Important reading.

Healthy things to do if you are feeling unloved in your marriage.

Best codependency article I ever read.

And this is my mother. Does it sound like anyone you know?

Just Because You Know What's Wrong With You, That Still Doesn't Make It Go Away.

Present.

I’m discovering as I learn more that I must have one of the unluckiest natal charts you can get. Not ONLY do I have Saturn square my Sun, Moon, Mars, AND Mercury, but I also was born with my midheaven right on top of the Weeping Sisters, and throughout my entire childhood I experienced a really awful phenomenon called “Saturn Chasing the Moon.” (It didn’t end until I moved out of the house and got away from my BPD mother. Isn’t that appropriate??)

Who the FUCK has all that? Not to mention: Saturn yod with Neptune and Uranus, and Saturn is the highest planet in the chart, the “handle” of a bucket formation.

Hmm.

It is said that the Weeping Sisters guarantee you a life with lots to weep about.

No shit.

Something else just occurred to me. Anne Ortelee, when she looked at my chart, told me I’d have met and married someone else by October 2017. I don’t know what she was looking at—Well, yes, I do. She was looking at Chi! But I looked at the same chart and transits and saw me hearing from Chi again. So did Alice Portman, and when I went to class, my teacher pointed out some additional indicators of something Big and Fateful happening then.

At first I thought, well, I can forgive Anne, she didn’t have both our charts. Then, I remembered: Yes, she did. She told me Chi was eight years old emotionally. (Now, that I can believe.)

I was right, over a big practicing professional Manhattan astrologer.

So I guess I’d better pay attention to what I see now.

Except … (and I’ve been through this once already, so I guess that will help.)

This, like last fall, is where I go: It’s May. Regardless of the accuracy of our charts so far, free will trumps charts every time. Here’s where it doesn’t happen, and I never see him again. And even though I know how horribly dangerous this relationship is, how unhealthy this person is from a bad childhood, and how resistant he is to doing the work required to get well … I’m still hideously depressed. Really, really hurting.

I already know I’m supposed to be grown up. Not needy for relationship, not fused with other people, just taking care of what I have to do every day, humming to myself and in a happy or at least even frame of mind, like everyone else. But something’s just plain wrong with me.

I know that this place where my heart just hurts and hurts is really just that baby and young child from 45 years ago, squashed by sick parents and rejected by cruel schoolmates and let to cry all alone. I know. But I still can’t make it stop, and I still can’t make it go away.

And I really need to get over this, because I see now, from the time my husband died, I was going to be all alone in my life for at least ten years, no matter what, and possibly even longer than that. I may have the power to barge in and change what’s going to happen. If I insist, I don’t have to be all alone for the next ten years. But if I do that, there’s hell to pay. 

Basically, I can choose to be all alone in my life now, or I can put it off until I’m seventy-one. 

I’m wayyyy better off doing it the right way … doing it now. If I grab at the relationship now, because I’m too lonely and weak and sad and scared to just walk away and accept that I might be alone forever and ever more, it’s a sick enmeshed codependent relationship. The same things happen in that relationship that have happened so far in theirs. I’m Rory, and he’s Chi. Nobody learned anything. Nobody got well. And it ends horribly at an age when NOBODY wants their relationship to end horribly.

Clearly, that just can’t take place. So I’m left with:

Scenario One:

He shows up on schedule. He’s still codependent, of course, because he sure as hell wasn’t doing anything with his recovery last fall, and I didn’t see much chance of that happening anytime soon, not with the attitude I was hearing and the people he spends time around. I still have to send him back home, and request once again that he address his own problems, not everyone else’s. We wouldn’t be back in each other’s lives for keeps in any case before 2023 (and there’s more in his chart supporting that.) And maybe Rory wakes up along the way and 2023 never happens. Because if she makes ANY change for the better at ALL, he stays. He doesn’t want to upset his adult children and his family. And that's the way it should be. Iff she wakes up and does better.

Scenario Two:

Something’s happened. He’s too codependent to even try ever getting out of there no matter how miserable he is, or Rory woke up and they fixed their marriage, finally. Summer goes by and he’s just, gone. Even if my transits are right and some relationship shows up in five years—it’s just with someone else—I’m STILL alone for five more years. The only way not to be alone for a total of ten fucking years is to accept an illicit affair with Chi this summer—and that turns out bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Even though we have a Davison with very good potential. As I said, it seems that the reason good Davisons don’t turn out good is: Somebody’s being an asshole.

