I'm Gonna Sing So You Can Hear, I'm Gonna Sing Away Your Fear, I'm Gonna Rock You To Sleep, A Sound Of Trumpets
--"A Call to Arms", Oh Laura
I was trying to interest Epcot in watching In Treatment the other day. I figured, of anyone I know, she's had the most training and the most extensive background in dealing withe people's problems. I figured the show would be right up her alley. That led us to talking about my history with being treated (namely, that I don't have much of one) and her asking why is it that I went for those three sessions when I did. I honestly didn't know what to tell her.
What I find odd, now that I think about it, is why I felt compelled to go after breaking up with Tara and not anybody else. I mean--there's Tara, who I went out with for a little over year. Yet I got shaken up enough after that break-up to seek counseling. And then you have people like Breanne, who I've had possibly the most fights with, and DeAnn, who hands-down I had the most knock-down drag-out fights with (not to mention the most physical altercations with). What was it about Tara that made me believe I couldn't handle sorting through the fallout on my own and what was it about everyone else that made me think that it wasn't bad enough to ask for assistance? What makes Tara so special. She wasn't hard to get along with. She wasn't cantankerous. She had an altogether pleasant personality most of the time. Yet something about losing her made me seriously tank the next few months before getting help. I stopped eating for days at a time. I missed like 80% of my classes for the next two months. I would take drives every night just so I wasn't tempted to call her or lay there late at night, hoping she would call me.
However, as far as break-ups go, it was relatively painless. I didn't have to see her everyday. There wasn't the slightest bit of vindictiveness on either one of our parts. Yes, there was that whole snafu in Philadelphia, where she basically ditched me for three days, but that was just as much my fault as hers. Honestly, of anyone I've ever gone out with and subsequently broken up with, she's the only one I still look back upon with any sort of fondness.
Yet for three hours over the span of three weeks I momentarily felt enough resentment to blather on in detail to a psychologist in Arcadia because I honestly felt like I was at my wit's end.
The only thing I could come up with is she warranted professional analysis for two reasons.
One, she's the first girl that ever officially broke up with me rather than drift away, let the relationship slide, or otherwise passive aggressively break-up with me. I don't know if it's actually true because I'm sure the words were said before me, but in those instances I think it was mutually agreed upon, but Tara is the first girl I believe that wanted to break up with me that I didn't want to break up with. You could kind of lump Jina in the same type of predicament, but in that case she never wanted to get a relationship started and told me no right from the get-go. It's one thing to end things when both people want to walk away. It's another thing entirely when one wants to go and the other wants to stay.
Two, she's one of only a handful of girls that I actually went out with for more than six months. Maybe it's only a number. Maybe I had some other relationships that might be lumped into full-blown boyfriend/girlfriend material, but it never starts being real to me until the relationship hits that six months plateau. I've gone out with exactly four women for longer than six months and one of them doesn't even count because I still to this day can't place a date on when we exactly started going out and when we exactly stopped. In that instance I'm doubly screwed because not only do I not have a sense of closure, but I never had a real sense of beginning either. That just sort of happened. However, Tara, I know exactly when we started going out and when exactly we stopped. That made a difference in why it hurt so much for so long.
It wasn't like DeAnn where I had three years to see the writing on the wall. It wasn't like we'd been fighting the whole time. To me it still seems like we had about nine great months that culminated in one bad weekend, after which we broke up. I still can't really do the math on the whys and hows. That was the bulk of my trying to make sense of the whole affair, the unfairness of the situation. I mean--with DeAnn and the others I can remember the fights. I can remember the issues we seemed to tussle about. I can remember every time I raised a hand to DeAnn or threatened to crash the car with us in it. I can remember every time I bullied Breanne into doing what I said, regardless of her emotional state. I can remember every time I took advantage of her age and inexperience to win an argument. I can remember with Ilessa all the shouting matches in the car where I just wanted to strand her out at Dodger Stadium or wherever we happened to be. But I can't remember a single fucking fight I had with Tara before that fateful weekend.
One of the first things I told my doctor was that with Tara it felt like I had lost a fight I didn't even know I was fighting. He then asked me if it would have made a difference if I had known she had doubts. I told him it would have made a big difference. You can't fix a problem you can't see.
That's when he told me that maybe it was the not seeing that was my problem.
