Читать книгу Ready to Heal: Breaking Free of Addictive Relationships - Sarah Elisabeth Boggs - Страница 15

Barbara came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father was a doctor, her mother a homemaker. Barbara recalled happy times with her father before she was four years old. She remembered him as warm and kind: “He held me and smiled at me.” Barbara doesn’t have pleasant memories of her mother though. She recalled her mother being unaffectionate and unloving while always ironing, gardening, or cleaning. She also remembered her mother having a vodka martini each night before dinner. Her mother threw lavish parties to entertain her husband’s colleagues. Barbara helped out with these events to earn her mother’s approval, but it never seemed to work. Barbara felt disconnected from her mother, which intensified her yearning for her father’s attention.

When Barbara turned four, there was a family incident that left her feeling afraid and confused. In Barbara’s words, “Standing at the top of the stairwell, and they were taking my dad away on a stretcher. They were taking him away and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again.” Barbara was left alone and has no memory of what happened the rest of that day. Where was her mother? Why didn’t she help Barbara make sense of what happened? Was her father physically ill or did he suffer some type of emotional breakdown?

When her father was taken from their home, Barbara thought he might be dying. She felt profoundly frightened and abandoned. Today, she still has trouble processing the memory of the event and cannot recall what the rest of her family did to cope, or even what exactly happened to her father. For these reasons, an event that could have been painful but not traumatic, became tragic. After her father’s episode, Barbara remembers her family as cold and distant. Her parents weren’t affectionate with each other and seemed to be emotionally shut down. Her father had unpredictable moods. On a good day, he could play with Barbara in the backyard or read her a bedtime story. But on a bad day, he had an explosive temper and became physically abusive. Since Barbara had bonded with her father early in her life, she was shocked by his new behavior and totally unprepared for it. Her father was once her refuge. Now he seemed lost to her. She couldn’t make sense of his abusive treatment, so she internalized that something must be wrong with her.

Barbara spent her energy trying to regain her father’s warm attention. She excelled in school to please him. She tried to adapt to his moods, spending hours with him watching baseball on TV. When he raged, she tried to soothe him. She studied him and tried to be like him. But eventually she became weary. To soothe herself, she turned to food. She craved ice cream, candy bars, and chocolate. The sugar helped her hide the emptiness she felt inside.

When a child works hard to earn a parent’s love and approval, she has no time to develop her own interests or desires. She lives to please someone else. Personality development is stunted, and the results are painful. Underneath the attempts to please a caregiver grows anger and sadness. Unconsciously, the child wonders, “Who is there for me? Why do I have to earn love?” When Barbara became a teenager, her attempts to connect with her father changed. She began provoking his anger, preferring the intensity of an argument to his painful dismissal. Their fighting resembled an unhappy married couple more than a father-daughter relationship. Since Barbara’s parents had very little connection, the primary intensity in the home was between Barbara and her dad. A pseudo-marriage evolved. To numb unbearable feelings, Barbara began overeating and gaining weight, which greatly displeased her father. He told her she looked “fat” and tried to monitor her eating. Barbara hid her food and ate late at night, alone, in her room. Her eating became an expression of rage. Her growing body said “get away” even though she felt she desperately wanted her father’s love. Yet her father was only a substitute for the real love she needed from her mother and the desperate longing for a home that felt happy and safe. She was angry that her parents allowed this to go on. Unable to express and identify these feelings of betrayal, of being used, she turned the anger onto herself.

Not surprisingly, Barbara was a very isolated teenager. Her primary relationships were with her father and food. The relationship with her father became more strained when she was sixteen and her cousin Ed visited while on military leave. He asked Barbara to meet him downtown for a beer. When Barbara’s father found out about this, he was furious and lost control. He hit Barbara so hard that he broke her eardrum. The next day Barbara’s mother took her to the doctor because her ear was bleeding, though she never once offered Barbara any emotional support. Deep inside, Barbara felt vindicated when she told the doctor, a colleague of her father, how her injury happened. Barbara felt a sense of power when she shared how her father had hit her, knowing her father would have to face his colleague soon.

Even though her father eventually apologized, it was meaningless to her. She just felt cold. Barbara adapted to her father’s abusive behavior by shutting down. She became distant from her family and everyone else. She had no close relationships with boys or girls her age. Barbara was living in social deprivation.

In college, Barbara replaced the intensity with her father by finding her first romance. She met Adam in a bar one night. Adam was twenty-eight, divorced, a part-time student, and out of work, but Barbara felt flattered by his attention. Soon Barbara and Adam were spending lots of time together. Adam was struggling to get his degree, and Barbara found that helping him with his homework gratified her. She felt powerful and needed. She knew Adam admired her, which gave her a sense of control. Barbara lost her virginity in this relationship. However, she never felt like she loved this man.

Part of her stayed separate from Adam, so when he ended the relationship a year later, she was sad but detached. It’s as if she never really bonded to Adam. Part of her still remained frozen and numb. Barbara had learned to be cold growing up in her family. Furthermore, the intense relationship with her father filled an important space in her heart and soul. On an unconscious level, she had no room for another love. Her father was her primary relationship. The psychological bond between them kept Barbara hostage and unavailable for age-appropriate relationships.

In graduate school, Barbara met Jerome at a hospital where she interned. Jerome was a surgery technician and a drug addict with little ambition. He lived with his mother and spent most of his free time with the guys from his neighborhood looking for ways to acquire drugs and money. Barbara found him wildly attractive. Shortly after they began dating, Jerome moved in with Barbara. She tried everything to keep Jerome happy. She loaned him her car and gave him money. She felt desperate for his love and attention.

At one point, he lost a bet in a poker game and asked her to have sex with one of his friends as payment. She agreed. Barbara wanted his love so badly, she compromised her dignity to protect the illusion that Jerome loved her. But the relationship remained tumultuous. Barbara remembers incredible fights as she pleaded with Jerome to spend more time with her. When Jerome failed to give her what she needed, she switched strategies. She began having onenight stands with other men to deal with the painful loneliness and shame she felt.

Like Maria, Tori, and Heather experienced, Barbara’s sexual behavior escalated as she felt rejected in love. The emptiness of her childhood followed her into adulthood. Her desperate search for love put her in humiliating situations. Sex with other men became her painkiller. It was her drug. In this way, Barbara developed an addiction to sex to cope with her lack of human connection.

The stories of Maria, Heather, Tori, and Barbara are painful. As you read Ready to Heal, there will be some tough spots, and you might want to put the book down—or throw it against the wall. Take breaks and read it in small amounts. It takes courage and integrity to face the truth about your romantic and sexual behavior. Facing your sexual issues may bring up feelings of shame. Healing may be difficult, but it will be the most rewarding work you do in your lifetime. When you deal with sexuality, you are traveling into the core of your being, discovering who you are without the trappings of addictive sex and love.