Are we wasting time?

[haphazard]

Funnily enough while I'm reading this book I keep coming across stuff that I am labelling "strong bunny". You watch Mojo there's going to be academic theses built around your zoo in a few years time!

Another bit of this book says that when a parent is angry or rejecting or negative to a child the child internalises the parent. So all the negative self-talk stuff is identification with the "good" parent against the "bad" self. When we become close to another person we transfer the bad aspects that the now internalised parent disliked about us to the "other". So back again of course to: we have to learn to love ourselves before we can love another.

The weird part for me is that I absolutely knew all this before I started out in the relationship minefield. But both xBF and H argued against me. They argued against honesty, against pleasing yourself, against loving yourself first. What I don't understand is how I got duped into believing them rather than kicking them both to the kerb early on and maintaining the good ground I already had on coming out of my FOO.

You have to be very experimental I think with relationships. You're in a good position right now Mojo to try out what it's like to relate to different types of men. It would almost be worthwhile to deliberately date men you are not attracted to (physically is OK, but not emotionally attracted to) in order to explore what it's like to hang out with someone that different from your usual type. It seems to me from what you have said about the guys you've been dating that you are enjoying flirting with danger. You are getting a buzz out of hanging with slightly dangerous seeming men. Safety is a turn off. Love is not safe. That is something pretty much all of us here learned in early childhood. It was not safe to love. Therefore when we are with someone safe it doesn't feel like love.

The sense of anxiety is closely associated with love because pretty much all of us were left to cry ourselves to sleep in our cribs - a highly unnatural thing to do to a small vulnerable baby. And it's still going on. We do it to our own kids, we don't tie them to our backs and carry them around with us for the first couple of years. We leave them so we can go out to work. We train them into a sleep routine and are told that they must learn to self-soothe. The prevalence of MB is actually a form of self-soothing which is something most babies have been trained to do. When we meet someone safe we don't feel love. When we meet someone we feel anxious won't stay with us then we interpret that as love. Once we have hooked up with that person we retreat into self-soothing habits such as mb, alcoholism, shopaholism, controlling behaviour, avoidant behaviour (not wanting to want) in order to maintain the distance which maintains the anxiety.

Whenever my R with H gets comfortable I start to feel like it is dull dull dull. That's what happens - it oscillates between agony and boredom. I'm not sure I don't trigger the agony as an escape from the boredom.