Obsessing about Someone from the Past

Mom was usually attending to my older brother, sister, or her hobby (which is a collecting hobby, I know just where I get my worse OCD traits from). My older sister took care of me a good bit when I was a baby. POA is nothing like my mother, only somewhat like my sister. I think my sister is tied up in my Imago more than my mother. I married someone that is very similar to my mother in many ways. POA or my Imago share more traits with my sister (right down to sexual unavailability).

It's clear that I bear a torch the size of Texas. There has never been someone so jarring as POA. No relationship has been as significant and yielded such emotion. I have been both negatively and positively moved by this relationship. There is no closure apart from the kind that you might get from a wound. I have been stitched up again and again over the years. The wound keeps reopening and defies closing. Many people have attempted to debride the wound over the years. Like a flesh eating bacteria, it has infected my psyche and constantly gnaws at me.

My willfulness is of primary concern. You often claim that I am not classically narcissistic. I claim that I feel narcissistic rage and narcissistic entitlement when it comes to POA. I have described this in therapy as a "diamond point" within me. It is a fixed point that will not yield. It is the core of my narcissism, a sense of self worth that demands repayment of the insult perpetrated against me. It competes with POA. I must have parity or superiority.

When I got married some years ago, it was in the Church, before the Lord. We were legal with the state and the fed. This is what I had over POA. After 2015... Society advocates what had so cruelly torn my relationship with POA apart. Her behavior has been validated by the government. My government is working against me. This, to me, is not fairness nor just.

This is where God's Will comes in. Resisting Tyranny is just and in accordance to God's Will for humanity and we will soon see who God appoints as an authority over America in the coming years. In the mean time, I will prepare my body and mind and soul for what is coming. I am going to obsess about my fitness and my health.

How grand have I been in posting? How much attention have I cultivated here? I hold up my education like a badge sometimes. How much do I like to feel smart? It's a kind of defense against being used and manipulated and kept in purposeful ignorance (I'm not 17 anymore, this could be a feature of underlying anxiety or even paranoia). I certainly wanted to be witnessed in my internal struggle. I do want to be admired by at least on person (POA) and much of my pursuit of a person that does not want to be pursued is indeed a complete lack of empathy towards POA. I certainly feel for POA but if I could truly relate to a person that desires such things that are in complete opposition to my worldview, I probably would not feel such outrage and so competitive.

If I am completely honest with myself and others about this. Continuing pursuit of a person that got the best of me is very self-seeking, selfish to my current partner, selfish in dominating a conversation about recovery, selfish in holding on to this person out of fear of admitting defeat. My ego was really thrown by POA's rejection of men.

It's a joke among lipstick lesbians. They joke about dealing with that one guy that thinks they "broke" you. The culture of young lesbianism (teens to post college, 26ish) is very harshly dismissive of the feelings of men in their lives. I once had a supervisor that always discussed humor as "a highly refined form of aggression".

Painful things happen to nearly all of us early in life that get imprinted in all our systems which carry the memory forward making our lives miserable. It is the cause of depression, phobias, panic and anxiety attacks and a whole host of symptoms that add to the misery. We have found a way into those early emotional archives and have learned to have access to those memories, to dredge them up from the unconscious, allowing us to re-experience them in the present, integrate them and no longer be driven by the unconscious. For the first time in the history of psychology there is a way to access feelings, hidden away, in a safe way and thus to reduce human suffering. It is, in essence, the first science of psychotherapy.

—D. Arthur Janov

. “Repressed pain divides the self in two and each side wars with the other. One is the real [authentic] self , loaded with needs and pain that are submerged; the other is the unreal self that attempts to deal with the outside world by trying to fulfill unmet needs with neurotic habits or behaviors such as obsessions or addictions.

“The split of the self is the essence of neurosis and neurosis can kill.

“Our pain is the result of needs and feelings that have gone unfulfilled in early life. Those early unmet needs create what I call Primal Pain [Original Wound]. Coming close to death at birth or feeling unloved as a child are examples of such Pain. The Pain goes unfelt at the time because the body is not equipped to experience it fully and deal with it. When the Pain is too much, it is repressed and stored away. When enough unresolved Pain has occurred, we lose access to your feelings and become neurotic.

“The number one killer in the world today is not cancer or heart disease, it is repression. [Therapy] is important in the field of psychology, for it means, ultimately, the end to so much suffering in human beings. Discovering a way to treat Pain means there is a way to stop the misery in which so many of us are mired every day of our lives. After two decades of research, after dealing with thousands of patients with every imaginable psychological and physical affliction, we have arrived at a precise, predictable therapy that reduces the amount of time one spends in treatment and eliminates all the wasted motion. It is a therapy that has been investigated by independent scientists and the findings are consistent. [Therapy] is able to reduce or eliminate a host of physical and psychic ailments in a relatively short period of time with lasting results.

“Feeling Pain is the end of suffering.”

“We have found ways to measure the ongoing presence and chronic effects of early trauma. We have observed time and again that even though it is not felt, the force of the memory remains in the system, reverberating on lower brain levels and moving against the body wherever it happens to be vulnerable. It shapes our interests, values, motivations and ideas. By reliving these traumas, patients can return back to early events and know with certainty how they formed adult behavior and symptoms.
“Repression is the hidden force behind illness”

We can see how buried memories constantly activate the system, putting pressure on vital organs and creating disruptions which can eventually result in serious illness. The problem for too many of us is that suddenly we find ourselves with afflictions or obsessions [addictions], and have no idea how it all happened. We don't know why we can't sleep, why we can't find a mate, why we are obsessed with this idea or that or why we don't function as we want to, sexually. [Therapy] can clarify these seeming mysteries.

“Delving deep into the unconscious has allowed us to clarify the basis of adult behavior. We have a good idea what lies in the unconscious and it doesn't seem to be the mystical emporium so often described. We have learned that irrespective of whether the Pain is manifest in the body or in the mind, the person is not himself; there is a dislocation of function which is global. Both emotional and physical pain deform cells and cause alterations which show up in measurements of vital signs, brain function and chemistry, the immune system, hormones, peripheral blood flow and in a person's behavior. Everything is askew.

“Instead of working from symptoms to possible causes, we work from causes to symptoms. The focus is always deep. From this approach we have developed a more profound understanding of who we are and what drives us, our basic, hidden, unconscious motivations. Let me give you an example.

[One of my patients told me once he was] . . . was flooded with insights. He told me that his whole life seemed to have suddenly fallen into place. This ordinarily unsophisticated man began transforming himself in front of my eyes into what was virtually another human being. He became alert; his sensorium opened up; he seemed to understand himself.
“The attempt of the child to please his parents I call the Struggle. The Struggle begins first with parents and later generalizes to the world. It spreads beyond the family because the person carries his deprived needs with him wherever he goes, and those needs must be acted out. He will seek out parent substitutes with whom he will play.

“Many parents make the mistake of not picking up their child sufficiently out of fear of “spoiling” him. By ignoring him, this is precisely what they do, and later they will be swamped by the child's insatiable demands for symbolic substitutes—until the day they crack down on him. The consequences of that are both inevitable and dreadful.

“Out of his neurotic drama, he will make almost anyone (including his children) into parental figures who will fill his needs. If a father was suppressed verbally and was never allowed to say much, his children are going to be listeners. They, in turn, having to listen so much, will have suppressed needs for someone to hear them; it may well be their own children. . . .

www.businessinsider.com/most-common-relationship-problem-is-unrealistic-expectations-2018-1

I have always loved Dr. Ruth Westheimer. She has come to my rescue with this timely article about expectations...