My anxiety is now under control¹, so my therapist and I have moved onto other issues.

It’s funny that I started going to therapy for my anxiety attacks, but he keeps digging up issues I never knew that I had.

Not that any of it is as debilitating the way the anxiety attacks were, but it’s made me realize that they have affected my quality of life. All of it stems from my parents (as opposed to being teased, some kind of incident, etc.). Once again, I say that I don’t like to blame them, but the glaring fact is that I can now trace every issue back to my childhood.

The idea of a self-destructive pattern whereby we repeat the pain of our childhoods is called a lifetrap. They’re categorized differently, depending on the school of psychology one prescribes to, but my most significant ones (i.e. rated “very high”) are emotional deprivation, dependence, unrelenting standards, and punitiveness. When I first started, I also had pessimism, but this has mostly gone with my anxiety.

I’ll touch on two of them now:

Emotional Deprivation

• One of the things that sparked the realization that I didn’t have a regular childhood was when I was asked to fill out a diagnostic questionnaire. I was told to rate how strongly I felt about the statement “I have not had someone to nurture me, share him/herself with me, or care deeply about what happens to me”. I thought to myself, “That’s normal? People have that?”.
• This is why I feel alone and detached from the world. It’s not quite as clean-cut as this, as there are a bunch of other issues that factor into the issue, but it’s an overall feeling.
• Until that point, I never considered the idea that such people exist. I assume the parents are supposed to fill this role, and eventually a spouse.
• In many people with emotional deprivation, the lifetrap manifests itself in relationships where they remain emotionally distant. For me, it’s more of a difficulty communicating to my girlfriends about my needs, and then feeling disappointed when my needs aren’t met.
  • This makes me wonder how certain relationships would have worked out if I was a different person and didn’t keep breaking up with my girlfriends
  • Unfortunately, I could write a book on this.

Unrelenting Standards

• I’ve realized that I’m still being too hard on myself. This stems from the expectations put on me as a child, or simply the fact that I think being unsatisfied with stagnancy is healthy because self-improvement makes me a better person. Most likely, a bit of both.
  • Sometimes I have to compare myself to someone like Pat to give myself perspective on this issue. He’s a person who hasn’t “achieved” much when evaluated by my standards, but he’s happy and that’s what matters. It makes me question what I’m trying so hard to achieve. I think of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip, where Calvin says, “It’s hard to argue with someone who looks so happy”
  • I understand that it’s the pursuit of greatness, not greatness itself, that should make life worth living, so when I have this self-destructiveness as a result, it doesn’t quite make sense. I’m working on this. It helps me to keep a quote by Charlotte Cushman in mind: “To try to be better is to be better”.
  • A side effect is that I’m too hard on other people because I project my unrelenting standards on them as well.
  • A lot of people tell me that I wouldn’t have had so much pressure to be the best and perform well if I wasn’t an only child.

1. I don’t say solved because I don’t think one can completely eliminate anxiety [↑]

A deeper look at an old topic

Some time when I was a child, I asked my mother if she loved her nails more than she loved me. She had this kit full of nail tools — clippers, files made of metal and emery, toe separators, fake nails separated in little boxes, even a small hand-held, battery-operated dremel with different attachments used to grind, sand, and polish — that she would carry with her around the house. When I asked her this question, she picked me up in her arms, and vehemently denied it. I didn’t believe her though, not in my heart. She had always paid more attention to her nails than to me.

My dad was no better. One time I googled his name to find his work number, and came across an audio/visual site where he had written a small paragraph as a review on a projector he had. I was crushed. It was more effort than he had ever put into my life, sitting in a couple of short sentences in front of me. It would have been okay if he had been so uninterested in everything, but he wasn’t. He loved his car, he loved his home theatre, he loved his karaoke, but me he had no interest in.

So, before I had become a teenager, I started to look for some kind of approval from other people. At that point, it was Andrew and Alex. They were my best friends in grade 3 and 4, but I changed schools in grade 5. Even after this, I tried to hang out with them but they seemed to be more interested in school, and we lost touch.

