Post Therapy Insecurity Disorder

 This has been a HELL of a year and I see no end to it, regardless of the fast-approaching December. 

It started with the death of my step brother. Then my genetic brother cut off ties with me. Then someone hijacked my work, and other work opportunities inexplicably dried up. Then a lot of what I had worked on over the last couple of years went up in smoke. In my industry, where your next job depends on what you did last, this is much worse than it sounds. Not to mention the amount of gaslighting and ghosting from colleagues and friends which hit me straight in my abandonment issue feels. Then, while visiting my extended family, my father treats me like crap - and for the first time in many years, I realise that perhaps I'd been wrong to think that my family had a chance. Maybe I should have focused on building my own separate dysfunctional family unit and not so much been the glue for the one I was born to. Then another friend died, making me face my mortality - again. And finally someone who barely knows me called me "sweet"! SWEET?? When did I lose my scary acerbic edge and get ground into this polite pulpy mess that everyone feels completely okay walking all over?? I feel like I've lost my grip on who I am, and it's making me question everything about my choices, my supposed talent and my vision (or lack thereof) for my future. It's November and I'm shaken. It's been a messy year.

And so, I'm back in therapy. I say "back" loosely, because the last few times I've indulged, I used it mostly to tackle the visible issues and not THE BIG ISSUE, you know.

For example : Sam dumped me - TWICE! - and Doc, I just want to know, is it a normal breakup when someone takes you on a holiday, makes love to you and the next day says he doesn't feel the love anymore? And then spends the next few months convincing you to get back and then breaks up with you on the day your lease is over and you're moving in with him? Is that normal or as truly horrific as it feels? Or Doc, I tried to kill myself with Vodka and pills and is it normal to feel totally cut off from people and absolutely not expect things to get better ever? 

And every time I got an answer that made me feel better, and more aligned with what felt real, I moved on. Yes, Sam was a shit and that breakup was bananas. And no, you can't be blamed because you trusted someone who pretended to be trustworthy. Yes, you are depressed because your best friend died and also you haven't dealt with the how your entire self identity got tossed around thanks to Sam being an unworthy tool.

So, the minute I was told that I wasn't insane to be feeling how I was, I moved on and got on with life. I'm not crazy after all, regardless of how many times and how many boys who loved me have tried to tell me I am. 

But this time, after my intensely painful solo trip with my father, I came back into therapy. Doc, is it wrong for me to want a family that behaves well with each other, talks lovingly with each other, so I don't have to carry the load of everyone's discontent? Doc, after so many years of regular interaction, is it wrong for me to expect my father or brother to like me, maybe even understand me? Or is there something truly wrong with me that people look at me and decide "Meh, it's okay to hurt that." Also, I'm in my mid 40s... shouldn't I be done with these childish things? Weeeeeelllll.....

And finally, my shrink and I started on THE BIG ISSUE. And cliche as it is, doesn't it always go back to 'mommy and daddy lied' foundations?  Mostly, they lied about being the grown ups. They lied about being mature self-less adults, or knowing what was best for their kids, and even about raising emotionally secure kids. How could they? No one had done it for them either. As a result, the child figured that this is what a happy family looks like - when someone makes you feel like you have to work for their love or they will go away, when someone explains to you how you're not matching up to their expectations of good behavior and that results in them leaving you to fend for yourself, when someone makes it your responsibility to be the 'bigger person' and forgive endlessly because that's why people will want to be around you in the face of your many massive faults. Sure, there were lots of trips and lots of laughs... and as long as you were laughing, nobody was fighting or crying and it was okay.

This was normal subliminal shit, and explained how Sam or Mocha or Alex or VJ or the myriad others traipsing through my heart and my mind found their way there to begin with and why I ran far from Kappa or Andy or a few others. The former were intense, messy, emotionally manipulative and withholding relationships and they felt like home to me, the others, not so much. The fact that home was a traumatic battlefield never occurred to me.

(If this resonates, please read "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents")

And now I feel homeless. With the hold of my past falling loose from me everyday, and my present day seeming adrift and my current relationships getting reevaluated through the lens of hindsight, I find myself spending almost all my time clinging to the only real steady things I have. My actual apartment, my cat, and stories that bubble into my head that I write down now knowing fully well that no one else apart from me will probably read them. It feels like I'm marking time, while dissociating from the terror of limbo as I go through my days of breakfast and coffee and housekeeping and gym and reading / watching / writing fiction while I wonder what the actual fuck I did or want to do with my life.

Separation Anxiety

 I remember the first time I consciously created a separation in my mind when it came to people. 

