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.