The Past Creates Today's fear

Yesterday in therapy I talked about this fear I have of somehow being tricked in this relationship. I know my fears of abandonment and the long standing sense of defectiveness that have been part of me for so long, but as we talked I kept coming up with this word “tricked”. It didn’t quite fit until I began to talk about how my mother could change on a dime, how her addiction to Dexedrine made her into two people: the 9 to 9 “perfect mother”…and then the Medea-ish monster that slowly appeared after 9pm as the Dexedrine wore off. Medea is the right persona. Like her, my mother was so angry at my father that she would hurt her children out of her own grief and fury. What I now understand is that as a kid it felt like a trick—someone had tricked me—I had a good, super-engaged and active, manic mother part of the day and at night the monster appeared and my better mother was gone.

The lasting piece is that I have come to not just expect but to anticipate and even strategize to deal with the other. I do this with John too. Sure he says he loves me, yes he wants to marry me, yes all the words and behaviors are there, but that younger part of me knows—she is just sure that she knows—he will trick me. One day I’ll come home to an ice cold man or one day he will just not come home.

It is not lost on me that this is also what his wife did experience. The loss of her seemingly perfect husband and seemingly perfect marriage must seem like the cruelest, most senseless trick. In my struggle to free myself from my old beliefs I also pray for her as she lives thru this reality.