

Here are Gorski's levels of relationship with a paraphrase of their chief features:

1. Superficial involvement: casual interaction, no investment and no commitment, temporary associations, situational interactions. 

2. Companionship: this is where the activity is more important than the person. For example, when I want to go to a movie but want someone to go with me, so I ask. If they say they don't want to go to a movie, I'm not likely to change my plans- because the activity is more important than the other person. 

3. Friendship: the person is more important than the activity. The association of two people for the purpose of mutual support and enjoyment of each other, as Gorski puts it. 

4. Romantic love: "This is a friendship in which there is shared passion, sensuality and sexuality." I found this definition of his to be nice and clear, very rational, and rather idealistic, but whatever. 

I am not very good at companionship, really. I have been okay at superficial relationships, such as with colleagues with whom I rarely interact, or people on a rafting trip, or on an airplane. I am fairly skilled at conversation and small talk, although I sometimes have the habit, less often now, of immediately taking the conversation someplace heavy and over-sharing. But companionship is an area where I lack skill, for the most part. In fact, when I read his description that the activity is more important than the person, I felt a sense of moral qualm. That is selfish and unfair, I thought. So one way I fail at companionship is I pretend it's friendship, I pretend to be more interested in the person than the activity, and I "compromise" a lot more often than I probably could. 

Friendship is truly hit or miss for me. I recognized about ten years ago that the hardest part about breaking up with romantic partners was missing their friendship. I didn't even realize how much I valued the friendship, for many years. My sexual frustration, boredom, emotional dishonesty and other destructive tendencies with romantic partners made it seem like the friendship wasn't really that important. It's also instructive to see that many of my long term partnerships became all about companionship, almost exclusively. It's interesting how partnerships have gone from romantic, to friendship, to companionship and even to superficial relating, over time. Like housemates. Barely even excited to see each other, if not flat out dreading it and avoiding. It has felt like it is a long, long road back to romantic partners, once that companionship or superficial relating has settled in. Well, not just a long way- but you can't get back to there from here. 

Gorski's definition of romantic love seems "healthy" to me but I must admit I have not experienced it as reflected in hsi definition for long periods of time. Of course this is where so much dysfunctional learned behavior arises for me. But I also feel like his definition is altogether too simple and pat. The evangelical nature of a lot of this family system stuff, rearing its head again. He also has some quiet strands of moralism underpinning some of his thinking here, especially in regard to sex with people other than romantic partners. The endless and everpresent emphasis on heteronormative monogamy in a context of commitment is a huge part of so much recovery literature. I reject it flat out. The default assumption that this is the goal of relationship recovery anoys me, as does the unexamined axiom that being able to sustain a "healthy long term committed monogamous relationship" is the pinnacle of sanity and skill and the key to happiness. I guess a lot of people get into relationship recovery because this is what they want and they suffer from being unable to do it. This was not my motive. 

However, when I think about many of my social interactions and romantic relationships, it occurs to me there are areas of glaring lack of discernment and skill. For example, I do not have many friends. Currently, all of my recovery people are companions, in the sense that recovery is more important than they are. I do a lot of superficial interaction on social media, but there's a pull in some of that toward a "deeper connection." I think some of the women I have ended up in long term relationships with just wanted a sexual companion, where sex was more important than I was, and I misread them. I think this was true for me as well, many times. I guess this is when I have felt used, or they have felt used- meaning, one or the other of us thought we were romantic partners, but we were not, authentically. I have been friends with a lot of women, but there are many ways I have expected more from that friendship, on an emotional level, than was reasonable. Many other patterns come to mind in regard to what I'll call "misleveling" of the nature of relationships. 

This misleveling of course can occur within a long term relationship as well, where on a given evening, for example, what a person wants is companionship and what the other person wants is friendship or romance, etc. One of the common patterns in the last year or so with A was that she wanted friendship/romance and I was withdrawing, not even really wanting companionship. What level of a relationship is it when you don't even want to be there at times? Normal and natural I would say, something all of us seem to experience, as long as re-connection and communication is still possible. But my extremism has often kicked in, where any separation feels like abandonment and leads to over-protective isolation, sometimes under the same roof. The housemate situation again. 

The idea of finding levels between total isolation and extreme involvement appeals to me, of course, and my recovery community has offered a lot of experiences along those lines. I'll be reflecting on exactly what kinds and levels of relationship I am truly most interested in and if I am not experiencing that, why not? And if I am, to what degree and in what ways? 

The idea that we have a choice of how to relate with others, at what level, and for what purposes is honestly new to me. 

