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?

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'.