Читать книгу Ready to Heal: Breaking Free of Addictive Relationships - Sarah Elisabeth Boggs - Страница 13

Heather’s parents divorced when she was a baby. She was left alone with her mother. Heather remembers being happy as a young child. She recalls her mother being sweet, safe, and soft. When Heather was four years old, however, her whole world changed. Her mother married Joe, a judge from an elite social class. Joe became the light in her mother’s life. Heather remembers long days, alone in her room, when she and her mother went to live with Joe. In therapy, she describes these childhood memories using colors: “Everything was yellow until Joe came into our lives. Then everything turned gray.”

Heather’s mother was so caught up in her new relationship that she became neglectful. Heather remembers frequently having no specific bedtimes or mealtimes. She was permitted to sit in front of the television for hours. Heather remembers falling asleep in front of the TV as a little girl, and for some reason this bothered Joe. He found her asleep, stripped her naked, and spanked her. Heather was terrified, humiliated, and confused. She doesn’t remember where her mother was when this happened, although she recalls one other time she was spanked by Joe when her mother intervened. This is the last time she remembers being hit.

Heather had frequent stomach problems as a child, so her mother and Joe took her to see a doctor. He recommended an enema. Heather remembers this humiliating experience: she was five years old, standing naked in the bathroom while her mother and Joe gave her an enema and waited for it to take effect. She felt ashamed and violated.

Heather remembers trying hard to please Joe and her mother by earning good grades in school and being a compliant, quiet child. She desperately wanted them to love her and include her. As a child, she loved to read. She escaped into fairy tales, dreaming that she was Cinderella. She also loved Nancy Drew. Everything was always neat, tidy, and “perfect” for Nancy Drew.

Heather shared a memory of being a little girl, before her mother left for work, crawling into her “warm spot” in the bed and watching her mother get dressed. This was all she could grab of her mother’s former softness and attention. After her mother left, Heather remained in bed with Joe during the early morning hours. He would hold her. She remembers these moments with ambivalence. While she found some comfort in the touch, she also recalls that when she tried to wiggle loose, Joe held her tighter and asked her to stay for just a few more minutes. She always stayed, grateful to be wanted, yet feeling “icky” inside.

When Heather was six, her mother and Joe had a baby. Heather recalls the day her mother returned from the hospital with her new baby brother. She desperately wanted to stay home from school to be near her mother and see the baby, but Joe forced her to leave. When she got to school, she pretended to be sick so the school nurse sent her home. Joe was so enraged that he sent Heather to her room for the entire day and wouldn’t allow her to be near her mother or the new baby. Heather felt shut out, condemned to be an outsider in her family.

Soon after her brother’s birth, Heather discovered Joe’s pornography collection. To soothe her loneliness, she learned to masturbate in the bathtub thinking about the images that she had seen in the magazines. Heather remembers spending what seemed like hours in the bathroom, finding comfort and pleasure from her orgasms. She felt immense relief that she could console her loneliness by herself.

Her performance in school continued to exceed that of her peers. In high school she made outstanding grades and excelled on the debate team. She was proud of her accomplishments because her mother and Joe liked to boast about her to their friends. But deep inside, Heather felt inadequate and alone. She never felt good enough. During her freshman year in high school, she developed a crush on a boy named Mark who was a star on the football team and liked by everyone. Even though he never dated Heather, he flirted with her. His attention fueled her adoration. She memorized everything about him—including his license plate number and class schedule—and went to great effort to be near him, even changing from the Methodist to the Catholic church he attended. At fourteen, Heather, like Maria, began showing signs of addiction. She was using a relationship to compensate for horrific feelings of isolation and pain.

When Heather was sixteen, Mark became sexually interested in her. They began a sexual relationship, but Heather never felt like his girlfriend because Mark insisted they keep their relationship a secret, separate from school activities. This left Heather feeling ashamed and rejected. She felt constantly challenged to do more, be more, try harder to earn Mark’s love, just like she felt with her mother and Joe. Heather accepted what little attention she could get from Mark because, for her, the deprivation was familiar. She was repeating the events of her childhood all over again.

When Mark left for college, Heather’s behavior changed. She began having sexual encounters with boys she didn’t even like. When Mark came home during breaks, she dropped everything to be with him and have sex. When Heather graduated from high school, she moved to Washington, DC, to be with Mark. She enrolled in the same university. Just as in high school, she and Mark continued their secret sexual relationship. Mark had a girlfriend, so he only called Heather when he was drunk and wanted sex. To hide her unmanageable feelings for Mark, Heather’s sexual behavior escalated. She began having sex with numerous men to avoid thinking about Mark. She slept with men she didn’t care for or barely knew. If a man wanted to become closer to her emotionally, she dropped him.

In therapy, Heather relates her romantic life in brief spurts: “I only slept with guys I felt better than. I would meet one guy for breakfast, another for lunch, and another for dinner.” Heather seduced men she met in restaurants, internships, libraries, or bars. She kept a list of how many men she had sex with. The list included married men, friends’ boyfriends, and brothers of previous boyfriends. These were men she felt were “beneath” her. Heather explains, “I knew I was gaining a feeling of power with this behavior, but it came with so much pain because deep down I still yearned for Mark.” In therapy years later, she wonders if the pain of her addiction to Mark created her sexually avoidant behavior. “I think deep down I told myself no one would ever have that kind of power over me again, so I never let anyone get close.”

What Heather is describing is the desperate attempt to heal her first loss—the loss of maternal attachment. The pain of losing her mother’s love and growing up in a neglectful home left her brain craving connection and love. The experience of being abandoned by her mother profoundly affected her ability to trust anyone and form close relationships. She repeated this trauma of deprivation with Mark, constantly trying to earn love and find his acceptance, unconsciously duplicating the painful relationship she had with her mother and Joe.

After repeated failures to get her needs met, Heather masked her pain with sexual acting out. She gained a sense of control with seduction and flirtation, feeling new power with each man she had sex with. Her sexuality became the substitute for self-development, providing her with grandiose feelings that numbed her feelings of inferiority. She traded sexual power for authentic power.

Incidentally, Heather’s list of sexual conquests is a common feature for girls and women who become addicted to sex. Keeping a list is one indicator of a growing sexual addiction.