More on Attachment

i have been reading and thinking about attachment issues a lot these days, so of course everything for me is all about attachment issues. crazy it is what i am currently using to resolve some of the the questions that have arisen for me lately. but it makes sense to me at least that some of my deepest pain is activated when my matriarchal connections are felt to be under attack.

what is my matrix? it is the breast that i suckle for providing my fundamental nourishment. take that breast away from me and yes i begin to question my safety. attack my belief systems and you attack my foundation, which is firmly rooted in my relationship to my matrix. take away my matrix and i revert to an earlier stage of existence, back to the womb where i hide in a cloistered world where no one can touch me.

i think that no matter what stage of life i find myself in, i am eternally bound to live out of the patterns that shaped the paradigm of my earliest matriarchal relationship. that is until and unless i do something to recreate a better model. my own relationship with my birth mother did not provide a good pattern foundation. but all my life i was cursed to keep replicating them in every relationship that i encountered. it never dawned on me before recently that my unrequited relationship with my mother was the root of a major defect in terms of how i failed to connect with others, including myself. she was emotionally and physically unavailable, and the earliest attachment imprints never got wired, leaving a deep hole in me, which got filled when my older brother started using me as his sexual outlet. and in doing so he became my surrogate mother, loving and affirming my entire psychic and physical being.

when he later rejected the relationship i was devastated because it was as if my own mother had disowned me. so after that breast was denied me i was destined to find another matrix to take his place. so, i got married. it wasn't as if i wanted to get married, but, implicitly i knew that since i could not have neither my birth mother nor my surrogate brother/mother it was an easy life to chose because my ex-wife was someone i had known all my life and since we were both single at the time and both 'available' we latched on to each other. in this relationship i would attempt to connect to that larger matriarchal paradigm that society holds out as the relationship par excellence: marriage.

well that was not going to work, those years of 'marriage' were like trying to kick start a motorcycle without spark plugs. after we split up my new matriarch became recovery, and that kept me going even though i still did not understand what deep hole i was expecting it to fill. the other larger matriarchal forms of my life became my 20 year educational journey, my nearly 35 year career in church music, and in both of those things i can see that what i was merely trying to do, was to win the approval and engage a connection to that original person who carried me for those first 9 months of my existence.

so for today, i have two mothers: male survivor, and my spiritual community, mcc. and they are the most nurturing matriarchal forms ever encountered in my entire life. my relationship with both of these is very easeful and natural, and in them, i do not have to earn the love and acceptance. it is built in to the relationship. it is causing new wiring to happen for me, helping me to shuck off previous desperate and dysfunctional attempts at inducing nurturing connections.