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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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For some of us, loss of trust is a deep existential threat to heart

By David McElroy · April 22, 2019

I can’t sleep tonight. There’s no physical cause. I just can’t stop myself from reliving an old hurt over and over again.

It’s not something that matters anymore. That’s why it’s so frustrating. It involves someone who’s not in my life anymore and who I don’t even want in my life. But I can’t stop feeling an awful stabbing at my heart with a pain that feels just like a physical hurt.

For years, I assumed everybody felt this way, but I slowly figured out that I have something that’s like an emotional disability — another long-term effect from childhood “programming.”

I don’t trust people very easily. If you got to know me, that might surprise you, because I can be comfortable telling people my darkest secrets pretty quickly. I can judge someone’s character and trust people about pragmatic things — honesty and safety — but it’s very rare when I can trust someone with my inner self.

My real self. My heart. Who I really am.

If someone hurts me, it’s not like a normal hurt for someone else. Because I learned that trusting people to love me as a child always hurt, betrayal of trust feels as though I’m reliving my core wound. I haven’t been able to figure out how to change this.

An incident from a few years ago crossed my mind tonight. It really and truly doesn’t matter anymore, not in the pragmatic sense. But the wound is still just as powerful as the moment I experienced it.

For me, an emotional wound is a deep and painful gash that feels as though it’s going to kill me. It’s hard to explain this to people who haven’t experienced this sort of wounding, but it means that I react more strongly than someone else might to being emotionally hurt.

I’m not the sort to physically lash out at others. I don’t normally scream at others when I’m hurt. Instead, I withdraw and feel as though this is going to be the hurt that proves no one is ever going to love me — that I might move among human society, but that nobody will ever experience my heart.

If someone betrays me, I can lose faith in the person so profoundly that the relationship can’t be fixed. When that happens, I feel deeply wounded and betrayed. I feel so hurt that I’m like a wounded animal whose life is at stake. Being hurt is an existential threat to me in a way that’s hard to explain.

But here’s the strange part about it. I can forgive deep betrayal — and repair deeply damaged relationships — more easily than I can forgive small wounds and repair lesser relationships.

If someone hurts me in a fairly small way, I am prone to cutting off that person completely and permanently. If someone hurts me in this way — but I haven’t yet gotten too deep into trust with the person — I simply learn that this person isn’t worth trusting.

And I never trust that person again. I probably never speak to that person again.

But if the hurt is greater — because it’s from someone who I’ve trusted more strongly — there’s an entirely different template from my past.

It’s only now that both of my parents are dead that I can admit that a part of me never gave up on the idea — more like a fantasy — that one or both of them was going to finally be emotionally healthy enough and psychologically mature enough to love me.

I was deeply hurt by my mother abandoning me when I was a child. I hid that from myself. I didn’t want to admit it, so I went numb. But I was hurt so badly by it that I kept being drawn back to her — in my adult life — to try again and again to have a loving relationship with someone who just wasn’t capable of giving me what I needed.

After I finally figured out the truth about my father, I was incredibly angry with him and then I experienced deep hurt with him. I felt deeply betrayed. But there was a part of me which hoped — against the expectation of my rational brain — that he might go to therapy with me 10 years ago. I had the fantasy that he might finally understand what he had done and spend his last years repairing our relationship.

That’s my pattern with the deepest of hurts. If I have trusted someone enough to allow her into the deepest part of my heart, I am an unrealistic fool. Even when my rational mind knows better, I still expect for someone to finally resolve — once and for all — the old pattern by returning to love me.

My rational adult mind understands now why my mother had to abandon me. She had to leave us to save her own sanity. If she had stayed — or kept trying to take her children with her — she might have ended up dead. Or she might have killed my father. I understand that now.

But my heart still needs the old wound resolved. And that’s why my heart is full of fantasy even when my rational mind knows better.

Some part of me is still hoping — and even believing — that someone is going to love me in a way that finally resolves the old script of abandonment.

The betrayal of abandonment has gone on for my entire life so far, but all it takes is one miracle to change that for the rest of my life.

My rational mind knows I’m a fool to look for miracles, but my heart still has irrational faith that love wins in the end — in a way that finally resolves this long and excruciating story of betrayal.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: betrayal, father, hurt, love, mother, pain, psychology, romance

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For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to Sam. In 2009, I took in a young feral cat who I named for the early American revolutionary Samuel Adams. He was one of the most confident — downright arrogant, in fact — cats I’ve ever been around. He had an amazing personality and I immediately loved him. He was no more than 8 or 9 months old when he suddenly died for reasons that my vet couldn’t explain. Even though I had him only a short time, he was one of my all-time favorites. #tbt #cats #tabby #feral #birmingham #alabama
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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?”

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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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