These days I do a lot of 1:1 work with guys. I invasively get into their psyches and strip them down, rapidly find their most vulnerable points and jam my fingers in till they squeal. Till they can feel their own pain to a point where the truth of it forces them into realisations that provoke growth and change. It’s only fair that I am similarly transparent.
We have many soft spots waiting to be exploited. Many things that catch and hold our attention. Things we need.
Some of these are generically human, like the way the sound of a crying baby unignorably draws our focus. Or how the moans of an adult woman inflame our excitement.
Some of our soft spots are more bespoke. More uniquely related to our personal psychology.
I feel significant pain at disconnection or being discarded and rejected. I am deeply vulnerable to those I connect to.
Conversely, free-flowing creative connection fills me with life. More than coffee, more than success. Building empathic and creative worlds with others, without limits to free expression. Unbounded, boundary-pushing, joyful play fills me with energy. Beyond caffeine, beyond victory and beyond material success. I am able to easily be the best version of myself and do incredibly creative work when I am in that state, work that brings me deep pleasure to share simply for the sake of it.
To feel rejection, hate and manipulation fills me with pain that crashes my state.
This is why I try to limit the access I give in my life. Only letting myself connect deeply to those who are most able to accept me without attempting to change me, and try to avoid those who wish to use, fight or humiliate. Ideally only letting in people who are able to be a positive force in my life without being an energy vampire. Although the truth is they are exceedingly rare to find.
Pain teaches us who we are, and our many vulnerabilities. Jung called it forced individuation. When traumatic events push you into contact with your breaking points.
The traumas can be acute — an event that happens all at once — or it can be chronic, a slow erosion.
I see chronic stress exerted most often by those that have a key to our psychic lock.
A person who represents something to us at that point in our life that is significant, or onto whom we project special meaning. They may have behaviours or qualities that we recognise as part of an our childhood patterns, or having something that we feel we have been missing. We let these people straight past our defences. Through our boundaries. We willingly and enthusiastically engage in toxic patterns of behaviour with these people. We are addicted to their presence in our lives. Their loss hurts us deeply, but so too ironically does their persistence.
Their ability to hurt us is tied into a deep need - in my case the fear of being alone, with no family and no one to connect to. I have let people exploit me through that fear many times directly and indirectly. It is why I married someone I shouldn’t have, and it is why I have connected with many broken women who needed a surrogate father figure. The Daddy games aren’t just for their benefit, but the deeper connection, the nurture, the more permanent and trusting bond is also something I need. Particularly as my own family is fragmented and disconnected both literally and metaphorically. Loneliness is my primary childhood memory.
The strange thing is I fear being alone and misunderstood so much and yet I have spent the vast majority of my life in that state. Saturated in a perpetual feeling of unease, oppressive forces of control hovering at the periphery. Like I am a child and it’s always Sunday night, the looming dread that tomorrow morning you must go to School for a whole hopeless week where you will be pulled around and poked at with pressure from every side to conform along with hundreds of indifferent, frightened or cruel prisoners, forced to waste your time and energy until you lose the will to live. Until you answer with a number instead of a name. The system is bigger than you. There is no escape. Computer says no.
It seems a very British thing, to engineer systems to crush the will to live from the population. Ritualistic humiliation and de-individuation en mass. In moments of stress I often wake haunted by nightmares that I am back inside such systems.
As an adult when I tried to integrate into institutional and corporate environments I felt those same forces all around. Engineered so as to mitigate your strengths and level the playing field to a slow crawl so that even the dullest can participate equally. Like trying to run through water. Progress and outcome are irrelevant, only compliance matters; a black hole of energy and life-force converting you into a consumer-slave. HR types smiling through their teeth at you while they fantasise about a perfect world that doesn’t include you at all. An ideology of equal conformity all around until it smothers you to death.
Anyway, I don’t know if that’s exactly why I let a 19 year old bratty stripper with a narcissistic personality disorder torture me still with her insane behaviour, but it feels relevant. The latest in a long line of similarly scandalous, unstable and dangerous women. Each one more wild and impractical than the last - in the last few years I didn’t even separate them, taking them multiple at once was far more fun and created way more excitement and intensity. A life full of drama, creativity and novelty. Chaos. Ultra-high intensity. Life on the edge with colour, vibrance and passion. The opposite of the collectivist systems I recoil from.
Nearly at my 40th birthday now, and it’s fair to say that nothing in my life went the way I thought it would. If war, corrupt politicians, or AI doesn’t kill us all — instead of just taking our relevance and ability to earn money — then we’ll see what the next decades hold. At the moment new horizons and a fresh start are sounding pretty good as my current chapter is pretty played out.
As my husband tells it, he went through something similar in his 20s and 30s, only to finally hit self awareness in his early 40s. He pulled himself through a bitter, painful divorce, finally went to therapy and did the work. And then we met. I still remember the first time he broke down crying after I said a long string of nice things about him, simply because I was feeling grateful and wanted him to know. And it freaked me out because I thought I’d done something wrong but no, it was just him not knowing how to process being in a loving, supportive relationship.
Even now after 4 years together, when I give him simple compliments, like thanking him for making such a yummy dinner or telling him how handsome he looks in his new shirt, or cheering along with him when his favorite sports team wins, sometimes he will just stop and shake his head and marvel at how kind I am—just for saying these little things! And I usually laugh (not unkindly) because why wouldn’t I build up my partner? And then he reminds me that this is still a new experience for him and he doesn’t want to take it for granted.
I hope this comment doesn’t come off as me calling myself a perfect angel or anything, I just wanted to share my experience being with someone who went through hell and still remembers what it was like. We all deserve someone who reflects our light back at us.
This is the type of self-awareness I simultaneously strive for, and shy away from. Well done for putting a face on it, but please don’t do it again.