And what do we usually call people who have an affair with a married person (among other things)?

Although, I have to say: that 2023 relationship is reflected in all three sets of charts and transits. AND progressions. That speaks pretty loudly to me.

Whatever happens, I’m alone for at least five more years, and possibly even longer than that. Alone with the housework, alone with the laundry, alone with the dreariness of life.

It’s not like I haven’t met new people in five years. It’s just that they’ve all had emotional problems, or none of them fit like the relationships I always needed and USED to have.

This is when I go right back to thinking, Those were the good times in my life, and now they’re over and today sucks. There’s no point reminding myself that the company of a stuck, unhealed, self-loathing codependent wouldn’t help. He’d just yes me and resent me, yes me and resent me, then talk about me behind my back and attract another affair instead of risking and showing up and connecting and being authentic and being real, and the relationship would LOOK wonderful and BE fake. (Just like their marriage.)

I know. And it isn’t helping.

Why can’t I just be healed and live life like other people? What is it going to take to change my feelings and get me there?

**************************************************
Shortly after I wrote all that, this thought surfaced ... 

(coming next week ...)

Twenty-two General Principles for Dealing with Codependency

FUTURE

At night, when the stars come out, if I'm outside, usually in the car, the first one I see, I always do that little "Star light, star bright" prayer. 

What do I wish for? Always the same thing. "If Chi isn't going to get well, please don't let him come back. I don't want to see him again if he's never going to get well." 

Doesn't mean I don't miss him. I do get so caught up sometimes in all I've learned about codependency and the negative consequences of the behavior that I forget the good stuff.

And there was good stuff. If these guys were absolutely no good for us at all, they'd be easy to forget, right? This guy was so sweet, so sharp, so smart. We understood each other so well. He was so funny. We could talk forever about so many things. Once upon a time, Chi posted a joke on his Facebook that was so brilliant and so funny, it was just the epitome of why I fell in love with him and thought he'd be The One, that long-ago someday before Simon ever got widowed and asked me out. (Only I thought Simon would be The One, too. Odd sensation, that. Just look at our horoscopes ... they think the same things!) I can't post the joke here. I wish I could. It's just emblematic of the mind the man has. 

I have a pretty limited, specialized field of knowledge. I've spent so much time with my nose in a medical book, an astrology book, or a psychology book that I really can't tell you much of anything about classic movies, classic books, classic music. But he can. One reason I think Chi knows so much about everything but his own problems is that his inquisitive, brilliant, far-reaching mind has seized on all these other amazing things the world has to offer as a way to distract himself from thinking or learning about his problems. And, yeah ... so does his natal chart. (Sun conjunct Neptune. Moon square Jupiter.)

It's had the side effect of making him absolutely brilliant. And a kindred spirit I still miss very much. 

It's hard to lose the two loves of your life.

And I wonder why I feel so lackluster in life now. When you've had the best, and then you lose it, life isn't going to feel the same ever again. It just isn't. Maybe I should just quit dumping on myself for feeling bad about that and just accept it. This is life. Oh, well.

So, what happens now?

Well, the astrology for the end of this spring and this summer is pretty darn clear. It would smack any idiot upside the head.

If it doesn't happen, I have to assume Chi is just going to stagnate and never, ever get any better, and I don't need to feel bad about losing him. The consequences of a relationship with a codependent this stuck are so clear to me now that I'll know I've dodged a big, bad, bullet.

If the charts call their shot once again, though ... there's where things will get interesting. Let's put it this way: Just because he shows up again does NOT mean he will eventually turn the corner, put his back into it, and become healthier; but the only way I will see him ever again is if that is a distinct possibility. If he's just going to stagnate, he's going to do that at home, or with someone else just as sick and stuck.

Will I follow my own damn common sense, or relapse and do something DUMB? Will Chi ever engage his own problems and get better?

Tune in next ... (For reasons I can't write here, I'm betting the end of the month.)

To that end, I composed the following:

 

TWENTY-TWO PRINCIPLES FOR DEALING WITH CODEPENDENCY

1.)    The truth always comes out. The truth always comes out. The truth always comes out. The truth always comes out.

2.)    That’s because it is, in fact, the truth, and truth is supreme in the universe.

3.)    The longer the truth takes to show itself, the worse the outcome is, and the greater number of (and the worse) people get hurt.

4.)    For these reasons, any and all relationship must always be grounded in the truth.

