You hit a point where a huge gap widens between you and your friends because they don’t understand why you keep going back.
How do you say what you know.
That there’s an even bigger gap beneath your feet that keeps widening when you try to step away.
That the hope that he’ll come correct is all that separates you from the little girl whose parents could abuse her physically sexually emotionally and then act like nothing had happened.
Because if you can’t rewrite the story then you’re still that little girl.
Because if your love means so little that he won’t change his ways when they’re hurting you, then you don’t matter at all.
“It’s not just an ego blow for you,” my therapist says slowly. “You experience it as a full erasure of self.”
I’ll go for years without falling in love and during those times people who haven’t seen me in a relationship will wonder why I’m so shut down. I’ll say, “You don’t want to see my romances.” But they never believe it until they see it.
And then a gap widens because I’m not the strong insightful woman they thought I was.
I’m a desperate, frightened child.
I’m an addict.
My dearest friends have loved me through all of it, and it has healed me the little bit that I have healed. But even now, the best I can do is cut the relationship off the first time I get that Child feeling.
That feeling that he’ll never privilege anything the way he privileges his own issues insecurities ego schedule agenda appetites.
That he’ll do anything to keep it all about him.
Gaslight. Abandon. Play victim. Dissociate. Triangulate. Belittle. Attack.
Once a boyfriend dosed my pizza with LSD.
Another one hacked this website.
More than a few have hit me.
Most have cheated.
All have lied.
A few have raped.
And yet.
Most of the time, the drug of our connection is too intoxicating to resist.
The chemistry of compatible dysfunction is really quite profound.
So it usually takes them not coming back anymore for it to really end.
Which is to say, once I fall off the wagon, I fall hard.
I’m in between a rock and a hard place, you see. I can’t pretend that a narcissist isn’t a narcissist anymore, but I’m not attracted to anyone else. The imprinting starts so young. So the affair begins, blooms, blows up–God knows I’m not perfect either–and when I am inevitably left by the side of the road, I revert to the child still weeping because she knows.
She knows her parents are not safe people.
And she knows she has nowhere else to go.
I’m 47, almost 48, and that child still runs the show when it comes to matters of the heart. I don’t know how to heal her. I’ve been in therapy for nearly 30 years and she still runs the show once I fall in love.
Because it’s hard to give therapy to a child.
And her pain is mine and it is primal and it runs the fucking show.
If I learned anything this Venus retrograde, I have learned this.
The only kind of relationships in my life that last are my friendships, and my love affairs threaten even those.
But the best ones last.
And so do I.