Psychoanalysis

 As the time since my husband's death has rolled on, I have noticed a range of emotions. Sometimes, I am functioning quite well, but other times I notice a cascade of emotions. I wouldn't say that they topple me over. I don't lie in bed or find I can't cope with the many challenges that I have inherited. I get on with it.

Yet, I do notice that I am going through some sort of change, or transformation, or growth, or maybe it's regression. Whatever it is, it's undeniable. 

I found myself tangoing with the hypnotherapist I have used, sort of banging on his door seeing if he had a fix, and he doesn't have a fix. It's far too existential for hypnotherapy. It's not a structural sort of problem - like, add exercise to your life, or find a new man using this particular dating site. That stuff is well intended but it's not for now.

For now, is dealing with big emotions and violent dreams and thoughts that feel very true and unexpressed, and that don't have a loving or accepting component at all.

In fact, I have found myself wrestling with a thought. It's this: I worked ultra hard to give what has happened in my life the nicest packaging in every way. The goal was unconditional love, forgiveness, kindness, good intention. All that. 

However, what is really happening under the hood is much more vehemently judgmental, unforgiving, and carries the sentiment of 'What the f**k just happened?'

In that state, you can only move on so fast. It's not the time to date since I found that I was just so disappointed in the men I was dating. I had so little patience with them. I didn't express that. They didn't know until I said, 'thank you, but no thank you' but under the hood, I was thinking, 'There's no way I am listening to this shit for the rest of my life.' I was and am just so picky about it all, far preferring my own company.

So, hypnotherapy and hypnosis were no good for now. It was too...prescriptive. I don't want a prescription, somebody else's version of the 'solution'. 

I read a bit and located a psychoanalyst. Ahhhh, exactly right. I wanted to talk and I wanted someone to listen as their job. Perfecto. That, I am happy to pay for.

Bring me your dreams, your daydreams, the thoughts you don't speak, she says. Brilliant. That's exactly what I want to do.

I have never felt before in my whole life this urgent need to express myself so freely and I am going to enjoy every second of this process.

The story goes that eventually the patient runs out of things to say and it's what they say after that to fill the silence, something that can't be rehearsed, where the real juice is. Right now, I don't know what that is, but I am sure it is sitting in the subconscious awaiting it's turn.

Oh, thank you Lacan. Thank you for your invention. At last. Let the chips roll where they may.

Dating apps

 A couple of months ago I dated an older man. We had eight dates until, frustrated, I explained that I didn't think we had a romantic future together. He was an extremely polite and respectful person, and on one level I enjoyed his company and conversation, but it was impossible to not notice that his greeting and goodbye kiss was more like a peck. 

I think it was the third date when he asked me if I liked to hold hands and we started doing that. However, it got weird. Not only did he want to hold hands at times when it was comfortable to do so, but pretty much all the time. What this seemed to do was act as a shield against further intimacy. You can't go in for a hug or to wrap yourself around someone on the couch if you are sitting side by side holding hands. I would think in my head about what to do in moments, but nothing felt like it would be generously received. It felt like we were two islands and the mass of water between us would keep us that way.

I was sure that he wasn't sure about me because when I tried to bring up my needs as a woman, to be in the presence of a man who liked to assert control for our mutual benefit, he completely closed down. This was definitely off putting to him. An academic all his life, I think he was living almost entirely in his head. 

It gets worse. His wife had died suddenly 14 years ago, and he was devoted to her memory. She had most certainly achieved sainthood in his mind. After that, he married and that failed and he almost married but lived with another woman, and she left. My nail lady told me to run. It was impossible to compete with a dead wife who had died young.

All well and good. However, he wanted very much to stay friends and at the time it seemed a harmless request. For the last two months, he would wish me good morning and sometimes say something that prompted a little conversation. That seemed fine.

I had met him on a platform where I could see he often went, even when he was dating me, so I recently said 'goodbye' on that platform. He asked why I did that. Well, I explained, we text.

Then, he started to tell me about this new "lady" he was seeing for coffee and gallery dates, like we used to do. And then it felt weird. He was trying to set up a time to see a play together or have lunch as friends and supposedly he would tell me about this new lady and so on.

A little alarm bell went off. I don't mean to downplay all the horrors that are happening to people right now, but I haven't had wonderful things happen in my life lately and I have a responsibility to take care of myself. This friendship wasn't doing me any favours.