5.)    Hiding the truth from anyone, including yourself, in any way or for any reason, is never an acceptable thing to do, even when you’re scared. Even when you think you are trying to be nice or kind. Even when someone might get angry.

6.)    When in doubt about this, start at Number One and repeat.

7.)    If you are thinking or feeling the words, “I have no choice because someone might get upset,” or “Someone will get upset, so I have to ...” it’s codependent posturing, you're just groveling to get approval from other people, and you’re not displaying the real truth to yourself or to other people.

8.)    The truth is that you are a human being like all other human beings, with feelings like any other human being, born to unfold YOUR unique needs, talents, and potential, just like any other human being.

9.)    It doesn’t matter if your parents treated you as if you were not a human being because they needed to continue drinking, using drugs, being mentally ill, or whatever it was that they were doing. Even though you were born to people who shouldn’t have been entrusted with the care of precious, vulnerable, tender young children, the truth is that you are still a human being, with the same worth, feelings, rights, and needs to be yourself as any other human being.

10.) It doesn’t matter if you then picked out more relationships in which people treated you the same way your parents did. Principle Eight is STILL true.

11.) While it is true that human beings should not act out aggressively toward other beings or inflict injury to get what they need or want, it is also true that acting, pretending, lying, and turning one’s own feelings and needs down so as not to hurt anyone else is just as deeply painful and hurtful to the self. Refer again to Principle Eight.

12.) If this is hard to understand, start over at Principle One, paying special attention to Principle Eight.

13.) When any person is injured, or when truth is ignored, there are always consequences, and they are usually bad. In pondering this fact, please again review Principles One and Eight.

14.) When we ignore those consequences and repeat the same mistakes, the consequences happen again, and they are usually worse.

15.) When we are codependent, or we have low self-worth, we haven’t acquired a good grasp of the first fourteen principles.

16.) Therefore, the consequences take many years to show themselves, because we are acting, pretending, lying, and fundamentally dishonest in character. So, when the consequences happen, they are exceedingly bad. Life-ruiningly bad, in some cases.

17.) When people have emotional problems, the only thing that will fix those problems is their own determination to do so--their own reading, learning, and study, and their own hard work. Past the teenage years, the time when emotional problems can be altered by treating the sufferer differently is OVER.

18.) For this reason, the best way to help a person with emotional problems is to stand firm and demand that this individual do his own reading, learning, and therapy, and his own hard work. You cannot heal or mature an adult by babying him.

19.) Therefore, the truth is that trying to help an emotionally disturbed person by accommodating yourself to their problems and pain is a solution that never, never works, and this practice must be stopped.

20.) Those who fail to heed these principles will pay a price, usually a very big and very nasty one. It is quite possible to ruin lives by the failure to learn and practice these principles.

21.) The fact that our parents and our early life taught us something other than these principles, or implied that we were bad  or unlovable children if we acted on them when they wanted something else from us, does not make these principles any less true.

22.) Humans are not supposed to spend miserable lives in codependency and low self-worth. We are supposed to work, heal, and get well! So do that. NOW.

REFUSE TO FUSE.

PRESENT

So, I’ve become so interested in astrology as a way to help decode my problems and my future that I took over an orphaned astrology beginner’s group that was in danger of disbanding because the organizer stepped down. We're in the middle of the planets, and I took Saturn because I know so much about it. (And I can give soooo many good examples!)

This was sort of like a rehash of this post. In short,

Saturn square Sun—Your dark side is supposed to help you find your true potential. Urgent for you to integrate the two but also more difficult. Sun= the desire for recognition and self-expression. Your entire psyche is bent on achieving completeness and self-determination. You find at an early age that you have to work hard for everything. You feel like you have to guard yourself against life so you don’t get a blow that will flatten you. Too responsible. Never had the chance to be a child, so you never got to relax and just have something effortlessly go well for you in life. A lot of duty in childhood so you feel guilty for relaxing or having fun. Can be an extreme failure or an extreme success. Basically, your father let you down in some way and didn’t provide the encouragement of self a child needs, so you have to learn to do that all on your own. You get NO outside help discovering your own identity. An opportunity to explore conscious initiative and creative endeavor.

