the blog

1. Typically, you come from a dysfunctional home in which your emotional needs were not met.

2. Having received little real nurturing yourself, you try to fill this unmet need vicariously by becoming a caregiver, especially to men who appear in some way needy.

3. Because you were never able to change your parent(s) into the warm, loving caretaker(s) you longed for, you respond deeply to the familiar type of emotionally unavailable man whom you can again try to change through your love.

4. Terrified of abandonment, you will do anything to keep a relationship from dissolving.

5. Almost nothing is too much trouble, takes too much time, or is too expensive if it will “help” the man you are involved with.

6. Accustomed to lack of love in personal relationships, you are willing to wait, hope, and try harder to please.

7. You are willing to take far more than 50 percent of the responsibility, guilt, and blame in any relationship.

8. Your self-esteem is critically low, and deep inside you do not believe you deserve to be happy. Rather, you believe you must earn the right to enjoy life.

9. You have a desperate need to control your men and your relationships, having experienced little security in childhood. You mask your efforts to control people and situations as “being helpful.”

10. In a relationship, you are much more in touch with your dream of how it could be than with the reality of your situation.

11. You are addicted to men and to emotional pain.

12. You may be predisposed emotionally and often biochemically to becoming addicted to drugs, alcohol, and/or certain foods, particularly sugary ones.

13. By being drawn to people with problems that need fixing, or by being enmeshed in situations that are chaotic, uncertain, and emotionally painful, you avoid focusing on your responsibility to yourself.

14. You may have a tendency toward episodes of depression, which you try to forestall through the excitement provided by an unstable relationship.

15. You are not attracted to men who are kind, stable, reliable, and interested in you. You find such “nice” men boring.

Jill displayed nearly all of these characteristics, to a greater or lesser degree. It was as much because she embodied so many of the above attributes as because of anything else she may have told me about him that I suspected Randy might have a drinking problem. Women with this type of emotional makeup are consistently drawn to men who are emotionally unavailable for one reason or another. Being addicted is a primary way of being emotionally unavailable.

Right from the start, Jill was willing to take more responsibility than Randy for initiating the relationship and keeping it going. Like so many women who love too much, she was obviously a very responsible person, a high achiever who was succeeding in many areas of her life, but who nevertheless had little self-esteem. The realization of her academic and career goals could not counterbalance the personal failure she endured in her love relationships. Every phone call Randy forgot to make dealt a serious blow to her fragile self-image, which she then worked heroically to shore up by trying to extract signs of caring from him.

Her willingness to take full blame for a failed relationship was typical, as was her inability to assess the situation realistically and take care of herself by pulling out when the lack of reciprocity became apparent. Women who love too much have little regard for their personal integrity in a love relationship. They pour their energies into changing the other person’s behavior or feelings toward them through desperate manipulations, such as Jill’s expensive long-distance phone calls and flights to San Diego (remember, her budget was extremely limited). Her long-distance “therapy sessions” with him were much more an attempt to make him into the man she needed him to be than to help him discover who he was. Actually, Randy did not want to help in discovering who he was. If he had been interested in such a journey of self-discovery, he would have done most of the work himself, rather than sitting by passively while Jill tried to force him to analyze himself. She made these efforts because her only other alternative was to recognize and accept him for what he was—a man who was careless of her feelings and of the relationship.”

But institutional racism is imaginary, right?

Cash Money takin’ over for the 99 to the 2000s….

 Amazing! Waiting for the last one!

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science)  indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.