Instead, I've been trying to fully rationalize just why therapy is something I have to do at this point in my life.
The obvious and easily the most glaring reason why is the degree of both childhood and adult trauma I've held onto for most of the past three decades. That is undisputed and I fully accept the fact that that alone qualifies me for needing to talk to a mental health professional.
But I also had a conversation with a friend the other day that provided a point of emphasis for another reason I apparently need therapy, and this one bother me more than a little bit.
That point being that I need it because I want to be accepted and loved by people who, for whatever reason, aren't capable of providing either to a level that allows for a healthy relationship.
Since going into retirement in 2011, I've had times where the idea of ending it for the hypothetical right person has been a very strong consideration. As Ghost so declaratively put it the day she destroyed me, 'It's a good thing there's seven billion people on the planet, because maybe there's someone out there who'll love you...'
Well, the reality is that out of those billions, there's only three people I would've considered coming out of retirement for, and of the two I'm still connected to in any capacity, both have made it plain that I am nothing other than a friend.
Now, the most obvious option is to, of course, go out and meet more people. After all, that's how we've been cultivating new connections and relationships since time immemorial. Even in an age where we've boiled down potential companions and non-platonic opportunities to the swipe one way or another on a phone screen, it still comes down to the idea of putting yourself back out there and being seen.
Except that, for reasons I'll get to presently, is no longer an option.
Ten years ago, I started my final year of university and I remember very clearly that my aim in finishing my education was purely that. I was there to get my degree and make up for over a previous decade of lost time spent getting through a lot of the traumas that put me on the road to needing therapy in the first place.
I was not there, however, to make friends.
The reasoning behind stemmed from the duality of being married at the time to someone who possessed such a degree of insecurity and distrust of her spouse that I'd had to jettison the majority of friends I'd had when we first got together, because she saw them and anyone else in my social circle as potential threats to somehow take me away, thereby depriving her of the trophy she so badly coveted and was determined to hold onto at all costs.
Editorial Note: For the record, if you were to ask my ex-wife about this, she'll deny it vehemently and instead say I took advantage of her profound generosity and saw her as nothing but a simple meal ticket for the sixteen years we were together. Such is what happens when you fully subscribe to the helpless victim stance and refuse to recognize, let alone be accountable for, your own toxic behaviors, but I digress.
The second prong of that duality came from having endured the trauma of my primary education, which was nothing short of brutal. Said brutality came in the form of being relentlessly bullied, trivialized, marginalized, ignored and summarily rejected by the majority of both my peers and teachers who I had to interact with year, after year, after year.
Yes, I had small cluster of friends who I felt comfortable enough with that I could trust them and be more of myself when we were together. But it also didn't stop me from trying to exceed the limits of the bubble I felt trapped in, either.
It's not surprising then, that this applied most to girls whom I felt attracted to and hoped to establish potential relationships with. Being already a massively socially awkward person at the time and having that compounded by physical awkwardness and an extreme lack of both self-esteem and self-confidence, such attempts were never easy. And it wasn't long before I began recognizing patterns that would carry through all the way to now.
Upon meeting and getting to know someone, it quickly became obvious that my purpose was to be an emotional support animal. I've genuinely lost count of how many nights I stayed up late talking with female friends, listening to them cry and tell me how some other guy they were attracted to had treated them like complete shit, then ask me the same damn question...
'Why aren't there any good guys in the world?!'
I had to sit there and watch these people I cared about and harbored genuine feelings for get emotionally pulverized by guys who I'd loved nothing more than to take my own anger and frustrations out on. Or worse, it was a case where I served as the third wheel, having to watch them be seemingly happy with someone else.
All the while, biting my tongue until I practically gnawed through it because I'd learned the hard way that as soon as I spoke up and said anything about how I felt, that person disconnected from me faster than it takes to flip off a light switch because I'd crossed the rubicon from emotional support animal to interested party...and that was not acceptable.
Now I suspect the pressing question at this point is 'Why did any of that matter years later when I was an adult?'
On paper, it shouldn't. But we don't live on paper and when you had to spend the majority of your early existence endlessly trying to prove that you matter, only to have practically every aspect of your world tell you, No, boyo...you REALLY don't, that doesn't come out in the wash. All it does is further solidify the programming you're assimilating every day by people who on the one hand, tell you they love you, but then do all they can to undermine just about everything you need to be able to function like a 'normal' person would or should.
As a result, I didn't function that way. Instead, I fully enveloped myself in a bubble of willful isolation, not making any friends or letting myself get to know anyone on anything other than a working or otherwise professional level for close to fifteen years. Any connections outside that purview had to be essentially through my marriage and approved on some degree by my wife.