In a sense, that's true and that's what make Tara's case special. Everyone else I could see the conflicts, the differences in temperament. I've always been really adept at pushing the right buttons to get someone angry or to get someone to agree with me, if it was important for them to agree with me. I might have lost a step or two in the last eight years since I broke up with DeAnn, but on two separate occasions I was told I had a nasty habit of employing guilt-tripping as my mine method of fighting my battles. DeAnn even went so far as to call my style of persuasion "mental abuse". But it was Breanne who put it more succinctly. When I'm upset, when I'm fighting with someone, I've always played the part of mental terrorist. There's a huge part of me that identifies with the tactic of "if I'm going down, then we're all going down." I don't just threaten it; I act on it. In my years of dating, having relationships, I've used every trick in the book. I've caused scenes in public, ambushed people at work or at their home, I've stopped the car on the side of the ride, I've physically restrained people from leaving, I've pushed people down, I've hurt myself to get people to listen, and I've even threatened and made valiant attempts at killing myself. My thinking was I needed to do whatever it took, to not only get someone to listen to me, but to agree with me. And when I say "people" and "someone," I'm talking about women I supposedly loved.
I've spoken many times about how bad of a temper I used to (still do?) have. What I haven't spoken all that often about is the other personality flaw I have, which is an utter lack of regard for anybody else's rules but mine. It's hard to show restraint or maturity, when I've spent a great number of years fighting against playing by concepts of goodness, decency, and legality. I've always preached doing whatever you wanted if it makes you happy. The unfortunate corollary to this philosophy is that I tend t employ the same disregard for playing by the rules when it comes to making other people unhappy. It's one thing Breanne and I share, nobody can tell me what to do. Where we differ is that I extend that to situations where people are telling me to stop hurting them, stop making them cry, stop tearing them down. Even in the midst of breaking someone down to the core, I have to be honest, it still annoys me a little when somebody insists that I should stop... and especially try to use arguments of conscience and taking the moral high ground. I get into a zone where when I want to hurt someone, I don't want to be told to stop. I don't want to be told to calm down. I want to do what I want to do, damn the consequences.
And that's what was different about Tara.
I never reached those crazy times of seething rage. I can remember her agreeing with the majority of what I had to say. I can remember her agreeing with the majority of what I wanted the both of us to do. It was perfect. It's what I thought I wanted. As I came to find out later thanks to many a long chat with Miss Brandy. It's the classic fantasy of a domineering personality type. Brandy asked me all those questions. Have you ever said to anyone, "I wouldn't have to hurt you if you just agreed with me," or "tell me the answer I want to hear or we'll go all night at this"? And I honestly have. I've caught myself more than once thinking that situations would be easier if I could just have my way.
Well, I had my way with Tara. She didn't fight back at all. She never saw the complete darker side to me.
And that's what my doctor told me by that last session. I wasn't upset that she left me. I was upset that she left what I thought was the "good" me. I was upset she found fault with the person who was ostensibly on his best behavior. It's one thing to want to run away from the beast; that's understandable. But when a girl rejects you when all you've showed her is the princely side, then it really puts a knot in your rope. It didn't make sense to me. Not at all. After all, if I couldn't sustain a relationship when I thought I was being nothing but a perfect companion, then what hope did I have in being with someone long-term once they saw the other side of me.
I mean--granted, the worst times weren't had until after Tara had dumped me. I never had to drive someone to the hospital because I'd hurt them so bad in a fight at home until a couple of years later. I never had to hear about making someone so physically afraid to talk to me from someone's mother until a couple of years later. But even with Tara the signs were there. My doctor told me she probably picked up the dangerous aspects to my anger without actually having to see them and she was probably protecting herself preemptively, before she got hurt. I couldn't blame her for that. I couldn't blame her at all for that. When I recall all the damage I've done to people I supposedly cared about, Tara was lucky to get out when she did.
And yet it's the people who stuck around after the mighty blows were struck that I'm still on good terms with today. I hardly ever think about those times of ugliness now if only because the people who really cared about me, stuck through them. Even after she called the cops on me because she was afraid of what I'd do, even after I'd embarrassed her probably dozens of times, even after putting her through all this "mental abuse", DeAnn still hung by me for three more years after we broke up. And it wasn't because she thought I could change. It was because to her, the good aspects of what I had to offer outweighed the bad. Or as Breanne explained to her mother about why she stayed friends with me even after basically using her as psychological punching bag when I was just hating the world, "You don't throw away the cat just because it scratches you a couple of times." I don't know if it's true or not--but she says that it's a balancing act. The times and ways I've made her into a better person far outweigh the times and ways I've left her life worse because of me.
