What I don’t say out loud

August 24, 2008 at 12:21 pm | Posted in reflections | Leave a comment
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Sculpture by Tom Otterness“Have you ever made a plan to kill yourself?” the woman asked me while swinging her sandaled foot into the space between us.

“No,” I replied honestly, after thinking about it for a moment. Saying that, at least, left me feeling marginally sane. I can’t say the same for all of the questions I answered that afternoon.

I was participating, for minor compensation, in a psychiatric research study that involved answering a few hours’ worth of written and orally administered questions about my moods over the past, oh, ten years or so. I was fairly familiar with these sorts of questionnaires, since I had been obsessed with diagnosing myself with one mental condition or another in high school. But before this particular interrogation, it had been years since I’d thought about my darkest periods and the feelings that characterized them.

The research assistant had me chart my moods from the age of sixteen, then circled the low points and asked me several questions about each one. There were initially three downward spikes, but as our conversation developed, I kept remembering other times – periods of at least two weeks – when I had almost no motivation to get out of bed or see anyone; when I could barely be bothered to shower or cook; when I was sleeping ten or eleven hours a night; when I would cry nightly over memories I’d dredged up expressly for that purpose. During these periods I did manage to go to work, and in the worst moments I think at least talked to people on the phone. But it’s disturbing to think about how frequently this occurs.

I also happened to notice that my “depressive episodes” were often triggered by a breakup. The length of the relationship didn’t seem to make a difference, though. What does this mean? Am I simply a drama queen? Do I place way too much of my self-worth on whether I’m in a successful relationship? Or am I simply naturally prone to depression and does the end of a relationship merely catapult me into a state that was previously latent but nevertheless present in my psyche? Besides, might it not be true that my psychological makeup draws me specifically into relationships that do tremendous amounts of emotional harm to me?

I gave up on psychiatric diagnoses a few years back after a therapist suggested that I might be dysthymic and followed this up with the remark that “no currently used treatments are especially successful.” Talk about a downer. Luckily, at that same time I was getting into Jungian psychology and changing my thinking about mental imbalances in general. Now I believe psychological symptoms represent ways in which individuals needed to move forward, grow, change – rather than being static pathological states that require constant treatment that comes necessarily from outside of the individual herself. I distrust pharmaceutical drugs that treat psychological disorders, though I do understand the need for them in some more extreme cases, as a way of bring patients into a mental space where they are able to work cooperatively to heal themselves. Because of this attitude, I’ve steered well clear of psychiatrists and their methods, which are based on models of pathology and rely heavily on medication. I prefer growth-oriented therapists – Jungians, Gestalt therapists, Buddhism-oriented therapists, Process Workers, etc. But for the sake of money I exposed myself to this pathology-oriented thinking once again and, honestly, it made me kind of depressed.

First, it’s strange to be asked questions like “In the past two weeks, every day for most of the day, have you felt like you were worthless?” by someone who is there only to record me answer and not to offer any kind of support or even to interact with me as a human being. I never felt that she judged me for my responses, but at the same time her distance and lack of reaction only vivified what I imagined someone might say or think if they heard my answer.

“Have you ever felt like you would be better off dead?” I had to say yes to that one, and yes, even recently – though only in passing, I hastened to explain to her. When I feel this way, I recognize that in a few moments it will be gone, so there’s no reason to dwell on it. Mostly what struck me as I answered this particular question was: these are things I don’t talk about with people, not even the people I’m closest to. There are few things I’m totally unwilling to discuss with my close friends, and it’s not as if they have any illusions about my history with depressive states. I tend toward extreme emotions, moodiness and despair, and these aspects of my personality are things I’d never want to hide from the people who love me. After all, what good is having a friend if you feel like you can’t be yourself around her?

But telling someone that yesterday I felt, for a few minutes or hours, like I wished I was dead, well, I guess that’s crossing some kind of line for me. It’s the kind of information that becomes a burden. It’s very important for me to own my emotions. Most of the time I bring up even my most difficult problems in a way that makes them funny; at the very least I make sure it’s clear that what I need, if anything, is a few minutes of reassurance, and then the distraction that good company easily provides. Telling someone that sometimes I think about killing myself, or that I occasionally despair at finding a sustainable sense of meaning in my life, is like dumping a mangled animal corpse in their lap. It’s just not fair, and it’s so difficult for them to know what they’re supposed to do with it.

To be clear, I’m not saying I think people shouldn’t discuss these things. On the contrary, it’s important to talk such difficult emotions through when they become overwhelming. That’s what therapists are for, and of course carefully chosen friends can occasionally provide some comfort as well. My point is that voicing these feelings after so many years of keeping them to myself – because in general I’ve learned to manage them well enough to create a decent life – made me feel like a complete fucking freak. And it also made me realize that no matter how transparent I think I’ve been with the people I’m close to, I’ve been concealing pretty major information about who I am and how I operate.

Since I participated in this study a couple of months ago I’ve been spending a fair amount of time reassessing the way I see myself in terms of my emotional states. I can’t shake the idea that maybe my mood patterns are pathological, and that what I’ve been basically taking for granted as manageable might need to be looked at more closely and changed in some way. In other words, I guess I’m not quite as happy and well-adjusted as I thought I was. Shit.

Photo by Pixel_Addict.