Saturn square Moon—Moon=link with childhood and suggests the area where need for emotional security and a sense of continuity with the past is expressed. The Moon is what your parents, especially Mom, were and the longing for emotional rapport and an instinctual closeness with someone that works like the parental relationship. Difficult childhood either financially or emotionally because your mother let you down in some way. Your mother made you feel rejected, isolated, and inadequate. You had to learn to control your feelings as a child and now you’re brooding, lonely, and aloof. You need the close healthy family you never had because your family was high on rules and low on real love for the child you actually were. “Business before pleasure” early home life. Parents were a burden or a disappointment to the child. You have to develop your sense of emotional security all on your own because you don’t have any happy memories from childhood, and you can’t find that kind of healthy relationship to nest in in adult life. Moon-Saturn aspects in chart suggest that it’s time for you to become a conscious, thinking entity. Mom was a big, bad deal in your life that has to be dealt with.

Saturn square Mercury—Mercury=the instrument of communication of the birth chart’s potential to the environment and the instrument of assimilating data from the environment. If a bad aspect, the child didn’t get good feedback, encouragement, or help in this area, so has to develop this all on his own. Parents had the attitude that the child couldn’t think for himself because he was a child and therefore any thought the child had that conflicted with the opinions of elders got stifled. So the child grew up thinking he was stupid and feeling afraid to do anything because he was sure he would mess up. So he was afraid to do anything, was so slow and hesitant that he looked stupid to other people, was treated as stupid, so got confirmation that he was stupid and got even slower and more scared. Saturn-Mercury has to learn everything by their own effort. Suggests the opportunity for self-education in a deeper sense. Reflects urge to discover the truth and meaning in any experience. The native is not getting his opinions from other people but from himself.

Saturn square Mars—Worse for men than women. Can reflect cruelty suffered at the hands of others.  Recklessness, accidents, conflict with authority, attracting ill-will from other people. Not the only expression of this however. Inner frustration and feelings of weakness and powerlessness, so you’re acting out on other people. You’re trying to defend yourself because you’ve been treated so cruelly. OR, the same thing happened but you folded under pressure from other people and now you can’t assert yourself and get taken advantage of. You can’t say no and then you just SNAP! Authoritarian parents who just squashed you. Can be physical abuse in childhood. All this can get played out in the sexual arena (it’s Mars.) Opportunity in this life is for  deeper understanding of your personal will and the nature of power and control, that you don’t need to dominate others to prove yourself.

ALL of this is true for me. In short, I had parents who were wholly inadequate, and I grew up believing that I was weak and powerless and couldn't defend myself, and that I was stupid; and I grew up longing for the warm, close healthy fusion with loving, healthy caregivers that every child needs. And I grew up with no encouragement to be the real me, and had to learn to do that all on my own.

A child has needs that have to be met by the caregivers in order to develop and grow up healthy. Physical needs, of course, but emotional needs, too, and these were the ones I didn't get. And one thing a child will do is try its very hardest to get the caregiver to meet its needs so it can grow up healthy and develop its full potential to be uniquely its very own, special self.

I also had the Vertex to research and explain, and my examples for that can also be found in here and have to do with this relationship with Chi. As I talked and people asked questions, I realized several things:

When we don't get what we need as children, we try to stay children, crying and demanding from other people what we needed from our parents in order to emerge emotionally and physically healthy into adulthood.

Neither Chi nor I got that. Chi got worthlessness messages from parents who wouldn't take care of the children because they were drinking and codependent, so he's spent his whole life bending over backwards and sacrificing his entire being to please family, trying to get out of them the messages of worth that parents didn't give him growing up. And because I think I'm weak, powerless, stupid (and therefore incapable of success enough to support myself throughout all stages of the life cycle), and received no encouragement from these Godlike beings who should have done that if I were really good enough, I'm looking for someone to do those things for me.

Here's the corker: According to everything I've been told about her, and everything her chart tells me, so was Rory! We have identical experiences in childhood, and we're seeking the exact same kinds of caretaking from our mate!

SEE how these two sets of needs and behavior dovetail with one another and then destroy one another?

We see how it's worked out with Chi and Rory. He completely negated his own self to bend over backwards for her and take care of all of her needs, looking for her to show behavior that says, "You are a worthy being." Not only didn't he get it, now he's in so much pain that he's about to bolt right into another relationship exactly like that one, still looking for the same thing!

Only I woke up.

When we got together, this was e-x-a-c-t-l-y what I was about to do. I have to be honest and admit it; this is what was going to happen. And he wouldn't have been honest about how I was hurting him as I exacted my demands, just like he hasn't been at home; so I wouldn't have understood that I was hurting him. Just as the people in his life now don't understand it, and now that he's struggling to express it, they think he's "crazy" and bad, and are exerting all the pressure they can to make him show up the way he always used to show up.