Bre's had it the worse. She's had to listen to my stories about absolutely terrorizing people at one time or another, and she's beared the brunt of it as well. She might not have gotten the worst of it. She might be the only person I actually can catch myself before it gets out of hand. But she's had to deal with the most occurrences. If the DeAnn blow-ups were like huge earthquakes that came sporadically and the Ilessa blow-ups were like tornados touching down and staying for awhile, then the Breanne blow-ups were (and are) like winter storms; they don't do as much damage, but they're constant, and they can still kill you all the same. And I think it's worse with her too because it's like I know she's not going anywhere, which just makes it easier for me to want to hurt her more. I want to drive her away. I want to get her mad when we fight because it's almost like she can take it. It's like a boxer who's used to knocking people out with one punch meeting an opponent who can actually take a licking. It just make him want to hit harder because the usual stuff isn't working. I don't go into details about all the fights we've had, but we've had some huge ones where it doesn't matter how much I say I take it all back. The words are out there and they'll never be reined in again. Yet she stays because every year she knows me, we fight less often and less fiercely. She stays because I've been steadily been getting better on my own--thanks to Rachel and thanks to her, actually.
I've apologized to everyone. I've made up for mistakes. I've done a lot of soul-searching. And, yes, I think I've changed post-2000 as compared to pre-2000, but it doesn't matter. I'll never get the stain out of my soul for each and every time I've hurt someone because I wanted to. I'll never empty my head of the idea that, at my core, I'm just not a nice person to be around. I'll never fix myself enough to be with anyone worth being with.
Yet those are all concerns I deal with every day. Those are the problems I've accepted will by my lifelong burden to work on.
Tara was different. Tara was my one shot at playing it cool, playing it nice, and it still not working out. That's a puzzle I just needed some help solving. She's the one girl I don't think I did anything wrong with and still manage to fuck it up. Indeed, it's still a mystery I've come to accept will always be there, but I've accepted nonetheless.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
I was trying to interest Epcot in watching In Treatment the other day. I figured, of anyone I know, she's had the most training and the most extensive background in dealing withe people's problems. I figured the show would be right up her alley. That led us to talking about my history with being treated (namely, that I don't have much of one) and her asking why is it that I went for those three sessions when I did. I honestly didn't know what to tell her.What I find odd, now that I think about it, is why I felt compelled to go after breaking up with Tara and not anybody else. I mean--there's Tara, who I went out with for a little over year. Yet I got shaken up enough after that break-up to seek counseling. And then you have people like Breanne, who I've had possibly the most fights with, and DeAnn, who hands-down I had the most knock-down drag-out fights with (not to mention the most physical altercations with). What was it about Tara that made me believe I couldn't handle sorting through the fallout on my own and what was it about everyone else that made me think that it wasn't bad enough to ask for assistance? What makes Tara so special. She wasn't hard to get along with. She wasn't cantankerous. She had an altogether pleasant personality most of the time. Yet something about losing her made me seriously tank the next few months before getting help. I stopped eating for days at a time. I missed like 80% of my classes for the next two months. I would take drives every night just so I wasn't tempted to call her or lay there late at night, hoping she would call me.
However, as far as break-ups go, it was relatively painless. I didn't have to see her everyday. There wasn't the slightest bit of vindictiveness on either one of our parts. Yes, there was that whole snafu in Philadelphia, where she basically ditched me for three days, but that was just as much my fault as hers. Honestly, of anyone I've ever gone out with and subsequently broken up with, she's the only one I still look back upon with any sort of fondness.
Yet for three hours over the span of three weeks I momentarily felt enough resentment to blather on in detail to a psychologist in Arcadia because I honestly felt like I was at my wit's end.
The only thing I could come up with is she warranted professional analysis for two reasons.
One, she's the first girl that ever officially broke up with me rather than drift away, let the relationship slide, or otherwise passive aggressively break-up with me. I don't know if it's actually true because I'm sure the words were said before me, but in those instances I think it was mutually agreed upon, but Tara is the first girl I believe that wanted to break up with me that I didn't want to break up with. You could kind of lump Jina in the same type of predicament, but in that case she never wanted to get a relationship started and told me no right from the get-go. It's one thing to end things when both people want to walk away. It's another thing entirely when one wants to go and the other wants to stay.
