Quote: Is there any correlation between these two statements? My first thought when you said you were getting angry with your father’s self centeredness was, why don’t you tell him how much it hurts you, rather than just feel like attacking him?
With someone else, it might be worthwhile telling him how his comments hurt me. With my father, through long experience, I've learned that if I tell him that his statements hurt me, he'll go into attack mode.
"Sorry" is not one of the words in his vocabulary.
Quote: It sounds like you have a mindset that say you should accept your pain and sadness and just learn to live with it.
You're making an excellent point here. I hadn't thought of it exactly that way, but you're absolutely right.
To me this says you want the emotional bonding, the compassion, the intimacy, but you are not comfortable when you get it, so you felt smothered. With that guy you pushed away what you say you really want.
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I know it sounds that way, but, really, that guy, although he was emotionally available, had lots of other serious problems that caused me to end our relationship (for example, as time went on and he became involved in a bitter custody battle with his ex, he became very hostile towards *my* son -- which was a dealbreaker for me).
While the degree of closeness he wanted was a little difficult and scary for me, I wouldn't have broken up with him *because* of that.
And, now that I think about it, "Steve" (the guy I was madly in love with who started dating my best friend behind my back) was -- or at least seemed -- emotionally open and available. He just didn't really love me.
Quote: So like Corri says, you draw energy from others to please you, yet you keep them distant, all of which can be very consuming for the other person.
While you say you don’t want to “whine” about yourself, the fact is that you really do want to whine about yourself and you want others to make you feel better. You just don’t want to make yourself vulnerable by asking for it. So you make yourself dependent on others for setting your feeling of security. To me this all seems like a defensive structure you used to protect yourself from hurt. You learned to not want to want.
Yup. That sounds about right. Not a pretty picture, either. But how do I change this stance?
What are *you* doing about it, to the extent that this reflects your sitch and state of mind?
Whatever doesn't make you stronger, kills you. And it feels as though my ability to love and trust have been destroyed by a series of betrayals, large and small.
I'm a shadow of the person I was ten years ago. And I think of that person, who loved and trusted so easily with regret and with longing.