Whereas I ...

Can see where all this unhealthy fusion I'm trying to do came from.

I don't know how a preverbal child can absorb so well what its parent wants in order to feel disposed to behave warmly toward the child and take care of the child, but I did. I remember being on the school bus at five and falling in love with the bus driver. I remember scratching her back as the bus went down the road, thinking if I was nice to her somehow, she'd like me.

Only five years old, and I already had my mother down cold. Somehow, I absorbed that my mother thought if others just fused enough with her pain and her bad feelings about herself, she could finally feel better. My mother just never accepted it: SHE HAD TO WORK ON HER OWN PROBLEMS TO FEEL BETTER. 

My mother never wanted to work at anything. At eleven or twelve, I had to come home from school on Friday nights and clean half the house, all the dusting, all the vacuuming, and both bathrooms, before I was allowed to do anything else. My mother was making me do household chores at seven or eight, not by showing me exactly what she wanted me to do, but by telling me to do it, and then screaming at me when I didn't know what to do and left something out. (Who would have thought the "back of the toilet" meant the space behind the lid, not the top of the tank? How many times did I get screamed at and spanked before she actually showed me what she meant? Even though I was supposed to feel sorry for her because Grandma and Grandad did the exact same thing?) 

My mother felt simultaneously too stupid to hold a job and too entitled to. "I was incested as a child and my life's been bad enough! I shouldn't have to work! My husband is supposed to take care of me." Eventually that extended to cooking dinner. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, the owners of my mother and stepfather's favorite restaurant once commented that my mother never cooked. They ate out practically every night, because she "got treated so badly" and her "life's been so terrible, I shouldn't have to cook! I feel so bad I don't even want to cook anymore! Why should I have to cook for him?"
 
What a child my mother was!

And the real children in any family realize that when the parent feels right, then the parent will take care of the children.

So I spent thirty-eight years of my life in unhealthy fusion, sure that if I just fused with my mother enough--identifying with her pain, understanding how she felt, adopting every thought and every bad feeling as my own--that would make her feel better and fix her and then she would give me what I needed.

So what was I trying to do with Chi? (And I'm sure this is exactly what Rory was trying to do when she met him, too. When they first started dating, he'd experienced two horrible tragedies in his life, on top of the tragedy of his awful childhood.) We both thought that if we just fused with him sympathetically enough, he would accept a sense of worth, and then he would be ... SO grateful.

He's going, If I please these people they'll make me feel worthy (like my parents failed to do), and we're going, If we love him up and make him feel worthy, he'll encourage us and take care of us since we don't feel smart enough to take care of ourselves (like our parents failed to do). Neptune in a natal chart symbolizes all the things our childhood made us believe we're just hopeless to ever be able to do for ourselves, the things we look for another to do for us, and there's why Chi shows up as Neptune in both charts. (Moon Opp Neptune. UGH.)

We're trying to stay children, still handing the responsibility for the development of these areas of our personalities over to other people, the way they rightfully belonged to our parents while we were still little.

But we aren't supposed to stay children. Astrology tells us that we are powerful beings, much more powerful than even we know, and our job on the planet, when our parents neglect all these responsibilities in our growing up, is to take command and do them all by ourselves, without them.

And none of us wants to do that.

I'm sitting there in the meeting today, and Brittany says, "It's like you're trying to supply self-worth to your parent or to him, to prove you have worth. So they'll see how worthy you are. And I've done that, and it doesn't work. So, you can see that, so just stop doing it."

Exactly.

Because you can't do someone else's work for them. We pair up romantically trying to get someone else to do our unfinished growing-up work for us, when the truth is that it's impossible.

I'm not supposed to rely on someone else to know I'm smart and capable for me, I'm supposed to know that for myself. I'm not supposed to rope someone into providing financially for me, I'm supposed to provide financially for myself. I'm not supposed to marry someone who succeeds in the world, I'm supposed to succeed in the world. I'm not supposed to have a close person to lean on; I'm supposed to depend on myself.

And Chi isn't supposed to bend over backwards for other people because he's totally dependent on that steady drip-drip-drip of approval from other people in order to feel worthy for the next ten minutes before he needs someone else to approve of him again.

That's why it's called, self-worth.

We have missing pieces in our childhood because we're supposed to take command, find strength, and do those missing pieces all alone.