The Gospel According to Gorski pt. 1

Working my way through steps in CoDA, with the additional reading of Terry Gorski's classic "Addictive Relationships: Why Love Goes Wrong in Recovery." Gorski pulls no punches, leaves no room for much grey area, and has all the fervor of a lot of the family system and relationship therapists of the '90's. I think, historically, the "discovery" of the structural causes of relationship dysfunction, arising from the dysfunctional family, was such a supernova of epiphany that a lot of people went extremely hard to the black or white thinking around all of it. There's an undercurrent of ideology to some of it that I find obvious now, but when Bradshaw had his show "Bradshaw: On the Family" on PBS, I found it riveting and I was a true believer. It is probably ultimately a good thing that a lot of the framework is blunt and leaves little room for middle ground, since our denial around these realities can be so intense. Having the bullshit stripped away is painful- which reminds me of what A used to say to her son when she was going to remove a bandaid- "do you want the slow pull or the fast pull?" He would always choose the fast pull, which always made sense to me. Why not get it over with?

Gorski doesn't address denial very much in this little pamphlet, but I've thought and encountered the following stonewalling pushbacks in myself and others when it comes to doing family of origin work: "They did the best they could." "They were better than their own parents were." "You never lacked for anything- food, clothing, school." "I was a spoiled brat anyway and deserved the punishment I got." "Sure, this is all true, but it's universally true- get over it." Or even just flat out: "wow, it sounds like we grew up in different families," from siblings. Their rosy picture is met with my litany of emotional and intellectual abuse. They may be right and I may have fabricated all of it, who knows? The plain fact is that it is true for me, and I decided back in the '90's not to be gaslighted about it, although I didn't think of it that way at the time. 

Another side note on a lot of family system things- extraordinary efforts went into dismantling a lot of my inherited toxicity from my family of origin, from about 1987 to roughly 1997, on and off, but none of that work got me sober. In fact, I was somehow able to navigate intense explorations of how I had swallowed hook line and sinker the bullshit of my family system but without ever even questioning my drinking or relationship addictions. This experience leads me to believe that sobriety *has to come first*- there has to be a baseline of the essential principles of sobriety in recovery before family system work can have much overlap with recovery, for an addict. This is just my opinion of course. Few people really talk about this, that I am aware of. And a lot of family system therapies seem to me to not be particularly behavioral, and so it would be possible to "gain insight" into a ton of dysfunction without *changing a single thing* about how one operates. 

Gorski outlines "the relationship process" in the following steps:

1. go into yourself and know what you are feeling and experiencing.
2. Articulate that experience responsibly to your partner
3. Listen to their response. 

Repeat, and/or be open to many variations.

I don't know about you, but this is a ridiculously rational framework for relationships, from my perspective. Jung talks about the encounter with another human being as fucking ALCHEMY for God's sake- both people are transformed- like a chemical reaction. I wonder what I would have said, or what I would say, if someone said to me "what is the relationship process, in your opinion?" 

Here's an attempt:

A relationship is where two people trigger each other's unconscious strengths and weaknesses and engage in a shared enterprise to make the unconscious conscious through a series of painful projections and owning those projections. Relationships are mysterious and fraught with risk and we are changed by them in ways that we never expect going in. Since we are all essentially not trustworthy, all relationships are essentially risky and probably foolish, and to be intimate with someone is to invite them to hurt us or even destroy us to the core. However, relationships are the main way we access the truth about ourselves and learn, grow and change. 

So you can clearly see that I load relationships with a lot more than what Gorski is talking about. I exaggerated a few of those items based on pre-CoDA world view- but some of the basic outline is still there. 

I would say that my actual behavior around even the very first step- examining myself and knowing what I am feeling and finding a way to speak it- is a short circuit and a catastrophe for me a lot of the time. I spend or at least uysed to spend a shit ton of energy trying to figure myself out. I also used to strategize and censor myself a lot, even unconsciously. Let's say I look inside and discover I am angry with my partner. Oh fuck no. I am in no way shape or form going to express that. Not even in a responsible way. So right at the very beginning, I am already looking for ways to short circuit Gorski's framework. 

A few things that are apparent in the Gorski paradigm:

1. Clean and clear boundaries. I investigate my own experience enough to know it and own it and be able to communicate it. 
2. I commnicate it using I statements and taking ownership for it. 
3. I stay open and willing to hearing what my partner says in response. 

There is a very strong sense of two separate people engaging in a fairly well delimited exchange. The other person does not get put in a position of feeling causal in my experience or like he or she has to fix me or say or do anything to change how I feel. I am not asking for the other person to change, only to listen and validate. 

I'll be thinking a lot about this framework. I will confidently say that I had zero experience of this kind of well-delimited and safe, reasonable, open minded and attentive exchange in my family of origin. My memory is that it was not only rare, but literally non-existent, ever, at any time. And I can dimly see where some more well skilled partners of mind have expected it, and have gotten some very strange and confusing shenanigans from me instead.