"No one will ever love me like that again" and other such unknowns
My dad visited for 10 days. I was already dreading this from the beginning, especially since it was coming on top of a bunch of other recent stressors, and the first few days I was coping really bad. I'd get so frustrated with him inside while trying to play my part on the outside, dealing with his typical self-centered habits as he proclaimed up and down about how he doesn't like to bother people. I cried maybe once. About six days in, I got tired of my mask and got kind of short with him after a long day out together. Following that, he started coming over later in the day, which gave me some mental space to get through my studying. The remaining days fell into a pattern of me waking up earlier than I have in months, studying for a few hours and saying hello to my dad, lying in bed for an hour, getting or scrounging dinner with him, him getting driven back by my sister or her partner, and then proceeding to while away the rest of the hours of my night reading mid romance comics on end. I lost most of my interest in any other hobbies that felt like they required more effort (art, reading in Japanese, etc.) and just did whatever I needed to reclaim some part of my brain. At the end of the night, I'd feel like I was imagining the whole duress and go to bed thinking everything was fine, and then in the morning I'd wake up with dread again.
I developed a strange reaction to studying, where I'd get the immense desire to start bawling while running through my inoffensive flashcards ("opisthotic" means "located behind the ear," /SPH /TAOEUPLS translates to "sometimes"...) that I have yet to shake. Why was this somewhat infuriating but otherwise inoffensive man having this effect on me? I recalled my last therapist at one point saying something like, "But that's what your dad thinks, and we've already decided to discount that." At the time, I think my thoughts were: 1) Had we? 2) I guess it is true that I've said over and over that I don't agree with how he frames things 3) But wasn't part of the problem that I couldn't get his standards out of his head, which is why they kept coming up in therapy? 4) But if this was just a cyclical conversation in therapy and the answer was always the same, "Stop caring," then I guess they're right. 5) Will I remember that next time he comes around?
If I listed everything that bothered me about my dad, it could probably fill 50 pages. Broadly speaking, it is a mix of pity, anger, and nostalgic-based affection, which is what you get when you grow up with a parent who tells you over and over that you're the most special person to him, over all other family members, and then proceeds to abandon you emotionally and eventually physically. Despite all of that, though, he is extremely dependable when it comes to finances as a workaholic, and this is the only saving grace that separates him from a deadbeat dad. The love bombing that consists of a bunch of statements about how great he is and the display of both emotional helplessness and being told point blank what our relationship is is really something messes with my head. Honestly, I think I got less of this this time around, perhaps because I'm much older. I couldn't even find it in me to hug him when he came out of the airport, but I eventually yielded my hand to his in the car rides.
Truly, though, the worst part of my dad is his learned helplessness and his constant "I" self-narrative statements that serve three functions: to humblebrag so that others will think better of him; to also make him feel better about himself compared to other people in terms of virtues such as frugality and hardwork; and to reassure himself that he's doing fine and doesn't have to put in the work to connect to others. Rather, he has an innate fear of rejection, and the way he handles this is by humblebragging and only talking to people who initiate contact first. He says over and over that he doesn't know how to have deep conversations with people while yapping about himself and all of his achievements, and when you suggest that he call up someone he talks very fondly of who he hasn't seen in 5+ years, he gets afraid and says that he doesn't like to bother other people.
He thinks that "not bothering other people" means simply not making asks of them, but in reality he is simply offloading his need for connection onto any "safe" audience, which means captive grad students/postdocs and people like me. I exist less as a person to him than as someone he can imagine loves him unconditionally and to whom he will always have a safe connection with because he is my dad. If he actually made friends instead of just repeating "I always like to stay organized; I don't really like people; this is how I do things; I never learned how to talk to have those conversations with other people; I don't like to be a bother to others; I'm doing the right thing by waiting for other people to reach out to me and by not expressing my preferences even though I clearly have them," etc., ad nauseum, I wouldn't have to feel so much goddamn weight over every conversation I have with him.
Of course, the parallels of this way of thinking to myself are not lost on me, which also makes this frustrating. I feel like I try my best to avoid these types of "I" statements, but lo and behold, I just used one. But to use another, I feel like I've become allergic to talking about my "achievements" after years of listening to my dad tell the same stories about how he got his only Science paper publication, and I don't even know how to share the things I work on or how to be happy about them. Meanwhile, I got the unsettling sense from some (rare) new stories from my dad this time that my dad had been a better mentor figure to some of his postdocs than he had ever been to me.