When we don't, the result is a Jane--who clearly didn't get enough attention from parents and now demands it from everyone at the table the entire time she's seated there--and simply cannot assimilate that she's being rude and driving everyone else away no matter how I dandle her on my knee, baby her ego, and try to be gentle as I attempt to get this through her thick skull. When I attempt to baby her, all I get is kicked in the teeth.

Do I want this kind of person to live with the rest of my life?

No. I spent thirty-eight years in this same dynamic with my mother, and that's long enough.

No more fusing with other people, feeling their pain as if it's my own, thinking if I just baby them enough, they'll get it and finally feel better about themselves and then everything will be great. When you baby people, all they do is stay immature and expect more babying.

The only way we acquire what our parents didn't help us develop is OUR OWN HARD WORK.

If the other person isn't doing that hard work, it's a lost cause, and the outcome of the relationship is horrible.

So, there's no relationship here. As far as I know, this person is not yet doing his own hard work.

I guess that means I run a good risk, at my age, of never having another relationship, healthy or otherwise, ever again. I certainly haven't met any healthy candidates in almost five years a widow.

Oh, well. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Too bad.

Anything is better than my mom again, or twenty years with another Jane.

Where we get in trouble is when we don't realize that, or we keep deluding ourselves about it.

On Fusion.

PRESENT

I don’t know how far I was into Rebuilding When Your Relationship Ends when I realized what is really wrong with me.

My entire life, I’ve been searching for a family that was actually healthy. I remember being despondent in my teens and twenties, sure I was so fat no one would ever love me, that my legs were too thick and bunchy and didn’t look “beautiful” enough, that my butt was too big. I remember substituting daydreams for love instead, and having this odd sensation: Wasn’t this actually supposed to happen to me sometime, here? Where is it??

And then I found it! I met Simon, and we dated almost four years and had a wonderful marriage.

And I was happy.

It never even so much as occurred to me that this wasn’t the natural state of man, what we all look for and what we all need to be happy. I mean, look at all this literature about relatedness and connection, and how people are unhealthy without it, and how society is the worse for it. Disconnection and people feeling unloved is the root of most social ills. Even Mother Theresa said it.

This information is all over the place! You’re nobody til somebody loves you. So many social scientists wring their hands over the problems of aloneness and disconnection in this country that there’s just got to be something really wrong with aloneness and disconnection!

I never, ever imagined that they’re actually normal. That we’re all supposed to grow strong enough in ourselves to be happy all by ourselves, with no one and nobody else. Maybe the cosmic reason our society is so disconnected and so many people are all alone is because we came into this life in order to do just that.

Relationship, relationship, relationship, relationship. It’s supposed to make the world go around.

So of course as soon as I was absolutely alone, I mourned the absence of relationship. I’d never have anybody close in my life again. I’m old, and I’m not young, sexy, or pretty anymore, so no one was going to want me! (Certainly nobody else like Simon, who was my perfect match. They broke the mold when they made him.)

What was going to happen to me, as I grew old alone? What would happen to me when I was in trouble? If I got sick or had an accident and couldn’t work? If I woke up in the middle of the night having a heart attack and I was all alone? When I got my first cancer diagnosis? No one in this entire world gives a shit about me, and I’d be left to struggle all alone.

Always I was looking back, back, back, back to when I had someone to be with all the time, and I was happy just knowing he was there to come home to. Waking up and living my days with someone as happy, optimistic, and fun as Simon made everything worthwhile, no matter what I had to give up in terms of time and my old dreams. And as his illness progressed, that turned out to be quite a lot.

If I had him, I was fine. It didn’t matter anymore that I was never going to be a real writer. Those were just silly dreams; they never happen to people anyway.

That’s what we do. When we’re in a relationship, if it’s a good one, we get so happy and comfortable there that our personalities twine all around the relationship, and—*POOF!* We’ve changed. We’re not our old selves anymore.

Maybe we’re not even who we were supposed to be anymore.

But we don’t know that. We think that all of human existence is nothing but Relationship. And we have to have at least one with somebody, or life is no good and we’re not safe.

There’s no doubt that my relationship with Simon was the happiest time of my entire life. I doubt very seriously that I will ever be that happy again. And, when you find a person and a relationship and a time like that, perhaps it’s right that your personality deforms to accommodate it. That relationship was a precious eleven years for me. It will never happen again.

But sometimes, when you deform your personality to live in relationship with someone, you do something wrong. You do something to your personality that you should not have done, and then your relationship becomes unhealthy and then it breaks up. You stopped changing. You stopped learning. You stopped growing in order to be in your relationship. Or maybe you just stopped being yourself.

