Month: November 2013

Chasing and Running Away And Pushing and Pulling Behaviors

An interesting thing I’ve learned from being in intimate relationships over the years is that I once lived in a constant pattern of chasing after someone and then running away from them once I knew I had caught them. Within this constant pattern was a set of unhealthy behaviors that consisted of me doing nothing more than continuously pushing the person away that I loved and then pulling them back over and over again.

For the longest time, I liked the chase of trying to court a new person and develop an intimate relationship with them, much more so than the long-term relationship part which came later. I really enjoyed meeting someone new and giving them all that gushiness and touchy-feely stuff while trying to sweep them off their feet. I was quite fond of all that romance, candles, special dinners for two and all those other things that come when one is courting another. But unfortunately, when a day came where it appeared I had finally caught the other person, where they began to show how much they loved me unconditionally, I had the tendency to run in the opposite direction.

I started noticing this pattern primarily in my previous relationship to the one I’m in now. It commenced in the same way all my others had begun by me showering a man I was chasing after with much love and affection. Initially he played hard to get and I got a high off of each moment he succumbed to my romantic advances. This, by the way, is what I am referring to when I speak of that pulling behavior and I continued it until the day came when he began to express all that same gushiness and touchy-feely stuff back at me on a regular basis. It was then that I started feeling extremely uncomfortable and no longer had the desire to pull him in closer to me. Instead, I felt like doing the exact opposite, so I began pushing him back and running away.

What I mean by pushing him back and running away is that I stopped doing all those things that led to that man falling in love with me in the first place. Instead of sitting next to him on a couch and holding hands while watching television or movies, I’d sit on the floor or in another chair on the other side of the room. I stopped winking at him at all those odd moments I used to do and didn’t stare at him with those longingly gazes anymore either. I no longer wanted to cuddle real close in bed during any part of the night and instead started keeping my space. All in all, I essentially started halting all of my romantic courting behaviors and began to feel irritated at each of his loving advances. I’d tell him that I was feeling smothered and needed some space, which of course led to many arguments. During them, I projected my own fears and insecurities onto him until he got so frustrated he began to pull away. At that precise moment, when he created more distance, the chase was back on and I started trying to pull him back in again.

Round and round this went until I finally realized just how crazy this behavior was. After much therapeutic work surrounding this, I discovered I really didn’t know how to be on the receiving end of unconditional love. In each of my intimate relationships, I had no problem chasing after another man, showering them with affection, and doing my best to love them unconditionally. But as soon as they became smitten with me and started loving me the same in return, I would freak out. The biggest discovery though was the realization that all of that chasing and running away and pushing and pulling stemmed back to me being molested around the age of 12.

Sadly, my being molested became the first intimate experience I had with anyone in life. While I had been attracted to that adult male in his 40’s prior to his molestation of me, the ramifications of that experience led me to not being able to receive unconditional love. You see, that man did not truly love me. He was a sick man who used me and it established a pattern that created an extremely uncomfortable feeling within me anytime someone who truly loved me, started being touchy-feely and giving me all that gushiness. Those things did nothing more then trigger the pain I got from being molested.

So as I grew older, I went from relationship to relationship chasing after men I was attracted to. I’d shower them with my love and affection and did everything I could to pull them in. But as soon as they began loving me deeply, I started to run away by pushing them back on a daily basis. And all of that was due to never healing from that molestation because each man that tried to love me only reminded me of that molester when they touched me even though they weren’t that sick man.

Thankfully, my Higher Power has helped me to find the healing I needed to work through all of this. I learned I had to walk through those fears of intimacy by allowing a loving partner to do things such as touch me, hold me, cuddle with me, clasp my hand within his, and gaze at me longingly, even when I wanted to run away. The more I forced myself through those uncomfortable moments, the easier it became to allowing them to happen. And the more I allowed them to happen, the more I became able to receive unconditional love. And the more I became able to receive unconditional love, the more I stopped wanting to push and pull or chase and run away from that loving partner. And the more I stopped wanting to push and pull or chase and run away from a loving partner, the more I actually became happy in being in a long-term relationship.

