Days 289-291: Approaching relationships through negativity

13-14 & 16082013

A friend told me about a notion he had made while dating a girl from a foreign country. He had noticed that it is in the Finnish mentality to look at being attracted to someone a negative thing: that when you notice you're attracted to someone, your reaction is “oh no” instead of “oh yes”. I realized that I had never really thought about this, and when I started looking back on my relationship history it seemed to explain a great deal of things. I don't know if this is exclusively a Finnish trait, but the overall negativity even in relationships certainly is a part of this cultural mindset.

For me having a romantic attraction towards another has always been a burden. Whenever something like that has come about it has felt like a great deal of trouble instead of being a reason for joy. When I look at my first crushes during my childhood and teen years there has always been this despair, a hopelessness, a knowledge that it would never amount to anything anyway because I'm not good enough for the other – and this disempowering way of thinking led me to never act upon my feelings.

There was also a horrifying fear of being “discovered”. I feared that if other kids or family members found out about my crush they would tease me about it. There is this specific “ooooooh” or “aaaaah” people would make when they found out, as if they discovered a juicy secret, as if they knew something super intimate about me and now understood what all of me was about – which they didn't, or that's what I wanted to believe. I didn't want anyone to know because then they would think they knew how I felt when they could not in fact know. I thought of my experience as something “special”, “unique” and “mine” - which in a sense was true – and did not see the value in sharing and cross-referencing things with others.

I still get this embarrassment of sorts, this feeling of being bare in front of others. It's kind of like I'm holding this steel mask of not being emotional at all, and when people hear of me doing something that is perceived to be emotionally charged, like being in a relationship or dating someone, it's like the mask falls off. I don't like it. I am used to being “the stable one” wherever I go and so expressing emotions/feelings is something that is somewhat limited for me. I rarely feel emotions, not always even on a daily basis, but how do I know how much exactly do I suppress? How do I know how much of my non-emotionality is pure blankness and how much of it is suppression?

I know I have picked up this ideal of being “the stable one” from my father, as well as the behavioral pattern of doing it at my own expense by suppressing what I feel. When I look at my parents, the ones who gave me the relationship model I started to follow, I do remember them being openly affectionate towards each other, if not a bit shy about it. There were older siblings who were in their teens when I was a child, and I remember seeing them all embarrassed about their relationships, angry and ashamed when my parents teased them about it – perhaps this is where I picked this up, because my older siblings were a huge role model for me, both consciously and subconsciously.

This is a topic that is (again) on the surface as I have recently met a person with whom I am in a process of building a long-distance relationship. Just writing these words here is difficult for me even though I know that not many people read my blog (voicing things to myself is the most difficult step I guess), and when I think of talking to people about it I notice this nervousness rising immediately. I realize that this is because I have adopted a negative attitude towards the whole concept of two people gravitating towards each other – a filter of shame, worst-case scenarios and negative expectations caused by a poor self-esteem. I'm not saying I should jump to the other extreme and go crazy with excitement, joy and over-confidence (which some people actually do, which is news to me!) but to allow myself the enjoyment of the situation.

