Mark's Pages

May 9, 2005:

Which isn't such a difficult question.

You believed she understood you, and was uniquely supportive. False, both, especially the latter. Exactly backward, yet for so long you blinded yourself, inventing denials.

You felt sorry for her. Her pain, the emotional hardships she'd suffered. You saw the haunted look in her eyes and it drew you in.

It was easy to make excuses for her. She'd been a victim. Not until later in life did it become impossible to deny she was a victimizer herself.

You felt such empathy for her that you inevitably and narcissistically believed that the empathy was reciprocated. Naively you termed this "communion". It wasn't communion, it was empathy and it ran in one direction.

Then at the deepest level you became conditioned over time, in the same way that any participant in an abusive relationship becomes conditioned, so that your happiness hung on her approval in the same way that a child of alcoholics in the popular apocrypha comes to attune their nervous system to the fulfillment of the abuser's needs. In return of course for the merest drip-drops of approbation, doled out like heroin to an addict in agony of withdrawal.

Sick.

Which is, in the end, the shortest answer. You were sick. You both were.

May you each do better next time.