Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Day 208: Relationship Dynamics | Part 3


"So for me, it was not so much a fear of a boy trying to have sex with me, lol in those days the concern was more about 'will he try and kiss me'. I remember at parties we would sometimes hear via the grapevine that a boy was kissing one of the more popular loose girls and put his hand 'down there'. This would cause the rest of us to blush and stare at her for the rest of the evening, perplexed and slightly anxious of this 'slutty behaviour' which obviously to the girl and the boys who tried to get 'their hands into her pants' was nothing more than what they did each and every weekend.  Therefore for me at that stage even, there was a wide gap between what I was willing to try and what was already a favourite pass time for the 'popular gangs'…"

I feared being alone with these boys on a date or at their house, because for some reason I was absolutely petrified of any form of intimacy. I remember the only time that I became slightly comfortable with kissing a boy was when I was the one doing the pursuing and I remember this happening once. I started developing 'feelings' for a neighbour who lived up the road who I had been friends with for many years. All of a sudden at some point this 'feeling' that I could describe as 'sensuality' started developing in my chest area and it encouraged a new 'voice' in my head - one that was gentle and encouraged me to change the way I dressed, to flirt and to try out make-up. Obviously the boy noticed that my body language around him changed because one day when I was visiting him after school as I so often did (this time wearing a slinky black dress instead of my usual shorts and tees which obviously did not go unnoticed), we were sitting on his bed chatting and he leant over and kissed me. I remember we both experimented with the 'tongue' which was totally new to me and felt very risqué!

The strange thing is that this 'reaching out' that I did to him, even though I was afraid of other boys indicated two things to me about my 'sexual development' - I avoided the boys who directed their attention to me or who were comfortable actually addressing their likes for me, because this felt unpredictable and 'dangerous'. Therefore I liked being able to asses who I could explore subtle feelings that were developing within me with - with a male friend who was gentle and 'known'. Secondly I realize that this 'first attempt at expressing an inner experience was towards a boy that was mentally unstable (not saying because he kissed me lol). He was in a special school for children with learning difficulties. I remember his father use to be very strict with him, where for example the one time I invited him to go with me on an outing to a park (we always only stayed at his house watching movies, never did anything 'outside'). He phoned his dad to ask him and the father asked to speak to me. The father explained to me things which I did not clearly understand at the time, but he said things like 'he cant stay out to long because that isn't good for him, so we can take him if we promise to have him back in 3 hours. This left me with the distinct impression that together with him being in a special school that there was something about this boy that was not entirely stable. I also remember always noting how when his parents were with him when I was at his house - the way in which they communicated with him was different to how my parents spoke to me or how any of my 'girlfriends' parents spoke to them. They were always trying to regulate his 'moods' and even at that young age (between the age of 14 - 16), I picked up that even though him and I got along fine, there was something about him that I would probably never get to see and that that there was a side to him which I did not know about. I also heard his mom sometimes speak to him in another room about him 'not getting angry' and that they have spoken about when he gets angry and that he must breathe etc… So there were many tell tale signs so to speak for me that this boy had another side to him, that he was being 'contained' and that because I only interacted with him for a few hours a week after school, that our friendship would never allow for me to 'see his other side' as his parents seemed to shield him from making mistakes around me. When we shared stories about our weekends and I would share about visiting friends he never spoke about going out to a friends house or to slumber parties/dance parties and only sometimes mentioned a friend or two from his school visiting him at his house.

So I would say that this was the first time I was drawn to a guy who had a 'darker' side to him, a side that was potentially unpredictable and had to be 'contained'. The kiss was a once off affair and I remember that we did not pursue it any further because I felt that this guy was generally withdrawn from outside factors such as friends and 'girls'. Also I felt and thought that this was not something to pursue - it was just an instinct at the time based on what I had seen and heard. Our friendship did not continue so fluently after 'the kiss' because we both felt awkward, that we had overstepped a line which for both seemed off, considering what really existed inside of us as our own 'personal issues'. I saw him less from then on, partly due to the fact that my uneasiness around 'sexuality' started surfacing in random moments of anxiety around him. I felt at the time that the childlike comfort that I always experienced around him being my 'friend' was gone and that this could mean 'the unknown' with regards to what would now happen. Nothing happened, he did not make any attempts, but we simply drifted apart ,more and a year or so later his family moved...

