How Can You Connect To Someone Else When The Cord Is Frayed?

I want to escape this self-imposed prison.

I’m plagued.

Plagued by the feeling of being desperately lonely for intimate human connection, and yet petrified of going through it all over again only to be spat out when it all ends.

Lately I’ve been feeling like I am in a self-imposed prison. Inside the walls of my heart I am behind bars. Every time I want to open the door and take a tentative step outside into the sun, my brain screams at me to quickly get back in the cage and lock the door.

Do you ever get the feeling like you’re looking out at the world behind glass? Almost like a boy in a bubble?

You can see other people living their lives, happily being part of a couple, looking out for one another, and accepting each other’s foibles and imperfections.

You think to yourself ‘How do they do that?’.

Destined to fail?

I’ve had three significant relationships in my life. My first love was abusive. Cheating, lying, gaslighting, and triangulating me with his new partner. Classic trauma bond.

We were on and off for seven years during which time I had no other partners.

Then marriage. Emotional starvation. A husband who was addicted to porn and suffering from severe erectile dysfunction. Yet would never acknowledge the fact that we were living in a sexless marriage, despite my relentless attempts at rescuing to the point of burnout.

After divorce, another abuser. Cheated on, lied to, physically hit.

The deepest cut so far in terms of recovery.

I don’t blame them. I blame myself. I taught all of them how to treat me. Because I didn’t know any different.

My parents divorced, then my mother went deep into an addiction before she died of an overdose at the age of thirty-four.

Before she died, I was neglected. I did not matter. I was not important.

One night I woke up after a party and there was a naked man lying on top of her next to me on the bed.

I screamed and ran out of the room crying and panicking.

My mother minimized it and told me not to be so dramatic, that I was making a big deal out of nothing. She said that she was asleep and he was drunk.

I was confused. I asked her if that would mean that it was rape. She had no answer.

I begged her to never to let him into our house again. She didn’t listen to me. I came home one day a few weeks later and he was sitting in our kitchen, so I ran to my friend’s house and stayed there until he left.

In other words, a man who would do that to her was more important than her own daughter.

When I turned eleven, I was allowed to have a slumber party and invite some of my school friends. My mother set up a big tent in the backyard for us all to sleep in. After we went into the tent to sleep her friends came over and for a party and started drinking in the house.

Around midnight, one of her drunk male friends stumbled out and urinated on the side of our tent and my friends were all scared. I went inside to tell her and she told me to go back to the tent and stop making a big deal of it.

I was always told that I made a big deal of everything. Nothing pissed her off more than when I would interrupt her drinking time.

The deep shame I felt in front of my friends can’t be explained. I saw the look of disgust and pity on their faces.

I wish that I could tell some nice stories about the things she did for me. Because of course,and she did nice things too.

That’s the problem of a dysfunctional and chaotic childhood being raised by an addict. You never know what’s coming next.

I cry often now that I’m alone again because I feel defective. Like I just don’t know how to love and be loved.

I picture my ‘connection’ cord with a frayed end. I try to plug it in and connect with someone, but it just won’t fit in the socket.

Anyone who has been following my writing will know that I grew up feeling worthless and ashamed of myself and who I was.

I spent my whole life trying so hard to leave it all behind, make something of myself and break the cycle with my own family.

I managed to do it on the surface. You would never know if you met me what I went through as a child.

But it all comes out as soon as I try to love someone.

The feelings of shame, worthlessness and the fear of abandonment all start to gather like storm clouds, and I end up fearing being left. I try to ‘prove’ my worthiness by putting myself last and meeting all of their needs so that they will want me around.

I’ve spent over three years in intensive healing on my own, trying to get over this codependent mess that has been keeping me in chains.

Which leads me back to here.

Behind the bars.

I want to meet someone, I want to feel love and be hugged and have someone ask me how I am. Like I see other couples doing.

It just feels impossible.

Like I’m staring up at the summit of Everest, wanting to climb but having no equipment.

I guess if you made it this far you must be able to resonate a little.

Is there anyone else out there who feels like this?

Right now I feel like the only human being on Mars, burning around in my dune buggy looking for other life forms and finding nothing.

Send me a sign that I’m not alone…..