I was around 4, my brother was 7 or so, and my parents had had some kind of blow up about something related to him. I'm not sure if the words were ever said out loud, but it became clear from the argument that my brother was the 'problem' child and I was the 'considerate' one. I remember my brother and I were in our shared bedroom at that time overhearing this. That was the moment when I decided that I didn't care what my parents thought about my brother, or why, because those reasons didn't apply to me. I became the 2 foot wall between my parents and him, I became the supplier of my pocket money, I became the holder of secrets that would otherwise have got him a much-deserved thrashing. Because as far as I was concerned, he was and continued to be my favorite person, no matter what the others said.

This one action, very early on, taught me to separate my judgement of an individual's actions and their resultant impact on others, from what I considered "who" a person was. You did a bad thing, but that didn't necessarily make you a bad person and on the flip side, if you did a good thing, it didn't mean you didn't have nefarious motivations.

This single point ability has been my compass as I navigate my personal relationships. As compasses go, it's not ideal but it does explain how I'm friends with people who can't stand each other, how I can attempt friendships with exes, how my cousins and I remain on decent talking terms despite our parents being estranged from each other, how I have independent, functional relationships with my very dysfunctional family etc. 

It's also why I have a very compartmentalized way of having conversations about my relationships with people I'm in relationships with - platonic, romantic or professional. 

 One broad separation is : Since there's no point talking to people about others they don't know, that immediately eliminates large sections of overlap. For example : my mother's family doesn't know much about my father's family, and my paternal step family barely knows anyone in my original nuclear family and my ex-maternal step family knows only 3 members of my maternal from-birth family. Similarly, my School friends don't know my Undergrad friends who don't know my Masters friends who don't know my Work friends who don't know my multiple Families.

Add to this the interpersonal dynamics. Subset Family I can't stand all the members within it. Subset Work Friends can't talk openly about other members in the same group without impacting possible future earnings. Subset Exes who Work Together - Well, that's a whole different dynamic and yep, I can't talk about one to the other. I'm not even sure they know that they belong to the same subset to be honest.

Tangentially, I now have a Subset of Dating App Hook Ups, a small number of free-floating, often fun, professionals who sometimes happen to wander into professional meetings I'm having with Subset Colleagues. Not just that, once it's over, they also send a message like "Hey, the meeting went well, and here's hoping we can work together" right below a series of sizzling sexts that have been exchanged a few weeks prior with no follow up from either end.

While this isn't what I specifically want to talk about, I do wonder if a 'double thumbs up' emoji is an adequate response to communicate "I accept your bid to pretend we don't know each other and also yes, I too hope working together will be more fun than other shared activities" ? 👍👍

But coming back to why I started this piece : Today I find myself at a full-circle point where I've been cut off by my brother. This sounds way more dramatic than it actually is because (a) this isn't the first time he's cut me off and (b) not talking to each other for years is a family coping mechanism. But it is the first time I'm seriously considering not letting him back into my world - and I'm shocked at how clinically I'm weighing the pros and cons of this.

To offer context - the reason why it's been so easy for me to develop this compartmentalized personal relationship style is because most people I have personal relationships with have often not been in the same city or even the same country as I am. And for the most part, this was an expectation that was set up in me from the very beginning thanks to an Army life upbringing. 

My nuclear family unit would move every 2 years, make new friends to leave them behind every 2 years and repeat the cycle. Along with that, we had the routine of traveling every summer vacation to another city to be spent with different extended family members. The expectation of having all the people you care for in the same place or even within driving distance is so alien to me that whenever I find myself within families for whom this is normal, I think it's a real life movie playing out in front of me. 

Anyway, we knew we would see others when we would see them and, in the time of expensive long distance phone calls, the only input I would get of these people (mostly family, hardly ever the left behind friends) would be from my mom who would read out relevant bits from intermittent letters addressed to her. Underneath all that was an ever present philosophy : "It is what it is".

And when my nuclear family imploded too, consequently sending us all to different cities and countries... well, we treated each other how we had learned to treat all those other connections : intermittent desultory updates while apart, keeping all our excited energies for when we would meet. And this is where we badly miscalculated. 

All that excited energy turned to rage when we realised that it just wasn't the same. It wasn't us four against the world anymore, it was mom against dad, dad against brother, dad against me, mom against brother, aunt against dad, uncle against brother, all of us against the baby-sitter (another story but you get the drift), everyone fighting about money and distance and separation and betrayal and disrespect... and none of us being able to hear what the other was saying : 

That we no longer felt safe in this world. 

