What Every Kid Really Needs And Wants…

I may not be a parent at this point in my life, but there was a time when I was a kid. Looking back at the many years I was living under the Dawson household in Poughkeepsie, NY, I realized there was one thing that was greatly absent throughout most of it……unconditional love.

My parents did the best they could to raise my sister and I under their circumstances. Both were alcoholics and both dealt with bouts of chronic depression and anxiety. For a person to be suffering from any addiction, there is one thing that is very difficult to do and that’s caring about anyone else but their own self. To make matters worse, having mental imbalances such as depression and anxiety only furthers the inability to care about anyone else’s needs, wants, or desires. So in the Dawson household, because of both of those things, any love that was present had a level of toxicity within it.

Much of the love my sister and I received growing up was given with conditions, meaning there was always something that was attached to any kind gesture that my parents might have offered…

“If you do this for us, we’ll do this back in return.”

“If we give this to you, you need to give us this back later.”

“If we offer you this, will you help us out with that later?”

Unfortunately, what I don’t remember much of because it wasn’t present often, were loving acts of kindness that came without any attachments. I see movies all the time with family’s that portray those types of values. A son comes home from school having been bullied and his mother holds him tight while he cries in her arms instead of being lectured to stand up for himself in the future. A daughter is dumped by her first boyfriend and her father consoles her with words of how beautiful and special she is instead of telling her what she needs to work on to hold on to guys like that. A child walks into the home office and asks to have a catch outside with their father who promptly gets up and takes some time with them rather than saying he’s too busy. The parents surprise their children with a trip to their kid’s favorite restaurant, just because. And those are only just a few of the many examples of what unconditional love can be all about.

As a kid I desperately wanted to have a lot more of taking walks, having catches, and getting warm embraces and consoling without having to bargain or beg for them. I desperately wanted to be listened to by my parents without them saying anything when I was really struggling with something, such as my sexuality. I desperately wanted them to just look at me and say how much they loved me just as I was and that I was good enough in their eyes. Instead, any love that was given came with a price attached, and thus guilt trips were introduced into my home.

“I gave you this, how come you are being that way?”

“I did that for you last week, how come you won’t do this for me today?”

“Don’t you remember I helped you out with that, so can’t you help me out with this?”

That’s not unconditional love. Placing a guilt trip on something later that one needs or wants and basing it upon an original gesture of unconditional love only will take away from the power that unconditionally loving act of kindness once had. Unconditional love is when something is offered with no expectations of anything coming back in return………….EVER!

Sadly, all of the conditional love and guilt trips I received as a kid became how I was with everyone else as an adult and it’s taking me a lot of hard work now to reverse engineer all of that out of me. I don’t want to live my life offering love that comes with a price. I’ve started this healing by doing random acts of kindness for complete strangers where I know I will never be able to ask them for anything in return. I’ve bought coffees and snacks for those waiting in the lines behind me. I’ve held the doors open at various stores for all sorts of individuals. I let people get in front of me in lines when they seem to be in more of a rush than me. I slow down and allow cars to merge onto a crowded road I’m traveling on. The more that I have done those things, the more I have felt the desire to go on a more personal level with offering unconditional love to those I do know. I drive friends to and from AA meetings. I help people out in the 12 steps. I take my free time to speak at various recovery centers on addiction. I offer warm embraces to those that are hurting. I do chores just because I want to help ease someone else’s burdens. Thankfully, all of these things have helped me to learn how good it feels to love unconditionally.

What I really needed and wanted as a kid was to be loved like that. What I got instead was love that generally came with a price. Over time, I became like my parents and learned how to love conditionally and often resorted to guilt trips to get what I wanted. Through my journey of trying to get closer to God, I have been able to undue much of that early on conditioning that came from my younger years. Today I want nothing more than to love others without expectations. I know I still have a ways to go. But with God at the helm so much more in my life now, I’m seeing that it’s becoming much easier to love unconditionally, and much harder to love with conditions.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Would You Go Out On A Date With Someone Like You???

I hear people all the time question themselves on why they’re single. I hear others often ask themselves why they continue to date the same type of person over and over again. I even hear those that complain and find fault with every single person they go out with.