Then your relationship ends, and you have this horrible, miserable transformation you have to undergo, in order to find out what your mistake was, and how you need to unkink your personality again and grow back in the direction you should have been going. You have to be alone for a long, long time in order to do that, because if you reform another relationship before you do that, it’s just unhealthy in the same way and it will break up.

The whole trick in relationship is being your real self in the relationship while accommodating to living with another person. Too much your way or too much their way, and somebody gets stifled to death and the relationship ends.

I’m thinking of Chi and Rory here. If there was ever a textbook example of someone stifling themselves to death in order to accommodate themselves to a relationship, that was it.

But I’m also thinking of myself. As happy as I was with Simon, part of the reason was that I finally felt secure. I felt secure because I finally had someone with me who was big and strong and knowledgeable and adult in the ways I wasn’t. Someone who had always done well at work and owned his own business for twenty-five years. Emotionally, I was still a child who felt “too little” to handle big things in life like buying a car or an air conditioning system or big travel arrangements or washing the windows. I had Simon for that, thank God! And I was definitely the junior partner in the relationship. The sicker Simon got, the more the awesome and frightening responsibility I had to shoulder. I definitely didn’t feel ready for any of it, and I was better at some aspects of the job than others. It was something I would never, ever have willingly taken on, and I think one of the reasons he died while I was still so young was to show me that I could do it.

There are some healthy reasons to wrap our personalities all around a relationship.

Then, there are the UNhealthy ones. Yeah…the ones I’ve spent the last four and a half miserable years learning all about.

What I’m talking about up there, accommodating ourselves too much to the relationship, is codependent and a way we try to fuse emotionally with someone else. And I got that; on some level, I understood that.

What I didn’t understand is that this is normal in childhood. I found this in this book in a way I’d never seen it spelled out anywhere else.

I mean, think about it. When we’re little, ideally, Mom and Dad are right there all the time. Are you okay, honey? How did school go today? Do you need help with your homework? Why are you crying? Oh, it’s so wonderful that you did that! I’m so proud of you! Look how big and beautiful and talented you’re growing! You can be anything you want to be! Here, let’s pop a big bowl of popcorn and cuddle in bed together and watch Harry Potter movies! I love you, honey. Maybe we can order a pizza! We’re emotionally fused with Mom and Dad, and emotionally fused into this hand-holdy, sing-songy, fluffy-warm and safe and cuddly relationship that makes us feel good inside and okay. Oh, those images of Mom making us eggs and hot chocolate before school on a cold snowy morning! (That, I never got, because my mom didn’t want to get up for us, bitched and screamed about how slow we were the entire time, put out bowls of cereal, then went, “You’re so slow I don’t want to stay up and yell at you! I’m going back to bed!”) That not-so-lovely scene in the parentheses excluded, isn’t the preceding paragraph just your warm, fuzzy picture of ideal family life?

When we’re little kids, when we’re one and two and five and seven and nine, we need this absolutely. When we don’t get it, or if we only get it if Mom wants something from us, when she threatens to withhold it or punish us if we aren’t the children she wants us to be, when she uses this warm, loving quality of time to reward us only when we act like the children she wants us to be, that’s what makes us codependent.

Little kids can’t find their own sense of warmth and safety and OK-ness. Little kids need to get that from Mom and Dad, and they need it in order to grow up healthy emotionally.

Where most of us have gotten hung up is, we think we’re supposed to have this as adults all the time, and we think we can’t live without it.

Which is one reason I’m so unhappy. After eighteen-plus years of that kind of a mother, eighteen years of rejection from cruel schoolmates, and thirty-two years of believing, truly believing, I’d never even have sex ever in my life because I was too fat and men would think me repulsive (Fuck, man. Is it any wonder Fifty Shades and Twilight are our cultural ideals of romance, when most people are raised like this?), Simon and I got together and I finally had this kind of experience of love in my life!!

And then he died. And then he was gone. And then it was over. After not even seven years of marriage.

And I stumbled into the sunlight blinking, rubbing my eyes, thinking, That was it? That’s all? It’s all over? That’s all I get?? Ever, ever again? Really??

I still need to be emotionally fused to someone in order to feel okay. But, what we’re supposed to do in this life is grow ourselves up emotionally so we’re able to feel okay whether that’s present in our lives for us or not.