So if you happen to be someone like I once was, who likes the chase but runs away after you catch the person or who does a lot of pushing and pulling to the person you love, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and realize you probably don’t know how to truly receive unconditional love or deep intimacy. If you really want to have a long-lasting relationship, you’ll need to start walking through any fear that arises during intimate moments coming from your partner. You will find in doing so, that it will get easier and easier, until you no longer are afraid of receiving the love you so deserve…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Once A Cheater, Always A Cheater??? – Part I

I debated for quite awhile on whether I wanted to write about the topic of infidelity. But after much dilemma I felt it was for the best. This is not an easy subject for me to be writing about at the present time solely for the fact that I’m still in the thick of dealing with it. But as with all my writings, I am finding it’s healing to do so. So I would like to apologize to all of you in advance of reading this in entirety, only because its length is beyond my normal entries. I pray and hope for all those out there who have either considered cheating on their partners or done so already in their lives, as well as for all those who have been a victim of it, that my words may be healing on some level…

A few days ago, if you were to ask me how my relationship was going with my partner, I would have said that everything was amazing and I meant it. It had been over two years since we first met online and twenty months since we officially became a monogamous couple, or at least from what I had believed to be so. We rarely had any heated discussions and if we did, we always worked through them in a timely fashion and with a lot of love. While I believe there is always room for growth in every department of a relationship, including sexual intimacy, neither of us rarely had any serious complaints with each other. But all of that came crashing down in my world in a fraction of a moment, when my partner’s phone innocently beeped somewhere around 2am early Monday morning.

I was seven days into one of my ongoing trips back and forth between my home in Massachusetts and his in Ohio. He had retired early due to his work schedule the next day, while I remained awake and ironically had been writing an entry in here about embracing my inner child through my watching of cartoons. By the time I had completed that article it was just about 2am. It was then I went into his office to spend the normal few minutes it takes for me to write in my grateful God journal, which I do at the end of each night prior to going to bed. While I sat there in his desk chair writing down the fourth thing I was grateful for on that day, I heard a strange beep from behind me and noticed his cell phone was flashing. I thought it odd given how late it was, so I took a closer look. On its screen was a strange message from a number with no identification other than its digits. While I am unable to recollect its exact words at the moment, it was from someone who appeared irritated that my partner hadn’t gotten back to them and wondered if his partner (meaning me) was still in town. Immediately my heart started racing as I got a bad vibe from the message. Up until that point, there had been a high level of trust established between my partner and I where it was ok for us to answer each other’s phones or messages. But what I found out next in doing so, changed all of that.

In the course of a few minutes, this person provided hard to refute evidence that my partner had cheated on me with him only weeks prior when I had been at my home in Massachusetts. At first I thought it was a joke or that the person had texted the wrong number. But when they provided my partner’s name and a picture that was taken by me during a wonderful day we had spent together only a few weeks prior, my heart sank. Suddenly, I noticed I was shaking with anxiety, which I haven’t felt at any point or on any level since my relationship began almost two years earlier. I immediately went into the bedroom and woke up my partner to have a discussion, where I proceeded to watch the scenes of so many movies I’ve watched play out. First came the major denial by my partner of who this person was. Next came the pieces of information he kept changing during the conversation. And lastly, the truth began pouring out slowly by surely after almost two hours had passed with him giving more and more denials.

I really wanted to believe my partner’s innocence when he sat there and said things to me like “I swear to God on my parent’s graves” or “That’s the truth, I promise”. But I realize that his fear had gotten the best of him already on what he had done from the moment I showed him his cell phone. The long and short of it is that my partner had cheated on me back in the middle of October when I had been home for several weeks taking care of some personal matters. I learned his indiscretion had begun back in September, weirdly enough on 9/11, when he had been cleaning his filing cabinet out. There he supposedly had found a piece of paper with a name and number on it of someone from a previous fling before we had ever met. He had texted that person to see if they remembered him and his slippery slope to infidelity began at that precise moment.

