LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: Mind the gap

One joy,

I got so excited when I saw Donna’s promo for your article in her most recent email. I just got finished reading “Legs,” William Kennedy’s novel about the gangster, Legs Diamond, and thinking about his charisma and how people loved him, despite his criminal behavior, including murder.

Reading that started me thinking of what was so appealing to me about my ex. And I came to think that he offered me a version of me that was who I wished I was. More fun-loving, more selfish about taking care of myself, more spontaneous, less tied down with personal obligations and all the anticipation I did of other people’s needs. It was freedom from all the drag of anxious codependency that I’d developed to deal with my own family background.

I think that the first time he really connected with me (though he’d been trying to get me involved in a personal relationship for some time) was when he asked me one day why I looked so tired and blue, and I shared some of the huge personal and business issues I was dealing with. He listened, his expression become more and more impatient. And when I was done, he said, “I don’t understand why you tolerate all this. You deserve better.”

It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to me, but it was the first time that the idea arrived not just as an idea, but the opening of a path. I could do this. And maybe with this man as a friend, I could do it with some support.

Well, that story didn’t play out exactly as I imagined in that magical moment. His entry into my life turned out to be one of the most confusing, painful and expensive learning experiences I’ve ever endured.

But in the recovery part of it — which changed me and my life for the better — I learned a lot about the meaning of my personal history. Like you, I came to understand that it literally had split my psyche into the before and after parts. That I’d buried the memories of the big traumas that caused this, and with those memories, I’d buried parts of my personality and potential. The “me” that was left lived in fear of more disastrous trauma, and I managed my life and even my thoughts and emotions in a defensive mode that I thought was being smart and self-protective, but it was really repetitively recreating the disaster I was trying to forget.

And he, with the sociopath’s genius for uncovering hidden dreams, had spoken directly to the lost part of myself. It wasn’t a bad part. It was the child that was still playful, still felt entitled to joy without cost, still felt like the world was a trustworthy place. Before I met him, I would have said that part of me (if I recognized it was there at all) was the memories I had escaped. What I didn’t realize was that it was the innocence I’d buried.

At some point in my recovery, I realized that the entire time I was with him (five years), there was a battle going on in my psyche. The “grown up” me recognized that he was exploiting me and the entire relationship was toxic. But there was another part of me that wanted him, no matter what the cost. It battled the grown-up with all the determination and noisy emotion that a child battles for what it wants and needs. And despite my best effort to get some grown-up control over the relationship, that other part always won. She gave him whatever he wanted, surrendered whatever dignity or emotional safety was necessary to pal around with him or get attention from him.

Psychologically, this was the weirdest relationship of my life. I was always in pain. I was always excited and hopeful. No matter what was going on between us — good times or bad times — I experienced it happening at multiple levels. I struggled to communicate with him as the person I knew he was — cold, shallow, self-involved, interested in me only as a financial or social conduit to other things he wanted — but at the same time I was talking to him as the person I dreamed he was, someone who knew and understood and loved me at the deepest level. And likewise, I interpreted everything he did and said at multiple levels. I have never been so disoriented in my life.

Whoever and whatever he was, I knew that this was really about me. Yes, I was vulnerable to someone like him, and he identified and took advantage of those vulnerabilities. But those vulnerabilities were about me, not him. And through the whole course of the relationship, I knew that there was something really important going on. Something important for my life. I didn’t understand it, anymore than I understood him or what was going on between us. But I knew that eventually I would understand it.

I came from a terrible family background. The older I get, the more emotionally healthy I become, the more horrified I become was what I and the other children in my family went through. Odd as this may sound, I’ve always thought that I was the lucky one, because my father incested me for years. So, unlike the others who suffered more from verbal abuse and constant physical threats and occasional beatings, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was something wrong with him and what happened to me was not my fault (even though I knew that it had “ruined me” in many ways). This certainty helped me get away from my family early and build an adult life that had nothing to do with them. The others didn’t fare so well as adults.

Until recently I haven’t talked publicly about my background, but the therapists I’ve seen have always talked about how amazingly well I function, considering what happened to me. I gather that to mean that I didn’t become a hooker or junkie, or both. And that I developed a middle-class lifestyle complete with college-educated husbands and a successful professional career. So yes, I was compensating well. But that didn’t mean that my interior life, or my relationships, or my ability to “get a life,” or my sexual life were anything like normal. I spend most of my life as an unhealed survivor of massive trauma, and the evidence was all over the place for anyone who understood was untreated trauma looked like.

This relationship — and more importantly, the period of getting over it — got me in touch with the buried self that, previously, was all the “craziness” that I was constantly fighting. It helped me to accept my history, develop a broader range of feelings, and ultimately it changed the way I move through my life.

What he said to me that first day was absolutely right. It touched me so profoundly because it was the truth I was denying. In my attempts to be safe and avoid disasters, I wasn’t taking care of myself. I certainly wasn’t seriously considering that I deserved better. Or that I was making a huge and crippling mistake to imagine that my happiness, safety and ability to manifest my dreams depended on getting other people to love me and help me.

Putting myself back together again wasn’t the work of a day or even a year. There are layers of work — intellectually figuring things out, letting those insights filter down through the layers of emotional activity, converting my old PSTD-like reactions to more effective ways to see and deal with challenges, learning how to dream the future and create it, testing new ways of being and gradually getting better at being a person I like being.

When all those terrible things happened to me when I was still living with my family, I knew even then that someday I was going to have to heal from them. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would take me so long to settle down to that business. And I certainly never imagined that the catalyst for that healing would be the worst person I’ve ever known, the most awful relationship, and the fiercest battle inside myself.

Looking back, I think that I needed something that terrible and unmanageable to finally break me loose from those early coping mechanisms that had become so dysfunctional in my adult life. After all, I was a “success.” What he showed me was the lie I was telling myself. Because if I was such a success, why didn’t I take care of myself? Why did I keep loving and why couldn’t I break free of someone who was so hurtful to me? The whole experience forced me to look deep into myself and figure out why I was my own worst enemy, a much more important enemy than he ever was.

So thank you, One joy, for bringing this all up again. Surviving is good. But turning disaster into personal blooming is even better. There was a time when I couldn’t look back at the period with anything but shame and anger. Now, it’s more like the dramatic flaring up of a chronic sickness that warped and drained the energy from my entire life. It finally gave me a chance to see where the wound was and use that knowledge to heal it. Hooray!