Day 207: Relationship Dynamics | Part 2


"This distancing was obviously very difficult on myself, my mother and my sisters, as we all knew that his behaviour was not normal. But 'back in the day' obviously nobody really spoke about what happens behind closed doors, as I am sure we are all able to relate to our own family issues which we remember and we distinctly remember nobody talking about. I remember how tense I would feel around my father, I knew there was a distance between us, an uncomfortability from his side. This I internalised into unconscious and subconscious patterns in relation to my own self worth (being rejected by father meant no self worth) as well as how I picked boyfriends from there on based on these emotionally distant experiences I had with my father. In my next blog I will write about each major relationship and what I realised about my self."

Alright, let's get started. ..

Somewhere through my puberty I developed a fear of boys and a fear of relationships. I realised years later as I assessed 'my past', that the tension and unease that I grew up experiencing around my father, translated into an uneasiness about 'males' and relationships with males. Boy oh boy my first real relationship was a direct reflection of an almost psychotic attempt at understanding and reflecting my perceived relationship with my father. But first more on my school years.

In high school I am able to count on one hand the boys who showed an interest, I was a 'plain girl' although a bit of a class clown (suppose not much has changed there). I remember always being filled with a sense of absolute dread and fear each time these boys would declare their interest in me. It was strange for me at the time, because I remember never being able to see what it was that these boys saw in me and therefore in part, my resistance to saying 'yes' to their requests for a relationship had to do with the feeling of absolute inferiority. I had the opposite view of myself - an absolute general low self esteem that would always speak in my mind telling me the direct opposite of what the boy in front of me was saying. Therefore by the end of the conversation, my mind was always made up - I 'knew' that what he was saying was a lie and that I was being deceived into some pubescent-boy trick. I would always rationalise to myself that the boy was in on some dare with his friends to see how far he could go with me. I would therefore each step of the way be rather dubious about the poor boys words and actions, always explaining to myself in my mind what he was 'really trying to get to'. In this way I was preparing myself to be deceived and where possible to get out of any compromising situation. These 'relationships' usually only lasted a few weeks, as long as my frail nerves could take it and towards the end I was always the one to end it with some well designed lie. Or I would use something the boy said or did as an excuse for why this relationship had to end.

Obviously, as we are all aware in today's age of teenage/adolescent romance - we all know that it is very different to how it was in the 90's. I mean the stories that I have heard of teen sex and parties and drinking, has often left me tongue tied, seeing and realising that teenagers today are basically living out real life porn dramas, with very little self respect towards themselves, their bodies or each other. It is all about the energy behind the ego, about trying to appear cool, to be the next Youtube star, while spitting in the face of what the previous generation considered 'proper' sexual and dating practise. Unfortunately these young people, from my perspective do not see or realise what they are really creating and contributing towards in the word. As we then grow up, we get to a stage where we start reacting to what is happening in the world -as we step out of the adolescent energy possessions and start paying attention to the effects that deliberate "I don’t care attitude' have on society. We move on and have relationships, get married and plan families and then things like the effects f porn in our marriages and society start to hit home. We see woman raped/hurt/abused because of men who are obsessed/possessed with sex and we are faced with the consequences of the last 50/60 years of societal psychological development around sex. BUT when you are a teenager and you want to fit in and be seen as in control and cool and desirable then nothing will stop you from playing all the games at your disposal. I cannot help when I see young people, to wonder what sex system design exists within them - something has been developed over the last generation. When a young man now looks at a woman or young girl, does he see flesh and bone - a human being - or does he see a porn star - a half naked piece of flesh easily transmuted in his mind into the latest mots gruesome sexual position?

