Attachment Part II

the last couple weeks have been a transitional time for me. as you may know, i have been scarfing up the brain food in bonnies book, 'brainwise therapist' and it has been so seminal for me. i have gone thru it twice already and the margins of nearly every page are lined with penciled in notes and comments which stirred ideas about how her statements relate to my life. the subject of attachment as brought up by her in her book, has led me to the next level of understanding of how this unmet need has contributed to my own lifelong social phobia and dysfunction. the understanding i have been pondering is how my frustrated relationship to my matrix/mother/primary care provider never got resolved, caused me to avoid new/strange situations thoughout my life, and left me in such a fearful and anxious state, that i never felt comfortable or confident enough to risk the rejection that would inevitably become a part of approaching strangers for social connection. so i withdrew essentially, and spent all my energies only involving myself in controlled situations where i could interact with people safely in terms of my relationship to them through my musical talents.

seeing this now, and realizing what a big hole this left in my life, is making me rethink my entire approach to life and people. now, i understand how important it is to risk seeing and being myself as not surrounded by the protective wall of my safely cultivated characteristics, and begin to develop the willingness to branch out of that comfort zone. not as scary as i thought it might be, but really just don't know where to begin to allow new experiences to create new wirings to overwrite the old patterns in my brain. ah well, this i will allow time and space to work itself out.

but this past week, severely wounded by the deeper realizations of the incapacity of my family of origin to meet any of my deep needs for true intimacy safety validation and comfort, i have been suffering in grief of understanding the effects of such abandonment of the essential me. yes, they brought me into this world, then aborted me from their systemic circle after i disclosed my brothers perpetrator behaviors after his death in 1975, and have been the outcast ever since. it dawns on me recently how i have spent all these years blind to that, yet lived solely to invest all my energies in reestablishing myself in their good graces. and now i am done.

my mother, who last year after recovering from two knee surgeries went to live with my brother and his family in san diego, the other day came back to pittsburgh to stay for the summer. i was never informed about her plan. i heard about it when i randomly ran into one of my cousins last week who made mention of it. it seems that there is a very closed circle in my family who has the inside skinny on what's going on, and i am not part of the circle. only the sibs who are in the inner sanctum exchanging and sharing pain meds amongst each other are included. i was severly disturbed and deeply troubled for a few days as it dawned on me, and i made the connection as to why my mother doesn't respond to my emails, return phone messages, and when she does, she is always just going out the door, or carrying on a conversation at the same time with someone else in the room on her end of the line. i think her behavior is a way for her to manage avoiding talking with me about anything significant......such as abuse in our family.

so now, i have actually laid to rest the final notion of my mother as ever being a capable true source of nurture, and turned to the new matrices that i have been cultivating in my life, such as the metropolitan community church family, AND also, just recently joined the pittsburgh primetimers, an over 50 gay mens social group.

so i am feeling a lot better this week. trunking off bonnie's book, i picked up a copy of daniel seigal's 'mindful brain' and have been consuming more of the same concepts bonnie extrapolated in her book, but his focus is more on the mindfulness aspect of brain grooming.

so there is ron's inner life in a nutshell over the past couple of weeks. feel like i just had a psychic birth, and the poor offspring was stillborn. BUT, in this death there is a seed of hope for a new chapter to begin, unhindered by secret schemas implicit in the regions of subjectivity of my own thought.

hejira is such an apt theme for my life right now......leaving normal....