While I am still struggling to understand how such an amazing relationship could have something like this happen to it, I’m working more on coming to acceptance that it happened. The five stages of grief seem to be applying in that process as I am still floating in between all of them trying to arrive to that stage of acceptance. The truth is, I’m still in shock over the matter because my partner is someone who constantly spoke with passion about his disapproval of those who cheated on their partners. My brain is having a very hard time wrapping itself around that fact and the idea that he went as far as he did in his indiscretion. All of it has left me in a difficult spot filled with so much confusion. To get through this, I have been having to look in the mirror and see how my own past was filled with similar behaviors. Some say karma’s a bitch and maybe indeed it is. Maybe I just needed to feel what it felt like to be on the receiving end of this. In all actuality, I am just as guilty in many of my past relationships of similar behaviors to my partner’s infidelity.

While I never fully went into any type of sexual relations with anyone in this lifetime while being monogamous with another, I believe I once walked time and time again, a tightrope of what monogamy really entails. I used to maintain many friends I secretly lusted after and wanted to sleep with. I also used to look at porn for hours on end fantasizing about images of people I’d never meet. I even went as far as having sexual chats on the computer or on the phone with people where I claimed things like I was lonely or that my partner wasn’t giving me what I needed. I often played this sympathy card because deep down I was so insecure that no matter how much love any of my partner’s ever gave me, it was never able to fill that bottomless pit of despair I felt from within me. And when I wasn’t playing that sympathy card, I was making crazy excuses to myself as to why it was ok for me to be doing what I was doing. All in all, when it comes right down to it, any form of lustrous behavior or actual infidelity by a person in a committed relationship does nothing more than cause a destructive path for everyone involved.

It hurts the person doing it because of the guilt it creates within their soul and the poison that guilt manifest itself into for all the unspoken time it’s hidden away. It hurts the person they’re doing it with because of their involvement in sexual behaviors that are dark and not filled any love and light. But most importantly, it definitely hurts the other partner they’re cheating on so profoundly, especially if that other partner has been doing everything they can to love and support them and their relationship.

The simple fact is that any form of infidelity, whether it is acted upon or walked dangerously closed towards, only ends up bringing more darkness upon one’s soul and this world. It breaks down all trust and communication previously established in a healthy relationship. And it also creates an incredible amount of doubt, insecurity, and feelings of betrayal. And no matter what the reason why anyone ever does this, it all boils down to their selfishness and self-centeredness. Usually the person doing it wants to boost their ego and create a feeling of being more desired. But the reality behind it is that the person is really just unhappy with themselves or their life in some way. And while it may be their hope that playing the field while in their committed relationship will bring them what’s lacking from within themselves or their life, it ends up only creating more heartache and pain for them as it has for my partner.

I honestly can’t say I know where our relationship is going to head from here because of all of this. But I can say that I have already forgiven him and I do feel that my spirit and the God of my understanding wants me to give him a second chance. At the present moment, I have begun the process of doing so, as I truly believe in the saying to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The fact is I never used to practice that in all my previous relationships, but through God’s guidance, I am desperately trying to do so now.

Will my partner prove the saying true that “Once a cheater, always a cheater” I don’t know? I know that I have proved that saying wrong, as even through the greatest temptations I’ve faced lately, I have remained faithful to this relationship and plan on continuing to do so. So for my partner’s sake, I hope he can prove it wrong as well and I pray as well that he’ll receive spiritual guidance as he begins his own healing process on accepting what he has done and the ramifications it’s had on his soul, and my own. In the meantime, I will remain as devoted and loving to my partner as I have since the day I knew I had fallen in love with him, because truly, that’s what I believe God would want of me…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Loving My Inner Child By Watching Cartoons

One of the greatest little pleasures I get in life is when I actually watch cartoons. While I mostly like the superhero based ones presently, I’m still a big fan of all of the ones I grew up with. My partner has the tendency to chuckle when he sees me so engrossed in one, but I think that’s because I have the tendency to totally tune out the world and act like a kid when I watch them. What he doesn’t fully grasp, is how therapeutic it is for me to watch these cartoons as it brings me back to a time when I really loved being a kid.