So: on to self-forgive, so that I may find it comfortable sharing this experience with other people.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to feel ashamed of being attracted to another person because I have feared that people would question the target of my feelings – in other words, think less of the person I am attracted to and thus think less of me as well.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear telling my friends/family who I was attracted to because then they would see more of me as well.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear sharing my attractions with others because on some level I understood that within the process of becoming attracted to someone I become in touch with the sides of me which have been hidden – sides of me that have been “secret” because I have not known how to be self-intimate – and that in my choice of who to be attracted to I expose the hidden side of myself.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear admitting that I was attracted to H because all the other girls were attracted to him as well and I saw myself to have no chance within that competition.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear admitting that I was attracted to H because attraction was a new feeling to me and I had no idea what it was and how to deal with it, and because I did not know how to express an uncertain experience and to seek for answers from others.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear admitting that I was attracted to T because he wasn't “good-looking” in the usual way, as I was afraid other kids would tease me for liking someone “ugly” and think less of me as well – that other kids would not understand why I liked this person and instead assume him to be “less” and me to be “less”.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear admitting that I was attracted to T because I believed he did not like me back and I did not want to take the risk of getting rejected, not that I would have known what to do with another person anyway even if he would like me back.
  • I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear expressing my attraction because I had no idea what would happen as a result; I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear doing things the outcome of which I could not foretell or, in other words, control.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself as a child to fear that I will be defined by who others believe my target of attraction to be and who they believe me to be in relation to that image of him.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear that people will assume me to be something I am not.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself, when and as others have discovered I am attracted to someone, to distance the whole affair from myself and try and avoid the intimacy of sharing something so personal with others.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to hold myself back from sharing the early stages of a relationship with others because I have wanted to avoid exposing myself in such a sensitive state, rather sharing the news only when a relationship has stabilized and when I can pretend to be all cool about it.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to perceive and believe that my experience of attraction was something “unique” because it felt so overwhelming, not realizing that everyone else experiences basically same thing as the same patterns of thought and behavior create the same experiences.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that even though my feelings were overwhelming in my subjective experience, other people too have had these overwhelming subjective experiences and that the subjectiveness of something is not an indicator of its uniqueness.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel embarrassed when people have found out I am attracted to someone, feeling as if they were looking at something private and wanting them to “not look at me” or to “look away”.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to resist exposing myself to others as I have not fully exposed myself to myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to perceive relationships, attraction and sexuality through negativity, thus denying myself the enjoyment of embracing the situation.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty for having enjoyment in my life through relationships.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel undeserving of enjoyment through relationships.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to react to being attracted to someone by conjuring up worst-case scenarios, summoning a fear that I will screw things up, that the other will not like me, that things would get complicated and troublesome, that my attraction won't stay hidden, that the other one will abuse me, that the relationship will advance too quickly, that I would have to be tied to a relationship – thus pulling back from the interaction with the other, interacting from behind a defensive personality and being careful not to expose myself until I feel “safe enough” to lower my defenses – which may in fact never happen with a person, or may take a lot of time.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself, when and as I have been in relationships during my life, to not question my defensiveness and fearfulness and thus put a strain on every relationship (also some friendships) by not being “myself” (defenseless) until enough time has passed, if at all.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself, when and as a relationship has ended or been in conflict, to blame others for “not having patience” with me, not realizing that I am responsible for being in such a state that requires patience from others.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize I am harming myself by holding onto my fearfulness and that it is unacceptable that I keep on living as a “porcupine” that requires others to approach me in a certain way for me to feel safe.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear showing others that I experience emotions and feelings because it would require me to be honest with myself.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear being honest with myself about my emotions and feelings because I have perceived and believed emotions and feelings to be a weakness.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to idolize the model of “stability” that I saw in my father and want to become like him, not seeing, realizing and understanding the damage he did to himself as he played out “stability” through self-suppression, and thus doing the same damage onto myself unquestioned.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that in order to be stable one should have no emotions/feelings.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that stability is to embrace my emotions/feelings as an indicator of who I am and to direct who I am according to how I see best – not to accept and allow my emotions/feelings to direct me; stability is when I am in the wheel and emotions/feelings are riding along.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that stability is to see myself as a whole, embrace myself as a whole and direct myself as a whole – emotions/feelings included.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear admitting to an attraction because I have believed and perceived that attraction makes me “weak” or “less”.

When and as I go into resistance to share the fact that I am involved with or attracted to someone, feeling that inwards pull in my chest as if my physical body was trying to collapse into itself to hide itself from the eyes of others – I stop, I breathe and I realize that this resistance is a sign that I have not fully embraced what is going on and that I am not standing within and as myself in self-honesty. I realize that it is not other people I am trying to keep away from me but myself. I breathe and I release the tension from my physical body and I fix my posture so that I am open, relaxed and balanced. I ask myself: what am I hiding? What am I ashamed of? What do I not want to be seen? And I bring the answer back to myself as I see, realize and understand that I am in fact hiding from myself and not from others. I release the point through self-forgiveness (written, spoken or experienced) and I push through my resistance to share myself with others by speaking through words that best describe my experience.

I commit myself to with myself go through what is going on in this relationship in spoken and written word so that through absolute self-honesty, self-certainty and self-integrity I may stand within and as my decision to be in a relationship and share my decisions with others.

I commit myself to observe and investigate how approaching relationships through the negative polarity manifests in me.

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Another aspect of this point surfaced. In communication with the person I am in a relationship with I noticed in myself a fearfulness, carefulness, behind actions that were necessary – but not necessary to be done through fear. I realized I am scared of losing this relationship and that I am acting through that fear, trying to make sure that I am doing everything possible to maintain the relationship now that for the first time in my life I have some understanding of how to actually do that and NOT mess things up from the start. I regret all the mistakes I have made in my previous relationships and now try to make sure I make no more mistakes, that I would finally “succeed” - and this idea of “success” indicates that there is a relationship ideal I am reaching for, some kind of a goal that I believe to be possible to get to.

I will continue with this point in later writings.