It doesn't take a Ph.d in psychology to understand that that's not a very healthy way to try interact with people.
By the time I reached my final year of university, it was glaringly obvious to me that I couldn't keep doing that and I owed it to myself on some level to at least try to form some new connections. So I did and what I wasn't prepared for, or in no way could've anticipated, was the amount of energy that was going to take. To this day, I don't think any of the friends I made back then fully understand just how hard it was to let my guard down enough to let them into my world on some level.
It was exhausting and I don't use that term lightly or for the sake of hyperbole.
When you've allowed yourself to operate a certain way for so long, as much as a matter of simple survival as much as it is the perception of knowing your place in the social hierarchy, daring to go against the grain on that can sap the life out of you. Especially when it's become so entrenched in your psyche that it's always there to remind you how trying to evolve into something else is a complete and utter impossibility.
Fast forward to after my marriage disintegrated and I suddenly found myself single as I was entering middle-age with a severe case of dad-bod, my hair falling out, a career I'd barely paid for that was seemingly stuck in reverse as I was trying to get the damn thing off the lot, the financial tonnage of said investment around my neck like an anchor and a head full of Depression and PTSD that decided it was the perfect time to crank it up past eleven. To me, it wasn't hard to rationalize that I was, without question, the single-most unattractive human being in history.
Seriously, I felt like I could make the Elephant Man seem like late-90's Brad freakin' Pitt, by comparison.
And yet, I was still supposed to go out and find someone else to try and be with, so I did. Except I'd quickly discovered that it might be a new century and we were all supposedly woke to the new realities of the world...but nothing had really changed insofar as my ability to go beyond the confines laid out by people I saw a potential future with.
Not only were the lines of demarcation more severely drawn. Now they were guarded by a whole hell of a lot of barbed wire, dragon's teeth and other defenses prepared to take my head off if I made even the slightest move out of my allotted space.
But here's the kicker about emotions and why they exist. They demand to be felt — even when you know it's the absolute worst thing you could let yourself do. So I did and each time, I paid for my idiocy in thinking that it might somehow end differently than it has since I first started letting myself care about people more than I should have.
The friend I mentioned at the start of this said to me that one of the things she hopes I'll get out of therapy is that I'll stop being envious of people I'm attracted to who're in relationships and still want to include me in their lives, because, as she put it, "That sort of behavior can kill friendships."
Maybe it is, but my counter to that is what's more detrimental to a friendship or even just a person as a whole — forcing someone who cares about you on a potentially non-platonic level to have to swallow their feelings because it's considered some sort of inconvenience, or making them be a bystander for your attempts to be happy with someone else, then serve as a sounding board when it inevitably goes sideways?
Having been on the receiving end of both way too many times for one lifetime, I know well enough there's no right answer to that equation. They're both cruel and hurtful actions that we all-too-conveniently compartmentalize behind the edict that just because someone cares about you on that sort of level, they don't deserve to have that affection returned in any way, shape or form. This, of course flies in the face of about two centuries of opposing social norms and conventions that we cling to for dear life, slapping them on everything from internet memes and Hallmark cards to what we tell each other when someone tears our heart out for the seemingly umpteenth time:
Don't worry. There's someone out there for you. You deserve to be loved and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
I'm no genius, but I've been around this floating ball of rock long enough to know that you can't have it both ways.
To be fair, I don't go out of my way to make friends with women in order to eventually ask them out. I've had quite a few female friends over the years who I've felt exactly zero romantic feelings for and that doesn't bother me, nor should it. And when I find myself getting attracted to a female friend, it's not because of some quantum shift in my behavior that makes me think that they're somehow obliged to date me.
It's because by that stage, I feel comfortable enough that I feel like I can start to trust them, and more importantly, I feel like I can let my guard down and be myself, warts and all. Simple as that.
It may not be the right thing to do, per current social prerogatives, but I've reached the point where it's simply easier for me to find the quickest and easiest way out of what we now colloquially call the friend zone than it is to continued to be trapped in it because I'm not considered good enough to be anything else but.
I had to come to terms a long time ago that no matter what I do or how much I try to prove I'm just as worthy of it as anyone else, no one will have me. There's absolutely nothing in that acceptance, however, that requires me to like it on any level or continue to operate as yet another someone else's emotional support animal in exchange for being called a friend.
I'm sorry, but if that's what you need, then get a dog. They'll still love you unconditionally even after you go through yet another breakup with someone who didn't care about you as much as I did before you said I wasn't good enough.
Either that or do what I'm doing and go get some therapy, because I can't be the only one who's head is messed up if this is how friendships and relationships work in the 21st century.
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