Alright lol I did not think 'gee he sees me as a potential sex partner' = because in those days frivolous sex fro the sake of 'saying 'up yours to societal rules' was only for the very brave - the one or two girls or boys in your grade who had a 'reputation'. They were few and far between and shy girls like myself avoided these 'loose cannons.' Even the popular groups in my grade had their levels of 'looseness' lol, so to speak. Today this is a very different story, and I have observed that in schools frivolous sex and sex dynamics amongst youngsters is much more prevalent and exists parallel to eating and shitting.


So for me, it was not so much a fear of a boy trying to have sex with me, lol in those days the concern was more about 'will he try and kiss me'. I remember at parties we would sometimes hear via the grapevine that a boy was kissing one of the more popular loose girls and put his hand 'down there'. This would cause the rest of us to blush and stare at her for the rest of the evening, perplexed and slightly anxious of this 'slutty behaviour' which obviously to the girl and the boys who tried to get 'their hands into her pants' was nothing more than what they did each and every weekend. Therefore for me at that stage even, there was a wide gap between what I was willing to try and what was already a favourite pass time for the 'popular gangs'..

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Day 206: Relationship Dynamics | Part 1

One thing we can all relate to in some form of another is relationships or some failed attempt at having relationships. Every person has some story even back from when they were in kindergarten about some little boy or girl that they had a brief romantic encounter with. It is such a basic programming point for all of us as we develop into our adult personalities.

Therefore a subject that comes up often for people that I work with is either past relationship issues or current experiences. Whether one declares  celibacy or becomes a raging hormonal maniac over the opposite sex - there is always a story and a design behind what and how we choose.

So in these chats/discussions that I have with people I always suggest one key thing that I realised years ago as I was trudging through the thick mud of my own relationship designs. I always suggest to people to use past and current relationships experiences as a learning curve about self, and therefore to not take it personally but to rather sit down, write out the facts and change oneself so that as you move from current experiences into the future, you will be able to 'prepare the way' so to speak, for a potential relationship with another based on an effective relationship with Self. Therefore let ones relationships with others, be it romantic, family or friends show us what exist in our relationships to ourselves. Therefore one is looking at more 'real time' reflection on the outer, to understand the inner.


I decided to place my own understandings about my past relationships onto paper, to reflect for myself on what I have realised and therefore, to share with others who are perhaps facing similar experiences.

My previous blogs on 'Family Dynamics' and 'Experiencing Trauma' would definitely make a good introduction to these blogs, because in those blogs I speak about how I realized my own role in my family dynamics as well as insight into the strained relationship I had with my father.



Therefore to understand the relationship I had with my father will allow us to understand how and why I made the relationship choices I did. It was the relationship with my father that mostly determined the types of relationships I went into... whilst it was the relationship with my mother that mostly molded my character within these relationships intertwined with my own personality designs, which of course determined my reactions and responses to what these representations of my experience with my father did or said (boyfriends).

To recap: if you read my blogs called: Experiencing Trauma, you would have gained a basic insights into my reactions to my fathers death but also some insight into the fact that he had a very strained relationship with my mother, myself and my sisters. My father had adult depression from his own childhood experiences. This resulted in him having children as all adults from the previous generations believed they had to do, but inside of him he did not have the connection to or passion for his children, because obviously his own childhood memories and adult depression caused him to not really 'feel' much for his children. Any person who understands or has experienced depression will realize that depression as the word indicates 'depresses you' - meaning that you withdraw inside yourself and numb yourself towards yourself, your life and others - whether it is a chemical reaction in the body or a mental aspects based on a point one is reacting to within oneself towards your life.

This distancing was obviously very difficult on myself, my mother and my sisters, as we all knew that his behaviour was not normal. But 'back in the day' obviously nobody really spoke about what happens behind closed doors, as I am sure we are all able to relate to our own family issues which we remember and we distinctly remember nobody talking about. I remember how tense I would feel around my father, I knew there was a distance between us, an uncomfortability from his side. This I internalised into unconscious and subconscious patterns in relation to my own self worth (being rejected by father meant no self worth) as well as how I picked boyfriends from there on based on these emotionally distant experiences I had with my father. In my next blog I will write about each major relationship and what I realised about my self.

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