Love after lovelessness

LOVE AFTER LOVELESSNESS

Love
Was a word rarely heard
Rarely used, rarely spoken,
And certainly, rarely remembered
In one aching, yearning man’s
Childhood household.

Combine sexual abuse
And exhibitionism with twists;
Add in religious fundamentalism
About human sexuality
In this childless household.

Finally, take emotional coldness
Anger, controlling, and
Distancing both physical and emotional,
And you have a childhood household
That rarely modeled love
As well as rarely speaking of it.

Sex was seen as not just dirty
But also controlling and manipulative.
However, with love largely absent,
Sex filled a gap.

And the word ‘love,’
When spoken to me post-sobriety
On the phone by a once-raging father,
Seemed as manipulative as
A mom’s sexual exposure and spoken delusions
Had to a teenaged, hurting child.

I am more than my story.
I have grown beyond it, at least in bits,
But it would be a lie
To simply say, ‘I am not my story,’
Though I need to detach yet more.

If you know me well, as you do,
You know that. And I know you do.
Something can be both true and excuse-making.
I recognize more who and what I want,
If but in fits and spurts, too.

And I know that life isn’t always perfect,
Especially in its timing.

The frustrations

I think the biggest recovery frustration is knowing that I lost a certain amount of both “self” and opportunities for career, relationship and other development in the real world, but …

Not knowing how much.

As I sit single (has some advantages), with a job paying less than $30K (Texas is a low cost-of-living state, but still), and in a career I drifted into after trying to walk in my dad’s footsteps all the way to graduate divinity school.

And, as Eliot said in Sweeney Agonisties, I do measure my life in coffee-spoons, often.

An insight from Patrick Carnes about sexual addiction

From “Out of the Shadows”:

It’s about being SAFE: Secret, Abusive to others or myself (myself in my case); Feelings of shame or Feelings avoidance; and Empty.

Appearances of control, lack of control

“Control” is a huge issue in recovery, above all for sexual abuse survivors. I’ve seen many survivors, once they start to recognize their histories, talk about how much they attempted to be in “control.”

For me, I believe dissociation was “control” by other means. I simply shrank my world enough to have a slice I thought I could control.

But, both I and they were deceiving ourselves.

With full-blown “control” efforts, the energy one needs to invest, in ever-increasing quantities, becomes prohibitive, short of a nervous breakdown.

And, short of dissociative identity disorder (formerly called “multiple personality disorder”), the same is true for dissociation efforts, I believe.