After of 6+ years of therapy, you would think that I would figure out how to handle this better. Whenever my therapist had wanted to talk about my parents before I would see them in person, I would often feel like there was no point, because it always boiled down to "I need to work on my perception of them in my head, and there's nothing I can do to change them." The answer was predetermined, the work was supposedly being done in therapy — and yet, seeing them in the full force of their physical presence would pretty much always bowl me over.
Besides realizing that my dad basically stims variations on "I have great virtue" statements to self-soothe, this time I also started to think about how I could possibly end the loops that are keeping me in my own mental prisons. What on earth is keeping me so tied to my dad? What if I just let him go? I've already been through the intellectualizing and the reasons why he still has an impact on my brain, but what was the actual emotional core that was keeping me feeling trapped, even when my sister kept saying, "We don't need him. I have money, we can figure this out. We don't need either of our parents," to me?
Something I've been thinking about a lot -- witnessing people (such as my sister) repeat the same emotional loops and thought traps year after year after year even when they claim to be self-aware; thinking about the fact that dwelling in negative emotions (shame, guilt, loneliness, etc.) has its own twisted sense of gratification; and working through what kept me bound to my own sense of shame and a "fixed mindset" as opposed to a "growth mindset" -- is that people don't keep doing detrimental things unless it serves some sort of purpose. There is something that makes "sense" about how someone goes about engaging in behaviors that hurt themselves, and it's an emotional one rather than a logical one. This was also underscored in the last OCPD discussion group I attended: If it really made no sense at all and was a purely bad stimulus, people would simply stop doing it. Something about it is serving a purpose, and often times that is avoidance of having to change, to face the unknown, or to accept one's own limitations and truly feel the extent of one's grief out of fear of falling apart.
So I did some thinking about it from that angle. This was on like day four and it didn't make coping with the rest of the visit that much better, but what I landed on, when I really thought about letting go of my dad and what he thinks is good versus not, living my life in whatever combination of failure and success I'll end up with, was just this crushing thought:
But without him, no one will ever love me like that again.
Immediately after thinking that, I started crying. And then, of course, the next thought was, "like what?" How had my dad actually shown that he loved me rather than an image he had created in his head? My logical brain immediately began listing out all of the ways he had failed me. "What," part of me said, "are you even talking about? You don't seriously believe all the nonsense he says or else you wouldn't be bitching all the time." And yet, some part of me hasn't left being 10 years old, living alone with him with him telling me over and over that we had a special relationship. Something about getting physical affection when I wanted it, about him making me beef noodle soup. It's laughable, honestly (except I probably shouldn't say that if I'm working on radical acceptance), considering that immediately shadowing all of these memories are counter memories of him being depressed, not paying attention to me, ignoring me when I got too emotional — "You're the most emotional 10-year-old I've met," a coworker of his would tell me as she housed me for months while he disappeared to Taiwan — and yet there's some part of this lie, the lie that he truly gave me unconditional love sometimes that I don't want to give up.
At my emotional core, I don't want to give it up and accept the full story even while I know it cognitively, because I don't think I'll ever get it again. So if I let my dad go live his life and live mine without feeling even the slightest indebted to him, I feel like I'll be losing something, even when that something didn't truly exist in the first place.
Sometimes you want the fantasy so bad that it seems impossible to let it go.
I told all of this to my sister and her partner, and they assured me that they also cared for me deeply, as close to unconditional as possible. But the thing is that I don't actually believe them emotionally. Logically, I know if we look at actions, this is true, for they have supported me through way more than my dad did ever. Hell, I've been living with them for like a decade now, and yet the feeling of being "loved" in this specific way eludes me. There must be something that they aren't giving me that the fantasy of my dad's love does, and as long as I feel this gap, I will never feel loved in the same way.
But also, I know people don't really love in the same way anyway and "love" is a billion meanings people overlay onto one word, hold up, and go, "We all know what this means? Great!" without thinking about all the different types of love out there in detail.