I suggested via text that he allowed this new relationship to blossom and that our friendship was secondary to that, but he argued for his continuance. I really didn't want that. I am trying here to do things that are right for me rather than right for someone else. I am trying not to let abundant empathy stand in the way of good sense. I wrestled with the thoughts for at least a minute until I texted, 'Why don't you check in in a couple of weeks?' This, I felt, was better than his reliance on me to interact on a daily basis.

So, what's this all about, I ask myself. He makes me feel weird. He makes me feel like there is something wrong with me that I want intimacy, that I would like to feel some (gentle and not so gentle) control. 

I think I have been on the wrong dating app. If that's your proclivity that app is not where you are going to go looking for a submissive. Yes, I have strong tendencies towards independence but in the hands of a dominant man, that tends to take a back seat. I want that.

Healthy relationships

 Over time, if you keep track of your behaviour, patterns may emerge. In my case, I have tended towards attachments that simply were not in my Highest Good. Something made them feel good at times and at other times, they felt quite toxic. I was often off balance.

It isn't all that complicated at the heart of the matter. My parents being busy, self-absorbed, loving but at a distance, led me to chase love, but in all the wrong places because we tend to repeat these patterns unwittingly.

This blended with an early private life where my mind had co-mingled love with strict discipline, perhaps a scene in a movie I had watched, or a book I had read. Who knows.

This meant, in practical terms, that when I was in touch with someone who gave me intermittent reinforcement together with access to that dynamic in my fantasies, this became a 'hook' for my desire to feel love and to be pleasing; for the slot machine to throw out a random symbolic gold coin or two; to feel affection.

A situation where one is in a trauma bond with someone sometimes feels abusive but often not. The mind has a way of rationalizing things, especially if the coins were given out early. The mind says, 'it happened once, that means it can happen again'. I have written about it before in the sense of the fly being caught in the spider's web and when I wrote that, it felt erotic, whereas what I write about today isn't in the least erotic. Rather, it feels like shame.

Shame is the trickiest emotion I think I have experienced. There's a part of the brain working hard to protect you from shame until, in my case, I came head on to the feeling and registered it as just that. It started with a feeling of disgust when listening to a podcast hosted by a Dominant and then the deepest and most uncomfortable feeling of shame overtook me. What the hell had happened to me to have had any other feeling than this deeply uncomfortable feeling when listening to comments about submissive women that sounded harsh?

Even since then, my brain still asks me to use certain dark fantasies as a way to relax. I am well aware of the dichotomy of these two experiences. I do not berate myself for that but rather offer myself a great deal of self-compassion. My brain is wired now in a certain way and only time and effort will rewire it.

I can only speak for myself, and as had happened once before, when the drama and hurt of the association flooded me as it did when listening to this podcast, the decision to remove myself entirely was made quickly and almost effortlessly.  

I don't want to use jargon, but it felt like the Protector that was not allowing me to feel the shame, felt I was ready to withstand the emotional pain of that and stood back. The truth was revealed to me. I needed to move on now with self-compassion and I needed to ensure that any future associations, friendships, therapists or lovers were entirely healthy relationships for me. 

I needed to choose with full awareness, and I needed to note that healthy relationships don't always, or maybe never, have the zing of something that could light up the part of the brain that responds to intermittent reinforcement, or a power dynamic that isn't based on love and respect and taking into account the high likelihood that someone with childhood trauma could be retraumatised. Anyone less than a person academically highly trained to understand the effects of childhood trauma, attachment styes and a propensity to be susceptible to intermittent reinforcement could potentially do more harm.

I think I will have to look out for this for the rest of my days. There's a bit of post trauma sitting in the wiring of the brain and some susceptibility to a trauma bond, but also, I have grown older and wiser, and I am my own best friend now. I do not foresee this happening again.

Here Comes the Sun

 A few months after my husband's death, on a lonely night, I joined a dating site. To be honest, I brought into the hype that it was free, wrote a profile in minutes, selected some photos and didn't think much more about it. I only actually realized that it was 'up' when a few men sent me a message and/or 'like'. I couldn't read the messages until I paid, and I guess curiosity got to me, as they no doubt hoped it would, and I paid the fees to join.