That in a world where we had so blithely left behind connections in the wake of our family, we didn't like being among those left behind by our own. What was worse is that while we had very quickly learned to let go of external bonds with the farewell wave of "it is what it is", we never quite learned how to hold on to the bonds when they were ours, through the bad bits or even pull each other back. We never quite learned "I'm sorry, please let's fix it."

I think this was especially true of what went on between my brother and I. Everytime he would inexplicably cut off contact with me, I would just helplessly watch as that tenuous bond of communication would slip out of my hands. And since we never learned to talk to each other about all the terrible things that happened in our multiple compartments, or how they affected us, we just started afresh every time with something that sounded like "Hey, what's up?" which was almost always met with some version of "Hey, you wouldn't believe what my dog did today!" And years of silence and resentment was pushed under the Carpet of Relief that somehow, miraculously, that broken bond had come back within grasp.

Except this time, it feels different. Maybe it's because I'm in my mid-40s (and women in their 40s are a whole different kind of beast) or that a quick glance through this 18 year old online therapeutic diary has revealed that I've barely ever mentioned my brother except in the context of an awful argument between us almost 16 years ago ago. I went through posts to find some affectionate allusion to him but nope... and this isn't because he's not an affectionate man, it's because in the last 18 years, I've mostly had about 12+ years of silence from him broken up with periods of great laughs. But what was even more revealing was that some of my closest friends I'd made over the last 2 decades didn't know his name. The final nail in the coffin? When I told a few of them that my brother wasn't talking to me again, ALL of them said "Wasn't he already not talking to you? For years?"

There's a term for this kind of silent treatment, rooted in family relationships. It's known as "withholding affection" and is an emotional-abuse term. What was truly revelatory however was that it was one of my favorite people in the world who had subjected me to this while gaslighting me for other things. 

And I find myself falling back on my tried and tested method of understanding people - family or friends. You can be a good person who did awful things, or you can be an awful person who did good things. But at the end of the day, I think what truly underscores my relationships is an examination of how they treated ME, specifically, for how long, and why. And while some exes and friends get some kind of a hall pass, because god only knows what kind of trauma they went through, and the gravity of their mistakes, my brother doesn't really qualify for that kind of forgiveness. 

Because we both went through what we did, in the same home with the same parents, and we only had each other to count on for understanding. Atleast that's what I always thought. To discover that that same kid (now pushing 50, married with a 5 year old of his own) who got my unearned loyalty, decides that I'm once again not worth his attention is... heartbreaking.

Maybe I'm not being very clinical about this at all. Maybe I'm just done being treated like shit.  

One Night Catch and Release

 Recently I was watching a Netflix special where the whole crux of the one-hour stand up routine was to examine the concept of 'tension' in comedy. How you set up the joke, build it, play with the audience's emotions until the tension in the room can be plucked like a guitar string, creating its own unique note.. and then you drop the punch line. The act of dropping that punchline releases the tension which is seen in the laugh. Greater the tension, bigger the release, louder the laugh.

Like an orgasm at the end of a successful one night stand.

A successful one night stand like most stand up situations starts way before we reach the main punchline. The opening I'm-cute-AND-funny banter, the I'm-offended-haha-just-kidding overtures, the casual-but-intentional contact with skin, then the body-slam of some lacerating personal trauma that shines a wholly different layered light on all the revelations of the night, to finally end up with the last laugh. And boom, suddenly you're naked with the comic and the punchline is the release of all that sexual tension - and it's fun!

Now, what would happen if, when it's all said and done, the audience is leaving the theatre, discussing where to grab a bite and checking if they have all their belongings, and the comic comes back on stage and says "So... to continue what I was saying..."?

That's what the three-day-later phone call from a successful one-night stand feels like to me. To mix metaphors, Elvis has left the building and my partner has just asked for the menu to see what to order next. 

I've heard it said that a successful one night stand can be converted into a viable relationship but it feels like a lie. Can you imagine the same level of attention and intensity of a stand up routine that continues across an extended period of time? Not an hour every day, or even 4 hours at a stretch, but days or months or years and decades? That's what a viable relationship is but if one had to live it at the same level of intensity, it would destroy me, make me forget laughter, and most likely lead me to murder.

Or one deliberately dials back to pace oneself, thus changing the very nature of the sexy, unplanned, non-viability-testing beast that got you going in the first place. 

So what does one seek or expect on the second night after the first night already covered the first few steps from getting to know you banter to skin contact - and done it well? What fills that second hour of distance run if one has to avoid the inevitable disappointment of trying to recreate the magic of the first night?

