Most men have fantasized that a particular women could make them feel whole if only she’d go to bed with them.
This desire to rescue or be rescued is a symptom of love addiction. It comes from the desire to lose oneself in a process or substance because your life doesn’t work and reality sucks.
When I listen to the following song, I remember a few days spent on the couch at Pacific Union College in February of 1986 and one exciting date that week with an accomplished co-ed that every guy at Monterey Bay Academy wanted to marry, and then after my five days in paradise, I drove home to lonely Newcastle and started the Spring semester at Sierra Community College where my life descended into months of mononucleosis hell, a sneak preview of what was coming for me down the pike.
Living in Seventh-Day Adventist communities growing up, I knew many good people (Seventh-Day Adventists tend to be nurturing) and when I was around them, I felt whole (as opposed to when I was alone, then I felt lousy unless I was drunk with fantasies). I wanted to be adopted into these happy healthy families.
That urge to be adopted, that urge to rescue and be rescued, has never left me, but its severity waxes and wanes. The more I’m moving in the direction of a good life, the more busy I am, the less I feel this urge. The more despair I feel, the greater my need to escape.
I think we all know people who make us feel whole. That yearning is so intense, we usually bollix up the very relationship we imagine can heal us. When others fail to live up to our projections, we blame them or we blame ourselves or we blame God.
The opposite of addiction is connection.
Eleventh Step Prayer
(often attributed to St. Francis, actually from the early 1900s)
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.
