Oh, the wonders of Skype. From my vantage point here in the Land of Israel, I had a therapy session with my extremely well-meaning but very Catholic psychologist. When I’m in America, the cultural disconnect is clear but not insurmountable; here in Israel, where nuances of Jewish life saturate every word, every expression, and every second word in regular English conversation turns out to be Ivrit (Hebrew) anyway….it was difficult.
Im kol zot (oh sorry…”even so”) it was a good conversation.
If you have been following my blog you will know that my “About Me” section talks about my inability to form lasting relationships due to my injured nervous system. Or something like that.
And you might recall that over the past few months I’ve written about a Beloved who loved me not merely in spite of who I am, but because of who I am.
That was great. Amazing. Wonderful.
He came to see me in America for a week. It was fantastic.
Then I went to see him in Israel (which, by the way, is really my home). And the house of cards came tumbling down.
It wasn’t real. It was an illusion. It was everything I hoped it wouldn’t be.
I’m not going to go into details. It’s not worth the aggravation or the worry that he will see it (he reads my blog from time to time) and cause trouble for me in one way or another.
This blog entry is really about the conversation with my therapist, anyway.
We talked about my deep woundedness, and the fact that I was wounded as a baby, and then continuously until I left my parents’ house. And then the comparatively subtle wounding morphed into the gross, large-scale wounding, as I turned into a street kid and learned to barter sex for food, shelter, drugs, companionship: all the necessary things of life, I got by trading sexual favors.
Heck, even music lessons. One of the most horrendous rapes of my life happened with an Irish flute player who had been teaching me the fine points of Irish flute ornamental notes when he reached over and grabbed me and….not here, I won’t write that here. It had been understood that I would pay him in sex, but he wanted what he wanted, wanted it now, and it wasn’t what I was planning to give him, or would have wanted to give anyone else, for that matter.
So the question is, am I too wounded to be able to identify a “normal” person? I mean, as a potential mate?
Is that why all the people who are attractive and attracted to me turn out, sooner or later, to be violent, manipulative, coercive, egotistical maniacs?
Do I attract them because of my woundedness? Am I like a child sex abuse victim, overly seductive beyond their years, wearing their only means of surviving their childhood like a tight red dress and spike heels?
Unfortunately, my psychologist’s answer was in the affirmative.
Are there people who are too wounded to be able to have a healthy life partner relationship? Am I one of them? At this point, I rather think so. I think I never developed the antennas that tell you whether people are safe or dangerous. My life as a child prostitiute (let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?) put the final nail in the coffin of my childhood of emotional and verbal abuse.
I’ve been in therapy now for 28 years. Continuously. I’ve done lots and lots of special therapies like Neurolinguistic Programming, a special acupuncture treatment that drives out inner dragons, Rolfing, etc. etc. and listen, what it boils down to is that I lack the templates for normal relationship. All of my relationship templates are for “predator,” “drop-kick,” “sucker punch,” “egomaniac,” “narcissistic asshole,” and things like that.
True, I am in the acute wound-licking stage of my most recent failure. It’s especially painful because I spent the previous seven years in celibacy, hoping to erase the previous templates and build new healthy ones. Not a chance. This one turned out to be a screaming asshole.
There is good news, though. I didn’t stick around for it. I gave him twelve days to straighten out his act. Things only became more scary and heading towards violence. So I left. And I have not answered his emails, or any requests for contact.
Sigh.
