Relationship Despair

Confusion. Frustration. Suppression. Numbness. Dullness. Insight. Weakness. Hopeless feelings. Now there’s a good one - hopeless despair. We all need more of that, a bigger dose of hopeless despair once in a while, to remind us of how helpless we are and how big God is. Just thinking about it that way nearly ruins the hopelessness right off the bat thinking that God may show up any time now and intervene. Not that I can make Him do that by manipulation.

I woke up musing about this situation with K_____. I’ve seen this pattern before but interestingly enough it always involved women before and I was always labeled as something of a womanizer - whatever that means and implies. I always felt misjudged but helpless to defend myself since the circumstances and evidence always favored everyone’s judgments of me. Now the same thing has happened but this time it is a man and there is definitely no sexual overtones. The symptoms are strikingly similar though. Someone is listening and open and seems to understand me. There is mutual openness and seeming vulnerability and safety. Something deep inside me stirs and begins to move that I don’t understand and it frightens the other person and confuses me and those around me. The other person is frightened or overwhelmed by either my unusual openness or my desperate clinging lunge toward emotional intimacy and suddenly withdraws to protect their self from this unknown force, sometimes accusing me publicly of inappropriate advances on them. I am deeply hurt. The thing that stirred inside me dives for cover again and tries to burrow back into deep secrecy and isolation where it has lived most of my life. I never get a very good look at it partly because it doesn’t show itself long enough to observe carefully and partly because I am so ignorant of understanding to know what I am looking for.

Last night I was reading a little in Living With Men by Jim Wilder and read a section that suddenly exposed some strong clues associated with this mystery. He describes a boy who’s “attachment light” was seldom responded to by those around him when he was growing up and developing his brain capacity. Consequently he suffers intense pain and feelings of rejection which he cannot stop. He cannot turn off his attachment light by choice but he does learn to cope with the problem by hiding his light (just this second I was hit with the thought of hiding your light under a bushel and it felt very convicting) and pretending that he doesn’t hurt. He learns to function by being stoic and learning to appear “normal” on the outside so no one will see his pain and make him feel shameful. The book says that by the time the boy is about 13 he becomes so good at this that his light seldom comes on anymore and he is not even aware of the problem anymore.

As I read this paragraph my emotions surged strongly in recognition of an exact description of my life. In one way it is a relief to finally hear an explanation that makes sense, but in another way I face a blank wall. If the remedy is in a healthy community that fosters growth and healing, right now my case must be nearly hopeless, for no such community exists for me as far as I know.

I also realized this morning that there is at least one major difference between K_____ and myself. Besides that fact that he has a family that is committed to learning these concepts and growing together no matter how much pain it entails, K_____ has not seemed to be one to lunge toward someone and become clingy like I do repeatedly. He may have done it at some time but definitely not toward me. Although we had a wonderful intellectual friendship and a mutual desire to grow in understanding of ourselves and of God, we were quite distant at the emotional level and very guarded. This may be due to the marriage syndrome where once people leave school and get married it seems impossible to develop deep friendships with anyone else again.

Whatever the case may be, Wilder’s description still fits me perfectly. He states that for the rest of his life this boy’s greatest pain will come from ruptured relationships and his level one bonding functions will be very undeveloped, ignorant, weak and unsynchronized. That certainly describes me rather well. What to do about it is still a complete mystery to me, but that’s where I am right now.

As I read more today about good and bad mothers I wondered how that applies to our relation to God. I have thought that we need to get synchronized with God’s feelings and emotions. But since God is the perfect mother and we are all so immature He must need to synchronize with us first until we are mature enough to initiate synchronization with Him. So it’s not wrong to ask Him to come and feel our feelings with us. That is how we learn to return to joy, by having someone join us where we are first and then watch them to learn the way out of it back to joy camp. But will He do it directly Himself or does He use people to do it for Him? Or, as is often the case, is the question itself full of wrong assumptions?

So how do I apply this right now? Will God come and feel stuck with me? Lonely? Misunderstood? Rejected? It seems like I’ve heard of Him doing that an awful lot. And does this tie in to what Jesus said about not doing anything except what He saw His Father doing? In a perfectly matured, synchronized relationship who initiates the cycle? Or is it so mutual that it makes little difference? Or are the questions all wrong still?

I’m sure glad God is in charge of this whole learning process. He is trustworthy to continue what He designed us for and what He is doing in us. Sometimes it’s hard to stay in hopeless despair long enough to give God a chance when you are learning so many exciting things.