So I’ll meet women and I’ll think, this one has the personality, and this one has the looks and this one has the brains. Why can’t one woman have it all? And if she did, would she want me too?
At age 46, my options have narrowed. I’m trying to figure out how much mental illness I can handle in a woman.
When I fall for a woman and don’t want to live without her, all the comparisons I’m prone to fall away. Though sometimes I’ll think about how A in my past was great at X and B was great at Y and C had awesome attributes and D was smooth…
I had the hell beaten out of me as a kid and whenever anyone comes up from behind me or I get startled by an unexpected noise, I instinctively jump. Adrenalin surges through my system. I freak out. I feel like I’m about to get beaten again, even if it is only a friend unexpectedly from behind putting his hands on my shoulders. My most frightening memory from childhood was getting held underwater for about ten seconds by the kids in the grade above me at Pacific Union College.
People who work with me can tell that I have that beaten dog syndrome. It’s a certain look in my eyes when I get yelled at.
My upbringing’s influence is so difficult to disentangle. I keep thinking I’m past it and then it rears its ugly head again. I used to tell my therapists to focus on the present, but stuff from my past keeps warping me, so we might tiptoe back there a bit. It’s useless to say you forgive people in your past without realizing clearly what happened, what choices others made that negatively effected you, and then when you face that, then and only then can you effectively choose to let it go. Otherwise, you’re stuck playing out stuff you won’t look at.
So this new friend went to South America and took native drugs and vomited and defecated for a day or two and then came home completely changed. His negative imprinting from childhood was gone. He has appropriate confidence in himself. He wears bright colors. He’s kicking ass. Can Native American throw-up drugs really do that for you or is he fooling himself?