Yes, it’s true that as we become elderly, we get old and frail and we aren’t able to cook and do for ourselves anymore. It’s also true that if I had a car accident tonight and I was laid up and not able to work for six weeks, I would fall behind in the bills and I would most certainly need help! The same goes if we have heart attacks or cancer.

But if none of these things are true, we’re supposed to be able to feel okay without a warm-fuzzy, hand-holdy, sing-songy relationship in our lives all the time. We really are!

The trouble is, our society does not recognize this fact. And neither the fuck did I.

And inside, I’m still six years old, missing emotional fusion in my life, looking for it, longing for it, trying to make Chi fit the bill whether he actually does or not.

I mean, look at this. Because my mother had BPD, and used me as her emotional confidante literally ALL THE TIME, I spent all my life on this planet up until Simon died emotionally fused with someone. (Up until now, I always had at least one close friend.)

I didn’t have that emotionally warm mother who got up and made hot chocolate and pancakes and eggs, but I did have a mother who was emotionally up in my business every hour of every day, asking me every single picky little detail of who I sat with in school and what I said and what they said and whatIsaidandwhattheysaidandwhatIsaidandwhattheysaid on and on and on until I wanted to run away from home. Sharing every single picky little detail of every single little problem she had with another person (and demanding I agree with her view of things), and since she had BPD her life was nothing BUT problems with other people. And, you know, come to think of it ... that was the only way we kids were important to our mom. When we were tending to her needs. So now my brother is twice divorced and whining on Facebook all the time about how nobody wants a nice guy and he's so lonely and can't find anyone.

(What went wrong in those marriages, anyway? Anyone care to take any guesses?)

I have spent my entire life emotionally fused with other people’s lives, and for the first time in forty-five years, there was nobody there. I was utterly alone.

No wonder I don’t know how to be emotionally independent of other people, and why I’m longing back, back into the past, when somebody was there all the time.

This isn’t healthy. I’ve been left alone in my life so I could grow out of this. And that’s the job I was supposed to have accomplished by now, or I’d be so desperate I’d take Chi back no matter what—and he hasn’t done any emotional health work on himself. He’s still hideously codependent, and life with someone hideously codependent guarantees you won’t be treated well.

You’ll think you are, as the other person contorts himself to please you because he believes he’s unlovable, killing himself in the process—and then it will all blow apart, when the other person can’t stand the pain anymore and cheats on you.

(Codependents are known for cheating, y’all. This is why.)

I was supposed to have grown out of this need for emotional fusion with another person by now, so I wouldn’t do this to him or me. My job is to stand my ground and insist he get well, and walk away unless and until he does.

Only I don’t know how to live without emotional fusion. I’m still looking back, back, back into the past, to that golden time when I was happy. (That ended after barely seven years.)

A fine mess, huh?

I keep falling back into that trance, of looking wistfully back to those happy times I had with Simon, and a few with Chi, thinking those were the times I was really happy and that the present moment sucks. That I’ll never be happy again. That what’s the point?

I do better when I remember that that’s a child’s way of being in the world, a child’s way of looking at life, and that I’m supposed to just be me and focus on me and focus on developing my talents. There’s nobody healthy within a one hundred mile radius, and, as the incident with Jane just demonstrated, if you dandle unhealthy people on your knee and show them endless patience while hoping they’ll finally begin to treat you better … all they do is kick you in the teeth.

I hate to say it, but currently Chi falls into this category.

Anyone who hurts themselves that much is eventually going to explode and hurt everyone else. You can’t treat other people any better than you treat yourself, because treating yourself and other people truly well always involves HONESTY, and it NEVER involves acting. Acting is NEVER kind, because THE TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT, and the longer it takes, the more it hurts.

I’m tired of the sick people like my mother and Jane who have serious emotional problems and only want to look at others’ problems and never apply themselves to real, serious work on their own.

I don’t treat other people that way. I work hard so I don’t hurt myself and others, and that’s what love is. I need and deserve someone who will do the same for me.

Chi has one more opportunity to elect to be that person who will apply himself to the work it takes—on HIMSELF, not other people—to be healthy.

I don’t want to be so backward and so stuck in childhood that I’ll accept another Mom or another Jane. Because when it’s your husband or your significant other, being treated like that is the longest, cruelest, ugliest cut of all.

I just need to keep reminding myself: This is a child’s way of being. And I’m supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up. That means focusing on my talents, developing me, and forgetting about other people.

At the moment, there aren’t any healthy ones out there.

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