The Roots of My Dysfunction

I feel like you see the symptoms of your dysfunctions long before you are able to dig down to the real roots of those dysfunctions to weed them out. That's been my own personal experience anyway.

I’ve known for years that something was not right about the way I experienced certain relationships in my life--mostly my emotional responses to them, I guess--but I couldn't put my finger on what my dysfunction was. I could see the symptoms of it--the constant need for reassurance of love from the other person, the desperate desire to be with them every possible second of every day, the insecurity triggered by them having other people and experiences in their life that didn't involve me, etc., etc. I likened my feelings about these relationships to addiction on multiple occasions and knew this could not be a good sign. But I didn't know what I was doing wrong, and I didn't know how to change. I don't think I even knew I was supposed to change or that change was possible.

I knew my emotional experience was not “normal” or socially acceptable--I knew the word “needy” had very negative connotations and that needy people were generally spoken of with exasperation and contempt--so I tried to act normal and keep most of my crazy hidden inside. I tried to explain my feelings to myself in ways that put a positive spin on my experience rather than making me sound incredibly creepy and dysfunctional. After all, none of us likes feeling dysfunctional. I just loved people more intensely than your average person. That's not a bad thing, right? How can you love someone too much?

As long as I called the emotions I was experiencing “love” it was difficult to figure out where I was going wrong, since it's hard to argue that loving someone is a bad thing. But somewhere along the line my definition of love had gotten all tangled up with need and insecurity and control, and all those separate pieces had to be unraveled before I could clearly see what was love and what was dysfunction.

This work of recognizing my weaknesses, unraveling all the pieces, and reworking my definition of love began two years into a relationship with a close friend. When my friend was finally brave enough to communicate her feelings more honestly and set boundaries with me, I finally came face to face with the reality of how my weaknesses were affecting our relationship and how and why I needed to change.

Tracing my dysfunctional behaviors back to their roots was a long, slow, painful process. I was already so deep into the relationship and behaviors that I had to work backwards to figure out where they were coming from and what I needed to do differently. I was able to uncover some of the roots of my dysfunction, but some remained a mystery to me. I could clearly see the behaviors and emotions that were unproductive and work on changing those, but I wasn't sure what motivated me to begin them--why certain relationships triggered these behaviors and emotions for me and others did not.

Recently I made a new friend. As the friendship progressed, I started feeling the crazy coming on. None of my relationships had triggered it since the friendship that I had worked through a lot of my issues with. This time I was prepared to meet the crazy head on though. I was able to say, “Hello, old friend. Let's figure out who you are. If I can name you, you will have less power over me and I will be able to see clearly to unravel you before you start tangling me in your web of dysfunction.” And, after a lot of pondering on what may be triggering the crazy in this new relationship, I think I may have finally uncovered a couple more of the deep roots of my dysfunction.

Here is my hypothesis (and I reserve the right to modify it in the future, as needed, as future experiences make additional truths more clear to me): I think that when I am in a relationship with someone that I really like, but I don't feel like I am in a position of power in the relationship (for example, if I sense that the relationship may be more significant to me than it is to the other person), then as my love for that person grows, my fear of loss or rejection grows as well, in equal proportion. I think all of my dysfunctional behaviors are born out of this fear and the habits I’ve formed to try to cope with it.

When I start loving someone a lot, but I feel unsure if I’ll be able to keep them, and the more I love them the scarier not being able to keep them gets, I start feeling a panicked need to control the relationship somehow to make me feel safer in it. Basically, I start trying to control the other person and their feelings towards me in various ways to make sure they keep loving me and can't live without me. This leads to serving with strings attached (offering tons of self-sacrificing service in exchange for love and security in the relationship instead of setting reasonable boundaries for myself and letting the other person set their own reasonable boundaries), lots of over-the-top proclamations of praise and love for the other person, insecurity about all aspects of the other person’s life that don't involve me and are therefore out of my control, the need for constant reassurance of love from the other person to ensure that my strategy of controlling how they feel about me is succeeding, and a disproportionate sense of responsibility for the success or failure of the relationship overall since I am trying to control both sides of it instead of making my own choices and letting the other person make theirs, independent of me.

Recognizing where the feelings of panic and desperation that trigger my dysfunctional behaviors come from helps a lot in learning to manage those emotions in healthier ways. Since I already know from all my work in my other friendship that any control I think I have over the relationship is a complete illusion and that the strategies I use to try to control the relationship not only hurt the relationship but also make me feel more insecure rather than safer in the relationship (the complete opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish), it's pretty easy to conclude that trying to manage my fear by trying to control the relationship is a losing strategy on all sides and will not help me achieve a single one of my relationship goals. Having a personal testimony of that makes it a lot easier to choose to let go of the need for control, now that I know that's what I’m feeling, and relax and leave the other person free to make their own choices and be responsible for their own half of the relationship.

Realizing that I have no power to control the relationship or anyone else’s feelings about me is scary in some ways, but also very relieving in other ways. I don't have to hustle for my worthiness (that's a Brene Brown quote) because it won't do me any good anyway. Other people get to choose how they feel about me no matter what I do or don't do, so I may as well just be me and relieve myself of the burden of trying to take responsibility for others’ feelings about me. I can't be perfect, and even Jesus Christ, the only perfect person, was hated by a ton of people, hated so violently, in fact, that they put Him to death over it. Sheesh! You're never going to win the control how other people feel about you game, so it's just better not to try to play it.

So here's my goal, my new strategy going forward:

1) Accept that loving someone is a scary thing, and that's okay;

2) Respect and love other people enough to let them make the choices that are best for them rather than trying to control their feelings and choices to try to protect myself from loss and rejection; and

3) Self-validate rather than trying to use other people to validate me and my worthiness

Thanks for reading! Good luck to you all in uncovering the roots of your own dysfunctions ;)