I’ve found over the years that all people have at least one positive memory from their childhood, if not more, buried within themselves of something they once enjoyed doing with any type of frequency, like watching cartoons was for me. While it may take some healing work to access any of them, especially for those who had a dysfunctional childhood, I’ve yet to find a single person who didn’t have at least one thing they really loved doing as a kid. But sadly, most leave those happy childhood memories and the activities they did back then to create them, as just that, memories. Unfortunately, what they fail to realize, like I did for several decades, is how healing it would be for them in the present to do any of those activities again.

It’s really sad to say this, but too many adults stay in adult mode and forget about that child they once were. They grow up and become these mature people who do mature things. And meanwhile, that child lives on within themselves, except they have been put into some inner dark room and neglected. Now picture for just a moment what would happen to a real living, breathing child, if they were put into some dark room in their family’s house and neglected for awhile. I think you can imagine how much that child would be screaming and crying because of their fear, sadness, anguish or anger due to that action. That’s a lot like what happens within all of us if we neglect the child we once were.

I meet adults all the time a lot like how I once was, who have neglected their inner child for years and years, if not their whole adult life. They all appear to share a similar trait in that they seem to be quite often miserable about everything in life. Nothing seems to bring them that giggly joy they might have once felt as a kid. In some cases, such as it was with myself a few years ago, there are those who have neglected their inner child for so long that they’ve become severely depressed and physically sick. Medical studies have shown that there’s a strong connection between a person’s health and the relationship they have with their inner child. Thus it makes sense that a person’s health could decline if they continue to neglect their inner child instead of developing a stronger and healthier relationship with him or her.

In my case, I have found that cartoons is currently one of the strongest connections I have to developing a stronger and healthier relationship with my inner child. As a kid, from as far back as I can remember, until the age of 17, I spent every single Saturday morning watching cartoons between 8am and 12pm. Some of those included The Smurfs, The Snorks, Captain Planet, the Looney Toons, Voltron, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, GI-Joe, the Transformers, Scooby-Doo, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Inspector Gadget, the Superfriends, the Thundercats, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. During those four hours, all of the dysfunctionality in my family went away and I remained deaf to any of their arguments or drama. It was then that my eyes and ears were always glued to the animated characters on the television screen so brightly lit in front of me. And I absolutely loved those hours because it was in those moments that I just really loved being a kid.

A few years ago, I began to realize just how much I neglected my inner child starting around the age of 17 as it was then that I picked up alcohol and stopped doing things such as watching those cartoons. From that point on, I spent the majority of my energy doing everything but what my inner child liked to do. Instead, I chased after things that adults like to pursue such as alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, money, and various other material goods, all of which most kids could ever care less about. But if you think for a moment what a kid might normally like, it’s things such as going to a park and playing on a jungle gym, or playing a pick up game of some type of sport in their neighborhood, or going for a ride on their bike, or reading an exciting book, or taking a hike, or building a sandcastle on a beach, or playing a video game, or like in my case, watching a cartoon. I stopped doing all of those things when my addictions took over my life and my misery grew exponentially because of it. Thankfully that’s not the case for me anymore.

Today, I’m not ashamed to admit that I watch with regularity cartoons such as Ben-10, Ultimate Spider-Man, Beware The Batman, Avengers Assemble, and Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. Why? Because it makes the kid in me happy. It brings a smile to that inner child who has lived within me since the day I was born. While my body grew up and matured into adulthood, a part of me always remained a kid. I don’t neglect that kid anymore because I do things regularly such as watching cartoons. And the best part about this is that I seem to have those joyful giggles a lot more these days. But even more importantly, I really believe that this is also a major reason why my health seems to be improving more and more every single day.

So if you happen to be someone who’s become an adult and experiences misery and depression regularly in life, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and find that memory from your childhood of something you once did that brought you great joy. No matter what it is, just try doing it, even if it seems totally silly, and you may find in doing so, that your outlook on life immediately improves…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson