Posted by DisposableDoll on April 27, 2006, at 22:59:34
In reply to Re: Crush on My Counselor- Out of Control? » DisposableDoll, posted by orchid on April 26, 2006, at 14:46:22
Hey Orchid! I like your name. Actually, I once dreamed I named a child that. Thanks for the welcome and the response in general. I had planned to work on father issues with my shrink, but when my boyfriend and I started having problems, I thought I was going to have a break down and I started focusing on our relationship more than anything else in therapy. I also didn't dwell too much on father issues because I felt and still feel like my emotions concerning him are stupid and overly dramatic. I keep telling myself my relationship with my father or rather lack there of is not a big deal. It’s common place and much worse could happen. I tell myself I am just being a whiney baby, a drama queen, etc. My father never abused me, he never abused my mother really, he didn't die, he didn't kidnap me, he didn't constantly talk down to me, etc. He wasn't someone that I never got to meet and always wondered about. I knew my father, well somewhat at least. Furthermore we had a positive relationship for the most part, for years. So, I tell myself I have nothing to whine about- especially after all of this time. I should be healed by now. It was no big deal. It happens all the time. It wasn’t traumatic. It was nothing, right?
I loved my father and felt close to him. He said he loved me, too. However, things changed. My parents divorced when I was 4 years old and my mother got custody. My father did get visitation rights and I saw him again when I was 5 or 6. My father and I saw each other on alternate weekends in the beginning, but only during the day. As I got older, I began to spend the night with him and sometimes see him on consecutive weekends. During longer school breaks I sometimes stayed several nights. Honestly, I don’t think the divorce was really what hurt me so badly. Dad and I had some problems during our relationship and on my 13th birthday my father didn’t call, didn’t stop by, didn’t send a card, letter, or present. He didn’t do anything and the way things were going, I hadn’t expect him to. I haven’t seen or heard from my father since that day, either. I have since tried to contact him, but to no avail. His family says he knows that I want to talk to him, yet I haven’t heard from him. Oddly enough we don’t run into one another even though we live in fairly close proximity. I was hospitalized a few years ago and my family tried to alert him so he could contact me if he wanted, but he never did. I’m not sure if he got the message though, just to be fair. Yet, part of me wonders if he would care if I died.
When I was younger, I know I had positive experiences with my father, but I know not everything was perfect. He had a bit of a temper and he and my mother had some fights, but he never hit her that I can recall. He might have threatened to, and he once threw a large hard back book at her head (which she ducked and it missed her), and things of that sort, but I don’t think he ever hit her. He also had epilepsy. I am not sure, but I think it was temporal lobe epilepsy and he sometimes took what my mother referred to as “crazy spells” where around the time of a seizure, he pretty much acted schizophrenic, psychotic, etc. Then there was his unusual secrecy, like how he didn’t tell me of my other older sister or introduce me to her until sometime after his divorce from mom, then only because he wanted to see her mother to try and steal her from her husband, and he sprung it on me as though it were nothing or as if I already knew. For the most part, though, I remember my dad in a good light, but a dim one. I have some bad memories of him, but a lot of good ones and I remember him as having some bad characteristics, yes, but also some positive ones, as well. However, on the down side, I do feel as though I didn’t get to know him nearly as well as I would have liked, that I missed out on a lot when it came to having a relationship with him, that his love was far from unconditional, that he helped cause me to miss out on having a closer relationship with his other daughters, and that he abandoned, rejected, ostracized, and hurt me. Sometimes I dream about my father. Sometimes I dream we are talking again.
When dad was done with me, none of the rest of his family contacted me. To be fair, I didn’t contact them, either as I had never felt particularly close to his side of the family and actually felt nervous and awkward around them. I felt like I didn’t belong. In mom’s family though, had I suddenly stopped talking to them, they would have contacted me and asked me what was going on and ask how I was. Dad’s family never really did interact with me, though, unless dad brought me over to their house. I call mom’s family, MY family far more often that dad’s side of the family, because they don’t feel like family and I don’t think they think of me as family, really.
Anyways, the thing is, it seems I have always been drawn more to older men, anyways. I do not like them simply because they are older and male however. Many things factor in, but the fact that they are both older and male does make me slightly more drawn to them. It seems I have been drawn more to older males since I was a child. Some children are like that, don’t you think? My niece was always reaching for the men excitedly. I remember that while I loved my aunts and uncles, grandpas and grandmas, and my mother and father, I tended to gravitate towards the older males of the group. It wasn’t that I loved them more. I was just drawn to them more, closer to them, something. I don’t know how to say it. There was some added pull there. Perhaps it is simply because, in my family, the older males tended to be more playful and laid back, while the women were more concerned with keeping us clean and well behaved and feeding us and that sort of thing. Perhaps, instead, it is biological. I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that my grandfathers died on me very early on (one at 4 and one at 6). My mother and father divorced when I was very young (4), as well and I lived with my mother. I continued to see my father every so often, for awhile, but he eventually quit seeing me or speaking to me at all by the time I turned 13. My uncles gradually grew away from me and my male cousins for the most part never were much interested in me nor I them, besides this one older male cousin I had, who was old enough to be my uncle. Eventually, he ended up turning more towards picking on me as I developed my own opinions and it became evident that our political views were not going to be the same. I didn’t have any brothers, only sisters, and for some reason I never could make male friends, even though my female friends did with ease, and it wasn’t like I was ultra girly. Sure, I liked to play with cute stuffed animals, make believe I was a mommy, pet the kittens, put on makeup, and watch things like, “My Little Ponies,” but I also liked to play in the mud, pretend to be warring spies, watch “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and hold frogs. Still, it just never seemed that guys wanted to be friends with me. I didn’t make friends easily, period, however. When I got older, guys seemed mostly interested in me for sex, whatever else they could get out of me (homework help, those fries off my plate, etc.), they hated me, or they didn’t know or care that I existed. It was using me, hatred, or nothing. Of course, as I said, I didn’t have many friends of either gender, so I guess it worked that way with everyone pretty much, but a little more so with guys. I did end up getting close to a few guys however, but mostly that was either online friendships, or it was a romantic relationship. However, I felt that some of the romantic relationships were about more than sex at least, and that the guys genuinely cared for me otherwise, which is good. I guess what I am trying to say, though, is that I have always been very affectionate with older males, but my grandfathers died early in my life and my parents separated, but I still got to see my father. However, by the time I was a teenager, my uncles had grown away from me, a couple died actually, my dad severed all ties with me and basically, his family and I were separated as a result. So, I lost all of that older male companionship early on, and I always found myself drawn to it more than the maternal companionship.
My entire family was always very physically affectionate. My mother carried me for quite sometime as I loved being picked up. Various members of my family hug and kiss one another. We cuddle up together on the couch when we watch movies or sometimes just when we’re getting sleepy. We sleep in the same beds together often times, sometimes 3 generations together in bed at once. When I’m sick I lay my head in my mother’s lap or on her shoulder and she puts her arm around me, pats me or strokes my hair. My cousin and I fall over on each other in the car on road trips and fall asleep. When I was younger there was a lot of tickling, wrestling, carrying people around (in your arms, over your shoulders, on top of your shoulders), hoisting people up on your feet, bouncing kids on your knee, piggy back rides, etc. Even after I got older, I found myself running from my brother in law who’s trying to tickle or wrestle with me. However, I don’t feel like I get that very much anymore. Actually, my brother in law hasn’t tried to body slam me in months or even a couple years, and he doesn’t even try to tickle me very much these days, though I still get that impulse to run sometimes when I see him coming because I think I sense some slight action that signals a tickle attack….maybe the smile he‘s giving me looks a bit mischievous. Then I find out he really is just smiling at me and it was a false alarm. LOL. I do still get hugs and kisses and people willing to snuggle, but I only feel comfortable sleeping in bed with a few people anymore and sometimes I feel weird being touched by some people at all, even though I have no logical reason to feel this way, and at other times I am affectionate with them. Yet, a lot of times I crave physical affection. I almost never get hugs from men anymore, ESPECIALLY men that are older like my father. I don’t even hardly get pats on the back from them. I miss that. I remember feeling happy about just getting to take money from men’s hands at a fast food restaurant. Isn’t that weird?
Anyways, *sighs* I got started on that partially because I was thinking about when I was younger, I was very affectionate with my father. Holding onto him, hugging him, holding his hand, kissing him. My family kisses on the mouth sometimes, sometimes cheeks, sometimes foreheads, tops of heads, hands, and I know this is going to sound weird, but really it isn’t what it sounds like- a couple times I have even been kissed on the feet. Then you get boo-boo kisses of course, like on scraped knees. I don’t get those anymore, but you know, when I was little I did. Anyways, since we kissed on the mouth sometimes, at one point I remember my dad’s brother used to keep saying we (my father and me) had to stop kissing on the mouth. I remember getting p*ssed at him because I didn’t think it was his business and I didn’t think there was anything perverse or wrong about what we were doing and I was upset by him suggesting that there was and for trying to make us stop. It’s not like we were open mouth kissing or French-kissing. It was just pecking kisses. However, he said this to us several times. I know I blew him off, annoyed and I think dad did an few times, too. Anyways, we never listened. Then one day my dad decides, in front of his wife (my step mom), my older half sister, and my younger one (very young, though), to explain to me that I needed to stop being so affectionate with him because he was afraid people were going to start thinking something wasn’t quite right or wholesome about the two of us. I said okay, but I remember feeling embarrassed and I suppose rejected a little. More embarrassed than anything, though, I think. Almost ashamed. I had a tendency to get nervous around people anyways and conversations about anything sexual always made me uneasy if it came up around family and here he was saying that something I was doing with him might make people think we were sexually involved. UGH! I was also upset that he had actually said this in front of my sisters and my step mother. I think I was more thinking of my older sister and step-mom, not so much the younger one, but you get the idea. It made it even more embarrassing. I wished he had said it in private. I was also feeling ashamed because I almost felt as though I had done something wrong, but the thing is, I had never thought of it that way before and I didn’t think he had pushed me away before, and sometimes he was the one who kissed me, wasn’t he? Anyways, I remember being very embarrassed and it really stuck with me I think, that embarrassment, because I recalled this whole thing a few years back and I remember I felt the need to tell someone about how it made me feel because I was still upset about it after having remembered it and when I did talk about it to a close friend, I was embarrassed to tell even them, because I somehow still felt like I had reason to be ashamed. Anyways, don’t know if that was relevant or not, but it was in my head.
Point is, I tend to try to replace my father, I think. While I like making friends with people regardless of age and gender, I tend to be especially drawn, still, to older men. I also feel an urge to be physically, but platonically, affectionate with them. While I like to cuddle with my younger female friends, as well, it is the older males that I really feel the need to be physically affectionate with. Sometimes I think I want them to be somewhat of a father figure to me, except I want them to fall somewhere between being a father figure and being a friend. While I appreciate compliments (hard as they are to believe) from both male and female of all ages, and I especially like compliments from people that I know and like as people, I think these compliments have a bit of an extra pleasant feeling associated with them when the person complimenting me is an older male that I happen to like as a person. So I guess I am saying that while I do not fall all over all older men, and indeed hate some of them, if I like you as a person and you happen to be older and male to boot, your age and gender are seen as bonuses and I will feel more affectionate towards you, more drawn to you, more obsessive about you, somewhat more concerned with your opinion of me and seeking approval, needier when it comes to you, a bit more jealous when it comes to you, and I will be somewhat envious of your children……because I know that I could never come near to them in your heart, and I also know that for some reason, they got to keep their fathers’ love and attention even into adulthood and I lost mine by 13. I know I'm being a whiney-baby, but you brought up the father issue, so I thought I'd elaborate.
poster:DisposableDoll
thread:636996
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060422/msgs/637680.html