Pretty soon, I realized that I wasn’t anyone’s “best friend”. I cried and I cried and I cried. I felt like I needed this to define myself. I needed be a priority to someone because I certainly wasn’t a priority to my parents. Without being someone’s best friend, I was worthless.

As an adult, you may feel insecure about certain aspects of your life. You lack self-confidence in areas where you feel vulnerable — intimate relationships, social situations, or work. Within your vulnerable areas, you feel inferior to other people. You are hypersensitive to criticism or rejection.

I still feel this way now. The problem is that the need isn’t being met. Everyone puts other people first, and the one foundation I believed I had in my life has crumbled. I’m never important enough.

Two things keep me from killing myself.

The thought that one day, I may mean something to someone. Or the thought that one day, I’ll be able to stop defining myself through others, and simply be content with who I am.

Either way, something’s gotta give.

The experience of emotional deprivation is harder to define than some of the other lifetraps. Often it is not crystallized into thoughts. This is because the original deprivation began so early, before you had the words to describe it. Your experience of emotional deprivation is much more the sense that you are going to be lonely forever, that certain things are never going to be fulfilled for you, that you will never be heard, never be understood.

Emotional deprivation feels like something is missing. It is a feeling of emptiness. Perhaps the image that most captures its meaning is that of a neglected child. Emotional deprivation is what a neglected child feels. It is a feeling of aloneness, of nobody there. It is a sad and heavy sense of knowledge that you are destined to be alone.

I’m so fucking angryfuriouslivid at John right now. We were supposed to talk and play tonight, but yet again, I get brushed aside for his friends or girlfriend. I have no other communication with him, save for the phonecalls.

It’s not just this time, it’s a whole bunch of times added up. And I’m left alone, again. This is the first time ever that he’s made me cry. And I’m not even sad. I’m just angry. I’m sweating. I can barely see through these tears.

At least I found out that I could show my feelings to him. He’s the only person with whom I don’t have to worry about being polite. I can raise my voice at him, and I don’t clam up like I do with most people.

Right now, I have no one. John’s the one person I can count on to talk to me when something goes wrong. No one else truly understands me. It’s completely devastating when it’s this person who pulls the rug out from under you.

Maybe I am sad. Maybe this makes me think of how I’m always a second priority to everyone I know. That I’ll be alone for the rest of my life. That it’ll always be like this because I’m fucking flawed and fucking defective and fucking unlovable in some way.

I wasn’t going to drive to nowhere tonight, but I think I will now. I just have to remember not to rest my foot on the pedal.

People don’t understand how fragile I am. That sometimes I have to fight to feel significant, that I have to convince myself that people would be sad if steered into a concrete pole and died.

Just because I try to be easy-going and understanding doesn’t mean I’m not important.

I’m a person too.

John figured out that I don’t forgive people because my memory is too good.

And it’s true. Not only do I remember experiences, but emotions. It’s like I can relive every moment I’ve been hurt down to the smallest detail¹. The pain remains strong and salient, years after the incidents have passed.

While time may heal wounds for most, it doesn’t for me. I’m generally fine with this, since I believe that it should be actions and apologies that breed forgiveness, not time.

It’s only hard when I want to forgive someone, but I can’t.

1. This works with the other extreme too; for me, being happy is just as vivid. [↑]

I remember Christie once telling me that she always wanted to bring presents to someone’s house at Christmas. We were waiting at the train station to Toronto, our exams finished, doing exactly that. Carrying bags with a fondue set, maybe a candle holder, and other assorted miscellany for my parents who already had everything.

As a seventeen-year-old with an adorable baby-face, she was rarely taken seriously as a mature and responsible person. I could tell that having this holiday tradition was her way of feeling like an adult. Not the grocery shopping we would do, not the lingerie she would wear for me, or even the act of love itself, but a family to go to, gifts to give, a house to stay in, a little piece of maturity.

For me, it’s this car.

Not the bills. Not the house. Not the mortgage.

It’s being able to get anywhere. It’s feeling these keys in my pocket and knowing that they’re mine. It’s driving home after class when it’s dark out, blasting a night mix on the stereo. It’s even looking for a parking spot downtown on a Monday afternoon, or getting stuck in traffic.

It’s having all these things that I’ve never had before.