This last point about craving intimacy and also avoiding painful feelings is particularly apt with regard to my partner Blissy.
So far I have mentioned that we are affected in relationships by our insecurities and feeling not good enough. So much of this can be traced back to how we were brought up and our relationship with our parents.
So before I tell you about Blissy, I just want to give you some background to her upbringing. She had an extremely difficult relationship with her mother. Her mother was deeply troubled. She actually had a fear of water, which is a dire predicament for a water vole! This meant Blissy was not protected and looked after in the way she would have been if her mother was in a normal state of mind. So Blissy had to take care of herself from a young age.
As well as this her mother was reckless and a danger to herself in certain circumstances in water, situations that water voles would usually avoid. Blissy often had to look out for, protect and even at times save her mother.
This was a huge burden for a young water vole. Her mother was a source of fear to her, which caused her to need reassurance and comfort, but of course she did not receive these qualities from her mother, who was too preoccupied with her own problems.
Later, as a result, she either had very troubled relationships, or relationships, which she did not want to commit to, even though she wanted closeness. Blissy craved intimacy but also avoided it at the same time because of fear, low self worth and lack of trust, which is totally understandable based on her extremely insecure upbringing. Now at the time of our separation I was not quite so understanding!
At the same time as my dependence was growing in our relationship, Blissy was also feeling insecure. My neeediness may have consciously or unconsciously brought up painful feelings regarding her own sense of increasing dependence. As we started going out more, she began to experience increasing jealousy, which I was also experiencing. Her reaction was to dissociate from her feelings and feel a lot of anger as a form of self protection. It was Blissy, who initiated our separation.
However, there is a a problem with dissociating from your painful feelings. In the short term you avoid feeling these feelings, but they have to be dealt with it at sometime. Because if you don’t feel the painful feelings until they are gone, you won’t feel happy, joyful feelings either.
This is something Blissy had done at other times in her life. She had buried painful emotions, as if in a metaphorical burrow, to protect herself from pain.
Now Blissy was a ‘beautiful soul’, who always wanted to help others, so she would give and give, but because she had not dealt with her painful emotions, it meant she was giving all the time without much receiving. It was a stressful and exhausting way to live.”
Chapter 7 – Oak’s Message – click