Two, she's one of only a handful of girls that I actually went out with for more than six months. Maybe it's only a number. Maybe I had some other relationships that might be lumped into full-blown boyfriend/girlfriend material, but it never starts being real to me until the relationship hits that six months plateau. I've gone out with exactly four women for longer than six months and one of them doesn't even count because I still to this day can't place a date on when we exactly started going out and when we exactly stopped. In that instance I'm doubly screwed because not only do I not have a sense of closure, but I never had a real sense of beginning either. That just sort of happened. However, Tara, I know exactly when we started going out and when exactly we stopped. That made a difference in why it hurt so much for so long.
It wasn't like DeAnn where I had three years to see the writing on the wall. It wasn't like we'd been fighting the whole time. To me it still seems like we had about nine great months that culminated in one bad weekend, after which we broke up. I still can't really do the math on the whys and hows. That was the bulk of my trying to make sense of the whole affair, the unfairness of the situation. I mean--with DeAnn and the others I can remember the fights. I can remember the issues we seemed to tussle about. I can remember every time I raised a hand to DeAnn or threatened to crash the car with us in it. I can remember every time I bullied Breanne into doing what I said, regardless of her emotional state. I can remember every time I took advantage of her age and inexperience to win an argument. I can remember with Ilessa all the shouting matches in the car where I just wanted to strand her out at Dodger Stadium or wherever we happened to be. But I can't remember a single fucking fight I had with Tara before that fateful weekend.
One of the first things I told my doctor was that with Tara it felt like I had lost a fight I didn't even know I was fighting. He then asked me if it would have made a difference if I had known she had doubts. I told him it would have made a big difference. You can't fix a problem you can't see.
That's when he told me that maybe it was the not seeing that was my problem.
In a sense, that's true and that's what make Tara's case special. Everyone else I could see the conflicts, the differences in temperament. I've always been really adept at pushing the right buttons to get someone angry or to get someone to agree with me, if it was important for them to agree with me. I might have lost a step or two in the last eight years since I broke up with DeAnn, but on two separate occasions I was told I had a nasty habit of employing guilt-tripping as my mine method of fighting my battles. DeAnn even went so far as to call my style of persuasion "mental abuse". But it was Breanne who put it more succinctly. When I'm upset, when I'm fighting with someone, I've always played the part of mental terrorist. There's a huge part of me that identifies with the tactic of "if I'm going down, then we're all going down." I don't just threaten it; I act on it. In my years of dating, having relationships, I've used every trick in the book. I've caused scenes in public, ambushed people at work or at their home, I've stopped the car on the side of the ride, I've physically restrained people from leaving, I've pushed people down, I've hurt myself to get people to listen, and I've even threatened and made valiant attempts at killing myself. My thinking was I needed to do whatever it took, to not only get someone to listen to me, but to agree with me. And when I say "people" and "someone," I'm talking about women I supposedly loved.
I've spoken many times about how bad of a temper I used to (still do?) have. What I haven't spoken all that often about is the other personality flaw I have, which is an utter lack of regard for anybody else's rules but mine. It's hard to show restraint or maturity, when I've spent a great number of years fighting against playing by concepts of goodness, decency, and legality. I've always preached doing whatever you wanted if it makes you happy. The unfortunate corollary to this philosophy is that I tend t employ the same disregard for playing by the rules when it comes to making other people unhappy. It's one thing Breanne and I share, nobody can tell me what to do. Where we differ is that I extend that to situations where people are telling me to stop hurting them, stop making them cry, stop tearing them down. Even in the midst of breaking someone down to the core, I have to be honest, it still annoys me a little when somebody insists that I should stop... and especially try to use arguments of conscience and taking the moral high ground. I get into a zone where when I want to hurt someone, I don't want to be told to stop. I don't want to be told to calm down. I want to do what I want to do, damn the consequences.
And that's what was different about Tara.