I went on a few dates. I am not sure what was pushing me forward like this, but I wasn't really afraid, or shy, or uncomfortable. You could say I was 'discerning'. They all seemed decent people and I had checked that out as best one can with conversation prior to actually meeting them.

The first one was a nice guy but there was absolutely no attraction on my part. His humor actually annoyed me and though he wanted to meet again, I did not. It wasn't an awful first date but there was a radar in my mind telling me not to do things that I didn't want to do. Somehow, I had developed confidence in myself. The way he acted when I said 'thank you, but no thank you' told me my instincts were right.

I met up with another fellow. He was interesting. The conversation flowed easily and we had a couple of drink and dinner dates that led to some intimacy that was not in the least unpleasant. It wasn't the intimacy but rather the way he behaved after the intimacy where my body was giving me signals that that was enough of him. I had developed this radar for detecting what was good for me and what was not. I don't know where it came from, but there was a voice inside, a sense of wisdom that was directing me away from relationships that might cause me distress, or at the least not nurture me, and back to being alone.

Being by myself really didn't bother me and I mean that. I haven't had a moment of loneliness though I have often been alone. I have done a lot of grieving. I still smother myself in a garment my husband wore, but I have not been lonely. Maybe that is because I am still in the house we shared and where we brought up the children and to that extent, it's all familiar.

I met a very nice man and we had eight dates. He was always attentive and polite, very intelligent, but my body was saying that without a sense from his body that we in some vague way 'fit', there was no future. He liked me a lot and I think he had just got to an age, maybe always was that way, where the fitting of two bodies wasn't his thing. Talking, holding hands, that was enough. I ended it and he wanted to be friends. Since we had only ever been friends, it wasn't something unreasonable, and he still wishes me a good morning; occasionally we exchange some words around a topic via text. I am far too empathic to not agree to that.

I was sent a message by a man several years older than me that officially puts him in the old category. However, he didn't look old, something he said his friends said about him, he wrote in his profile. I let it be for a few weeks. He was from a different culture than my own, I was intrigued, but I thought of it more as an interesting 'idea' than a likely match.

One day, I decided to send a 'like' back and we had a super brief exchange around the fact that we were both widows that had been in decades long marriages. He in no way hurried me but a message sent to me instead of his nephew suggesting they meet for coffee had me saying to him that even though I was the wrong recipient of the message, why not we meet for coffee too?

After that coffee and in the hours of discussion that ensued, he shared the final days of his wife's life. He had nursed her to her death, mostly alone as COVID required, since she had begged to die at home. He was emotional in telling the story and I comforted him. Some sort of soul connection had been made.

He was scheduled to go interstate, he wanted me to go too, but I said, no, he was going to see his daughter, and it was too soon, it would rattle her. But we met again for an event in his apartment building when he returned and unbeknownst to me, I felt safe enough with him to tell him a story that led to me welling up in tears. It was about my husband's reaction to a meditation we did in Bali in 2024. We were sitting side by side and I put my head on his shoulder and he comforted me.

'I'm sorry', I said softly.

In this quiet, confident, slow drawn-out way he said,

'No, you mustn't say that. Let it out.'

Something felt so right about this. It was so soon and so random, but something felt very right.

I told him a little bit about my predilections, but I chose my words carefully, needing to check in with myself about how they were coming out of my mouth.

'I appreciate polarity. I want my femininity to be met with masculinity.'

He was touching me, rubbing me slowly and sometimes arousing a part of me with a touch as light as a feather.

'I understand. But you don't want to be dominated.'

'No' I said and I meant it. Somehow, I sensed that wasn't what I wanted with this man. This was going to be an exploration of our two entities far more in a Karma Sutra kind of way.

I get the sense he instinctively understands that what I need is to go to places where my mind is at rest, like mantras, and my sense of joy is uplifted.  I had planned to take him to dinner on his birthday shortly, but he changed that to oysters at the Market and buying food to cook me a fancy dinner. 'Of course, I said, whatever you want to do on your birthday.'

It's hard to explain to the children that my soul is reaching out to another soul living here on this Earth, that it feels healing and that I am beginning to feel...happy. I haven't wanted to do that or feel that too soon, a lot of caution in my heart was there, and yet I can also feel myself opening up like a flower. Maybe it's too soon to say but I do dare to think, 'here comes the sun'.