Love and Sympathy

Many Adult Children fall in love with someone they feel sorry for. This was certainly true for me. This phenomenon stems from my childhood relationship with my dad.

When I was five years old, I adored my father. Because I was right in the middle of the Oedipus dilemma, this was partially romantic. One day I saw my father crying. This caught my attention, and I still remember feeling sorry for him. I also wanted to fix him because he was an alcoholic and cried when he drank.

It did not take long for my sympathy and love to become fused, and I could not tell the difference between the two. This led to obsessions with boys that I also felt sorry for. This led to trying to "fix" them because they were wounded like my dad. I was never able to fix my dad (he died of alcoholism) or any of the boys and men I felt sorry for during my lifetime as a codependent.

This was my codependent pattern. I met someone. After finding out that they were wounded, I felt immense attraction for them. I set out to help them. They ended up using me until they found someone else. I never even realized the connection between sympathy and love until I got into therapy.

As these experiences were imprinted in my brain, I am never going to stop being attracted to wounded men, but I have, through behavior modification, learned to avoid men who were wounded like my dad and channel my sympathy for broken people into my career as a counselor and charity work in my church.

David

My longest obsession was in high school. On the first day I talked to the boy sitting next to me. I asked him if he was happy to be in high school. He told me he was nervous because his older brother was a popular person, and he did not know if he could walk in his shadow. To this day, I remember feeling sorry for him. Then, within days, I was in love with him.

As I am a Torchbearer, I still loved him for the next twenty years. At the twentieth high school reunion we danced together. He had been in a car accident while driving drunk and was now paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair. He was still drinking alcoholically and using drugs. Despite this, the moment I saw him I was sympathetic. This led to six months of romance.

Because I was in recovery, I eventually realized I did not want to be with an alcoholic. I asked him to stop. He refused, so I left. To this day it amazes me that I fell in love with David before he even took his first drink and that he would turn out to be an exact copy of my alcoholic, sympathetic father.