I never reached those crazy times of seething rage. I can remember her agreeing with the majority of what I had to say. I can remember her agreeing with the majority of what I wanted the both of us to do. It was perfect. It's what I thought I wanted. As I came to find out later thanks to many a long chat with Miss Brandy. It's the classic fantasy of a domineering personality type. Brandy asked me all those questions. Have you ever said to anyone, "I wouldn't have to hurt you if you just agreed with me," or "tell me the answer I want to hear or we'll go all night at this"? And I honestly have. I've caught myself more than once thinking that situations would be easier if I could just have my way.
Well, I had my way with Tara. She didn't fight back at all. She never saw the complete darker side to me.
And that's what my doctor told me by that last session. I wasn't upset that she left me. I was upset that she left what I thought was the "good" me. I was upset she found fault with the person who was ostensibly on his best behavior. It's one thing to want to run away from the beast; that's understandable. But when a girl rejects you when all you've showed her is the princely side, then it really puts a knot in your rope. It didn't make sense to me. Not at all. After all, if I couldn't sustain a relationship when I thought I was being nothing but a perfect companion, then what hope did I have in being with someone long-term once they saw the other side of me.
I mean--granted, the worst times weren't had until after Tara had dumped me. I never had to drive someone to the hospital because I'd hurt them so bad in a fight at home until a couple of years later. I never had to hear about making someone so physically afraid to talk to me from someone's mother until a couple of years later. But even with Tara the signs were there. My doctor told me she probably picked up the dangerous aspects to my anger without actually having to see them and she was probably protecting herself preemptively, before she got hurt. I couldn't blame her for that. I couldn't blame her at all for that. When I recall all the damage I've done to people I supposedly cared about, Tara was lucky to get out when she did.
And yet it's the people who stuck around after the mighty blows were struck that I'm still on good terms with today. I hardly ever think about those times of ugliness now if only because the people who really cared about me, stuck through them. Even after she called the cops on me because she was afraid of what I'd do, even after I'd embarrassed her probably dozens of times, even after putting her through all this "mental abuse", DeAnn still hung by me for three more years after we broke up. And it wasn't because she thought I could change. It was because to her, the good aspects of what I had to offer outweighed the bad. Or as Breanne explained to her mother about why she stayed friends with me even after basically using her as psychological punching bag when I was just hating the world, "You don't throw away the cat just because it scratches you a couple of times." I don't know if it's true or not--but she says that it's a balancing act. The times and ways I've made her into a better person far outweigh the times and ways I've left her life worse because of me.
Bre's had it the worse. She's had to listen to my stories about absolutely terrorizing people at one time or another, and she's beared the brunt of it as well. She might not have gotten the worst of it. She might be the only person I actually can catch myself before it gets out of hand. But she's had to deal with the most occurrences. If the DeAnn blow-ups were like huge earthquakes that came sporadically and the Ilessa blow-ups were like tornados touching down and staying for awhile, then the Breanne blow-ups were (and are) like winter storms; they don't do as much damage, but they're constant, and they can still kill you all the same. And I think it's worse with her too because it's like I know she's not going anywhere, which just makes it easier for me to want to hurt her more. I want to drive her away. I want to get her mad when we fight because it's almost like she can take it. It's like a boxer who's used to knocking people out with one punch meeting an opponent who can actually take a licking. It just make him want to hit harder because the usual stuff isn't working. I don't go into details about all the fights we've had, but we've had some huge ones where it doesn't matter how much I say I take it all back. The words are out there and they'll never be reined in again. Yet she stays because every year she knows me, we fight less often and less fiercely. She stays because I've been steadily been getting better on my own--thanks to Rachel and thanks to her, actually.
I've apologized to everyone. I've made up for mistakes. I've done a lot of soul-searching. And, yes, I think I've changed post-2000 as compared to pre-2000, but it doesn't matter. I'll never get the stain out of my soul for each and every time I've hurt someone because I wanted to. I'll never empty my head of the idea that, at my core, I'm just not a nice person to be around. I'll never fix myself enough to be with anyone worth being with.
Yet those are all concerns I deal with every day. Those are the problems I've accepted will by my lifelong burden to work on.
Tara was different. Tara was my one shot at playing it cool, playing it nice, and it still not working out. That's a puzzle I just needed some help solving. She's the one girl I don't think I did anything wrong with and still manage to fuck it up. Indeed, it's still a mystery I've come to accept will always be there, but I've accepted nonetheless.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Labels: assistance, Oh Laura, relationships, strength, therapy
posted by mojo shivers @ 12:52 AM
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