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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Maybe we’re doomed to replay past until we finally get it right

By David McElroy · February 13, 2018

My friend asked the question out of the blue. I was spending the night with my friend, Larry, and I was lying on a twin bed in the corner of his room.

“What do you think about your mom being gone?” he asked.

It didn’t strike me as a difficult or important question, but something about the experience has burned everything about it into my memory. I was about 10 or 11 years old. Although my mother had been away from us off and on for years, the divorce had been final only for a year or two. She had no custody or official visitation.

I considered Larry’s question for a long moment. I felt very cold. Very hard. There was no emotion in my voice.

“I couldn’t care less if she moved to the Sahara Desert,” I said.

That’s all I said and Larry didn’t ask any more. It’s a good thing, because I might have cried if he had pushed to know what I meant. I was confused. I couldn’t tell if I felt nothing or if I felt more than I could handle. I swept the feelings under a rug in my heart — and I left them there.

I’ve talked before about losing my mother — to manic-depression and to abandonment — when I was young. She first tried to leave my father when I was about 5 and my sisters were about 3 and 1. The first couple of times she left, she took us with her. Eventually, she concluded she couldn’t leave and take us, too, so she left us behind.

She was in and out of our lives — living with us for weeks or maybe months, but then gone for more weeks or months — and we never knew what to expect. I was relieved when they divorced, because I thought I might at least have some stability. I was mistaken.

I thought I adjusted to her absence very nicely. In fact, I thought we were better off without her. After she tried to get one of my sisters to come live with her — when I was about 15 or so — I called her on the phone and told her very curtly to leave us alone.

“You’ve done enough damage already,” I told her. “You’re not going to take away the family I have left.”

It wasn’t until I was in college that I started trying to process the confused feelings about her that I had left buried. And it was many more years until I realized the degree to which I was affected by losing her. But slowly, even I couldn’t miss the obvious effect that her loss had had on my romantic relationships with women.

It took me a long time to piece this together — and I had the help of a good psychologist — but I eventually realized that losing her made me fear that any woman I loved would abandon me.

Because I didn’t have another woman to take her place when I was young, I came to unconsciously associate love with a painful longing for someone I couldn’t have.

A psychologist told me about 10 years ago that I almost certainly wouldn’t have had the same experience if I had been able to transfer my need and my desire for a mother figure to someone else at a fairly young age. But because there was no one else, I learned an unhealthy pattern connected with love — one of pain and fear and loss and longing.

In a couple of key romantic relationships — only the most important ones — I have tried to replay that old script. When I first discussed this issue with the psychologist, I was afraid this meant I didn’t really understand how to love in a healthy way, but the therapist said that wasn’t the issue.

“Oh, you love her very deeply,” she told me of the first woman with whom this happened. “It’s real love. You’re not wanting her to be your mother. But there’s something in you that thinks if you can win her back, it will finally be like winning the love of your mother.”

I was stunned to realize she was right.

I’ve come to understand that I have very clear instincts about who to love, but I don’t know when to let go of someone who’s not going to give me what I need. On some unconscious level, I’m running an old script. I’m feeling the painful longing for a love which I can’t have — and I think that if I can just get this one woman to love me, that ghost from the past will finally die.

I will finally be able to feel that I’m worthy of love.

It’s hard for many of us to consciously understand how strongly we’re affected by some of the losses we suffer. Especially when it comes to a relationship as key as the one with our opposite-sex parent, our romantic relationships are almost certain to show a powerful effect. Even though I know that today — on a conscious level — the pull of painful longing is more than I know how to deal with. Even though I know I’m playing out one of the oldest emotional scripts of my life, I keep playing the part — and hoping that I’ll find love instead of confusing rejection.

The very fact that I do this says pretty powerfully that the old wound hasn’t healed. What’s more, I know from experience and from study that we tend to be attracted to people who are just as wounded as we are. Could I unconsciously be choosing to fall in love with someone who will reject me — to play out the hurt that feels so familiar? Maybe.

While we all think we’re making rational decisions about what we want and about what’s good for the people we love, we’re acting in ways that are consistent with our fears — about abandonment, about loss, about fear, about pain.

I feel as though there’s a part of me that’s hiding from the world — just as I was hiding in that picture above when I was a little boy. If you think about it, I was hiding but I was sticking my head out and making myself visible to my mother in a way that said, “Please find me.”

I wanted for love to find me. I needed for love to find me. I needed for love to say, “I love you so much that nothing can take me away from you.”

As an adult several decades later, I’m still doing the same thing. I’m still longing to be chosen — to be found, to be adored, to be loved.

It seems as though I’m going to keep on replaying this old and painful story — either until someone loves me and choses to stay or else I run out of time in life and it’s too late.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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