A Revelation

So, these past couple of days have been my whirl-wind tour through the mysteries of my own attachment, or lack thereof, to the significant people in my life. This may get a wee bit technical, but I'll do my best to explain. Attachment theory simply deals with the infant's attachment to mother in the first two years of life, and posits that later relationships are seriously affected by these early infant/mother interactions. If your mother did not or was unable to care for your needs as a child, the idea is that later in life you will continue to seek after relationships to get those needs met in some way. In seeking this out, people's whose attachments didn't go so well the first time around tend to act in specific ways in their relationships because of past hurt or unmet needs.
So that's the general overview.
This all started yesterday when I was free-associating (ie., day-dreaming) in Dr. Porter's class. (Actually, all this started long before that, but this seems to me to be the best place to begin.) I was goign along, half-heartedly listening to the lecture, trying to stay awake, when I had this sudden fantasy of Dr. Porter taking me in his arms, holding me, and then taking me home to his wife and baby. (I know, this is really weird, bare with me.) Only, the thing of it was, it was Not Sexual. So, being the good little psychologist I am, I was like, what the hell is this about? (Psychologists must use swear words.) I mean, Dr. Porter's a nice guy and all, but why him and why that?
And then for the rest of the evening, it was this massive 'clicking' in my brain, with things all fitting together like crazy.
Why did I want to be held by Dr. Porter? Because I never felt emotionally held as a child. My mother was too depressed, too off in her own little world to handle my emotions; instead, I had to handle hers. From a very young age, I learned that my emotions were 'too much,' that one must not be sad or unhappy, because two people being that depressed was just too much to deal with. So, make sure everything's 'fine,' make sure it's ok, make sure you don't show too much of what's really going on! No one can really handle you, you're too much. So, please hold me, Dr. Porter, please be able to contain me, don't let me be too much for you!
Oh!, but there's more!
Why must it be a man to hold me? Because women are fundamentally unsafe. First, my mother was too fragile to deal with me, and thus when I was sad or angry around her, things quickly became much too frightening for me to handle, because she freaked out and I had to parent her and make her feel better. However, even more importantly, I was molested by a woman, and thus touch from women frightens me to the core, and my whole being screams, "Get away!" That's why it takes me Years to be comfortable with a friend giving me a hug. Add to all this mix that my father was completely unavailable to me when I was little, and you have some crazy emotional crap!
So where does Boy enter into all of this? Oh so easily.
When I found you, you were my first 'secure attachment,' the first person who ever came even remotely close to meeting all these unmet needs, screaming from inside me. The problem of it is, that once your safety and grace overcame my barriers, my needs came out like a flood which no one, or at least no person, could ever fill. I was (and am) insatiable, looking desperately again and again and again for unconditional love, acceptance, and delight. You delighted in me in a way my mother never had. And I ate it up. And I wanted more. The problem being that you couldn't give me more, because it wasn't yours to give.
And then I became bonded to you out of fear. I was desperate to keep you, so desperately afraid of rejection and abandonment. And I began to use you as well. Oooooh, I am very ashamed of that, but it's true. I couldn't make myself feel happy, so I used you as my upper, fishing for compliments, fishing for kisses. I am so sorry. I hope you can forgive me. I was so desperate, and I sucked the life out of you, sucked every bit of love and affection I could find. But my needs don't make it right.
I could never understand why I was so jealous of every girl you talked to, and why it made me so angry when you went out with your friends. Oh!, I was so bitchy in my heart! I mean, a boy needs some friends, after all! But, oh!, I felt so hurt and rejected by it because I wanted All Of You. Just the parts you should and could give me were never enough, because I was asking you to be all the love and affection and joy I had missed.
And then I worried, because I realized you couldn't meet my every need, and so I thought, oh no!, something's wrong, because I didn't realize I was trying to make you meet needs that weren't yours to fill. And so my desperate fear that I would loose you grew and grew. So I held on harder, held on more desperately, and hid many parts of myself, because I so much feared that if you saw them, you would reject me. And so in spite of my desperate desire to be close to you, I pushed you away as well because it was too frightening to have you near. (As one of my articles says, "The closer we get, the scarier it gets, so I have to avoid the closeness or the father away we get, the scarier it gets, so I have to manipulate closeness.") Push and pull, back and forth, close and near. I cant' stand to loose you, but I can't stand to have you close.
And for heaven's sake, I definitely couldn't be myself, because you'd surely reject me then.
So, things got scarier and scarier, and I needed you more, and pushed you away more, and then a scary monster reared it's ugly head: Commitment. Was I going to marry you, or not? And while the thought of losing you terrified me, the thought of getting closer terrified me more, because our relationship wasn't 'perfect,' and for heaven's sake, you weren't meeting all my needs!, all those needs that weren't yours to meet anyway. And so, finally, in a last act of desperation, I rejected you, to beat you to the punch, so that you couldn't out-and-out reject me. I did the rejecting for you.
And that, my friends, is why all that mother/infant bonding crap is so important.
And that is why you shouldn't try to get a boyfriend to meet every attachment need you've ever had in your life.
And that is why I am very sorry for how I hurt you.