If you look around on what people say to cheer up others who are saying some semblance of, "No one will ever love me like that," or "I will never love anyone like that again," they basically say some variation of, "That's not true; it will happen [for the first time/again]." But as someone who doesn't believe that there are any absolutes because the future is inherently unknown and doesn't exist yet, I don't actually think this is true. It is true that some people will be loved or love "like that" (whatever that means) again, but it is also equally true that some people will die without experiencing that same exact thing again. That's what dying is, in the end. People die in the middle of things, and sometimes that middle thing is finding someone who gives that specific connection. People who say otherwise tend to have a survivor bias about the whole thing.
What if I end up being right that no one will ever love me "like that" (whatever that means) again? That this fantasy that is in my heart is closest it'll ever get to this specific experience? Then what?
I think I have to find it in me to radically accept this. Negative outcomes are always as possible as positive ones, and if someone isn't already walking around with some sense of loss yet, it will come for them eventually when the first loved one of theirs dies. That doesn't mean that the loss of something is the defining part of a person's life, but a fraction of their context. There are always good things that will be experienced too, because nothing in life is stagnant. The struggle lies in finding the actual acceptance rather than fighting it and learning how to have joy for the good things that do happen, no matter how few. I know this, mindfulness, yada yada. (muttering) It's always goddamn mindfulness...
I don't have it right now. I know it's a process that in the short term means staring down my flashcards and continuing to do them even while crying, accepting that I just feel sad because I'm still thinking about how I've failed to achieve and become someone who my dad would be proud of in that specific way. But there's the other big question:
Is it really impossible for me to give it to myself?
Something else brought up in the discussion group is that you also need to build an internal sense of reassurance or else you'll always be relying on exterior factors for it, and it'll never feel like enough. If the solution is to build some sense of self-compassion, it begs the question: Is it really that impossible for me to love myself?
If you had asked me like 6 years ago I would've been, like, "Yeah, it's impossible, duh, why the fuck do you think I'm stuck like this lmao," but if I've had to reinterrogate whether shame was actually serving me, then at some point I have to contend with this question. It obviously feels out of reach now too, but is it really impossible for me to give some form or parts of unconditional affection to myself?
(...literally had to pause to fight the gag reflex.)
I don't know. I feel like if I declare it's impossible I'm just trapping myself in my mind prison again because I'm afraid of trying. It feels safer not to try, I guess. So I guess I will just have to live in ambiguity for now because I can't declare the opposite either. It may or may not be possible, but if it's possible, I wish I knew how to do it. And in a way that isn't the false bravado that CBT worksheets feel like. Not a false bravado like my dad telling himself every single day that he has good qualities and this is why he's not doomed and a good dad, actually. It has to go deeper than that, a sense that my existence makes me happy and is non-negotiable and is ultimately capable of growth from past mistakes and behaviors. The baseline can't be suicide anymore, it has to be existence. That I don't have anything to prove to anyone, anymore, and most of all, myself.
People who already feel this about themselves probably don't even have to think twice about how they got there. It's almost baffling to be missing something so elementary. I tried looking in my head at my personified mind monsters and wondered if I could invent a new friendly monster that loves all the other monsters on the field, but I found that I actually lack the imagination power for this. It felt too fake, too random. Rather, it was easier to invent a narrator who writes all of these "I" statements, but that also felt kind of useless since my perception of myself would probably do better with more distance (hence the concept of the ACT "context") rather than assigning an "I" monster, which ironically makes me feel more bound to a self. I also tried thinking about whether I could assign this idea of unconditional love to my stuffed animals, much in the way that positive text posts say things like, "Your plushies always love you!" and whatnot, but this also proved impossible currently because to some degree my anthropomorphization by default includes the ability to say "no," much in the way that my cats will give me a warning nip if they don't like how I'm petting them. In fact, I used to worry that my stuffed animals, if they were to be capable of thinking, secretly hated me. I don't worry about that anymore, but at this point I just feel like it's mostly neutrality on their part.
Though, for that matter, is trying to assign something the role of provider of unconditional love just one giant cope? A friend of mine would probably say, yes, but also if it's just me or my inanimate stuffed animals, it doesn't actually hurt anyone else so it's a fine cope. But even having something I recognize as a cope makes me worried sometimes that I'll then cope my way out of accountability (hence wanting to avoid bravado).
I don't know. I feel like the theme of my life recently is just "maybe." Maybe I'll find it and maybe I won't. If I don't, I guess I'll just have to survive more sessions of feeling sad. And they are survivable; I don't have to chase the feeling and invent another mind trap. That's something, I guess.