The epidemic of unrequited love

August 21, 2008 at 1:07 am | Posted in relationships | Leave a comment
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Unrequited love

It amazes me how many of my friends are currently involved in an unrequited love relationship, in which they are the ones pining after emotionally unavailable jerkfaces. Is this just me – do I attract this kind into my circle? It makes sense that I would feel a sense of camaraderie with them; I’ve been susceptible to the same disease all of my adult life. For the most part I’ve weaned myself off the long-term version (my longest bout was 10 years), but the story of my love life has repeatedly featured me me throwing myself at guys who couldn’t match my commitment. Examples?

Current: I’m possibly becoming interested in a guy who is already seeing someone else and is hesitating in making legitimate space for me in his life, even though he says he wants to.

Spring 2008: Jon, a guy I’d been chasing off an on for almost a year (who originally told me that even though he had no prospects he would rather “play the field” than date me – but we should keep having sex!) finally decided he would like to try out a relationship. Within literally 3 days, he told me it was too much work for him and that he didn’t think he wanted to do it anymore. Please note that this guy lived about a thousand miles away from me at the time I started courting him, though we had just moved to the same city when we started our “relationship.”

Winter 2008: I met a guy who was crazy about me (this would be Travis). He lived 3000 miles away. He also had no prospects and hadn’t in quite a while (almost a year?). We got along fantastically and were crazy about each other. But he wanted to “play the field.” Even though I offered to move to the East Coast to be closer to him. He was just not ready to be in a relationship with any one person.

Summer 2007: Gus, the boy of the 10-year infatuation, came back in a flurry of toxic romanticism to try one last time to make things work. We had already broken up (fled from each other, really) at least four times by then. He arrived for a two-week visit (again, he lived 3000 miles away); afterward he stopsped returning my calls. Finally I called to break up with him since he didn’t have the balls to do it, and he confessed that he simply wasn’t ready to uproot his life to be with me. Never mind that his life at that moment consisted of trimming hedges professionally and occupying his childhood bedroom in his parents’ house. (Note that almost exactly one year later he called me to say that he was afraid he had made a terrible mistake and he hoped he hadn’t lost me forever. We can all see where this is going.)

Spring 2007: I started an intense romantic relationship with a guy who initially was all about sharing a life and being completely open. Within two months he announced he wanted to move three states over, and knew there was no way I could join him because I have commitments where I lived. He begged me, though, to “pretend” he wasn’t leaving until he actually moved. (I refused, thank god.)

I know I sound bitter, but honestly none of these guys were bad people. For the most part I still think fondly of them and I don’t blame any of them for how things went down. In all examples, you could say the external circumstances were just not compatible with the pursuit of a long-term relationship. But underlying that in every case was some kind of psychological resistance on the guy’s part to laying himself open. Maybe that was related only to some temporary emotional state that made it impossible at that moment to get involved. Or maybe these guys were just more willing than I was to admit that the pairing didn’t feel right on some level. That’s another problem I have: I compromise my needs and desires too much. I am always willing to work and work at a relationship even when it’s best just to let it go.

I’m inclined to believe that a lot of women have this complex of compromising, settling, taking responsibility. After all, we’re socialized to bear the burden of smoothing out the rough patches in our partnerships and marriages; we are the tenders of our relationships.

But the repeated pursuit of clearly doomed, poisonous relationships with emotionally distant partners is another beast. It requires a special brand of masochism. What is it about people like us who hurt themselves this way? A few theories have floated through my head over the past several years.

We’re reenacting a childhood trauma. Having a father who neglected or abandoned us seems to be a common theme. Maybe we’re unconsciously seeking out people like our dads (who were themselves emotionally unavailable) in an attempt to create a different ending to the story. But this is a generous interpretation. Are we really trying to do things differently? Maybe we’re just compulsively replaying the event in our minds and our lives because we want to try to make sense of it. And maybe, anyway, we’re giving ourselves too much credit by thinking we might be able to do things differently – after all, the only model we have represents failure.

We are, ourselves, emotionally unavailable. Finding a partner who mirrors our own defect allows us to then blame him for holding back, when in fact if we were with someone who didn’t have this problem, we would be the ones shutting down or running away.

We don’t really want a relationship right now. Slightly different from the above possibility, maybe we are not entirely committed to the idea of getting serious with anyone, so we naturally draw in a partner who is equally ambivalent. Since this isn’t pathological, if we were to discover that we wholeheartedly wanted to be in a serious relationship, we would find ourselves with a compatible partner. (I actually shared this thought with a friend who was going through a period of meeting a lot of guys who wanted sex but nothing serious. She had convinced herself she was all right with this, but when I questioned it, she relented. I suggested she write out exactly and honestly what it was that she wanted in a relationship. Within a couple of weeks, she met a man who was completely smitten with her from the beginning; they got married last summer. Aww.)

All of these theories revolve around the central idea that in some way we are lying to ourselves about what we’re doing, what we want and/or what we’re capable of. There is nothing for it, really, except to perform the arduous task of reflection upon our deepest desires and fears, and try to exorcise our own demons. This is a great example of why I think having a therapist can be such a gift. It’s often much too difficult to see our own behaviors objectively, and it’s rare for our friends to have the insight and detachment to be able to guide us consistently. Moreover, it can be very difficult for us to believe even our best friends when they try to tell us how we’re hurting ourselves and how we might stop. We have so much invested in these compulsive patterns of behavior. I think for many of us it has become a part of our identity, this special kind of burning agony that is the mark of unrequited love. Dismantling that identification often requires the help of a professional.

If that is not a practical option, then at the very least, women with this affliction need to read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women who Run with the Wolves. Seriously. It will change your life. Do it.

Then come back here to discuss.

Photo by Scented_mirror.

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