All these thoughts go through my head as I see the comic's caller ID pop up again on my phone which sits next to where I'm typing my confusion. I suppose it's only polite to answer, while wondering fruitlessly why I'm responding to the promise of another sexy encounter with politeness and tremulous anxiety about longer-than-another-day viability.  

Bleagh.

More than Words, FFS!

I've pretended for a very long time that this was one of my favorite songs. Why? Because this happened to be the song an ex played for me on his guitar when he was still trying to get me to come undone for him. I'd always thought it was a bit of a wanker song because the singer was just wishing-and-hoping-and-thinking-and-praying that someone would read his mind and do the things he wanted. What happened to communication, right? 

Today, when it played on my alexa, I realised Mr Extreme was me and every other person left hanging after a "Let's catch up" text that had no further follow up. And the reason this song is so popular is because there is absolutely no shortage of No Plan Dans in this world.

A No Plan Dan needs no explanation. He opens a conversation with "When are we catching up?" and continues the conversation without even suggesting a date-venue-time or even an activity, leaving the onus of the "plan" on you entirely even though he initiated it. Then he gaslights you with "But I keep asking you out!"

Lately I find myself infuriated with a couple of No Plan Dans in my life. And the reason it's infuriating is that.. well, they're also my friends and I wish they weren't so weak and wishy-washy. If they actually asked me out, I'd say yes or no, and it would be the end of that particular conversation line. Instead, I have an insidious little worm in my brain that wakes up every time I'm hit by the "hey" message.

"Saying I love you is not the words I want to hear from you..." 

No shit, sherlock. There are only so many times you can say the words without action. Don't tell me how great I am, or how much you care for me and then do the "how about we catch up" and then... nothing. How about we don't catch up? Ever. Would that significantly change your life or mine? Probably not. So then just stop.

Because words are easy. In the world of text messages and memes, saying things has become the easiest zero-accountability activity in all of time. Anyone can say anything - complete lies have gotten people elected to powerful offices! - and have zero meaning. 

The downside to all this is - doing something often enough creates a habit. So if I'm getting used to not believing you, or going out with you, because you're 'Dan'ning it up regularly, then that's a neural pathway that is being worn down deep in my brain. Next time you ask me "how about a movie?" (even if now it's a specific movie), my reaction would be an immediate walk down that specific pathway to the "no". Unless the plan becomes a group plan in which case, your specific presence is never important. And the neural pathway gets deeper.

However, on the flip side of No Plan Dan is the Haranguing Harry.

As the name suggests, HH is the one who thinks the polite refusal is a "maybe". He doesn't think about why there's a refusal to begin with, only that the 'maybe' can be changed to a 'Yes' if he's persistent enough. Ofcourse, he thinks that the reason it was a no to begin with is because the no-sayer doesn't really mean it, doesn't know her own mind, can't visualise just 'how much fun!' it would be to hang out with HH. He doesn't notice that if only he put a fraction of the effort he puts into haranguing the no to yes, to actually making a yes-worthy plan to begin with, he'd hardly ever get a no.

"... how easy, it would be to show me how you feel..."

The fact that after HH has worn down the polite woman's will, so that she says yes just to shut him up, by the time she starts that event with him, she's already wishing it's over. She resents him, and with every passing moment of 'so much fun!', she's thinking of how to never ever go out with him again, how she will always say she's out of town or busy with someone else whenever she sees his name in her chat list, while mentally preparing herself to be downright rude if needed, because politeness landed her in this shitshow to begin with.

And that's where No Plan Dan and Haranguing Harry meet and exchange notes. No Plan Dan is frustrated that the woman won't go out with him,  that he's such a nice guy and still she's always meeting other men and HH will talk about how all women be bitches, how she tried to pay for her half as if he wasn't man enough, then didn't even sleep with him for picking up her tab! The audacity!

"Now that I've tried to talk to you and make you understand..."

... it won't make a difference. The gang of NPDs and HHs will go forth and share the hurtful wife / girlfriend jokes and the ball-and-chain and the doesn't-know-her-own-mind and meant-to-be-in-the-kitchen podcasts and interviews and memes and the multiple other ways of blaming the women for the absence of women in their lives, instead of changing their approach, and this will lead to the creation of more NPD and HH archetypes until sooner or later one or many of those will decide to 'teach women their rightful place' through violence and... We have the present day world.

Recently I read somewhere that heterosexual women are the only people who have to date their natural predator. Is it any wonder then that more and more heterosexual women are choosing singlehood and celibacy - and leading reportedly happier lives - than those shackled to the Not-the-One?

At the end of the day, it needs "...More than words to show you feel that your love for me is real..."

And somehow, almost everyone missed the memo.