The common factor in all of those situations is the person doing the questioning. And at varying points in my life, I have lived as all of them. At times in the past I know I was  labeled a drama queen as I walked around with a ‘woe is me’ attitude when I felt everyone else had someone special to spend their lives with and I had no one. Often one might have heard me complain about someone I was dating regularly and how much that person was using me or abusing me in some fashion. There were even periods of time I went through when I found myself dating one person after another week after week and seeing something glaringly wrong with each of them. What I never realized in all of those cases was that I had some serious housecleaning I needed to do before I could ever meet that type of person I really wanted to be with. Until then, I continued to only attract those to me that were reminders of who I was inside and what I hadn’t faced.

I’ve been watching my roommate go through this a lot lately. I see him going out on date after date after date and not really being happy with any of the people he meets or vice versa. I’ve seen him want those that don’t want him and not want those that do want him. I’ve seen him sad and feeling lonely and in all of it, I’ve seen a mirror for myself on how I used to be. And when I used to live that way, the truth was, deep down I wasn’t happy with me. I wouldn’t have admitted that openly back then because I wasn’t aware of it. I wasn’t aware that I didn’t like me. I wasn’t aware that I was a seriously insecure individual. I wasn’t aware that there were many parts of my makeup that I despised. And I wasn’t aware that I had become the spitting image of the bad parts of my parents.

The result was that I either found fault in everyone I met, or I played the sad card around everyone that had someone, or I just continued to go hook up and be promiscuous telling myself that’s all that I deserved. All any of that did was further reinforce my sadness, negativity, and self-hatred. And the truth was, I wouldn’t have ever wanted to date someone like myself. Why would I have? I hated myself then and I didn’t like many of my own qualities and traits.

I’m a firm believer today that if anyone wants to have a life long lasting relationship, they first need to make sure they’ve healed themselves enough from all their past pain and traumas. Second, they need to make sure they’ve become much happier with their lives because of that healing. And third, they need to make sure that they absolutely, positively, and without a doubt, are really beginning to learn how to love who they are inside and out and would want to go out on a date with someone that had similar qualities as themselves. Until I reached a certain level in all of that, I continued to date people that were just like the toxic sides of my parents. I continued to date people who did nothing more than bring pain and hardship into my life. I continued to date people who ignored most of my own wants, needs, and desires. I continued to date people who always abandoned me. And I continued to always end up being single.

In the past few years, I have sought hard to heal within by first working on turning my entire will over to the care of God. The more I have turned my entire will over to the care of God, the more I’ve been guided to face those dark corners of my life that I was so very afraid to face. Through facing those dark corners of my life that I had always been so very afraid to face, I began to find the strength to make many difficult changes which helped me to like myself a whole heck of lot more. Through making those difficult changes and learning to like myself a whole heck of a lot more, a door finally opened in my life to allow a special person in. Through the door that finally opened allowing a special person in, came a partner who has loved me unconditionally and has done so since the first day we met…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

A Date With Me…

In about four weeks, I’ll be turning 41. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I’ve lived on this Earth for 14,975 days. What’s even harder is the realization that over fifty percent of them were nothing but a blur of me chasing and living in multiple addictions. I missed out a lot on living life because in each of those addictions, I was doing nothing but hiding from it.

My life today is thankfully quite different. Just yesterday I went to the movies on my own, which is something that for the longest time I wouldn’t do. There’s a theater locally that many people had been raving about and told me I should go check it out. So I decided to go see The Great Gatsby which had just opened that day there. While I enjoyed the movie’s 3D effects and the plush comfy recliner seat I sat in, I found the film to run a little long and be somewhat slow at times. But this isn’t the reason for me writing this blog entry.

Doing anything alone was pretty impossible for me not too long ago. Besides movies, there are so many things that I never could quite get myself to go do on my own throughout most of my life. Rarely if ever would I go out to dinner, take a drive, sit in a park, lay on a beach, or hike on a trail by myself. Why? Because I hated being with me and I didn’t like my own company. The reality was that I just didn’t like myself and the last person I wanted to spend time with alone was me.

One of the first ways I began to counteract this resistance to spending time with just me was through meditation. Sitting still in silence and just allowing the crazy thoughts to go around my head proved to be extremely difficult at first. But eventually, I was able to go on and complete a 10 day silent retreat where I did nothing but meditate, walk, eat, and sleep completely alone and in total silence. It was worth it because when the retreat was over, I wanted to spend a lot of time with just me and God. Sadly, somewhere along the way though, I fell back into my addictions and obsessions, became severely co-dependent on others, and completely forgot how good it felt to just take a day or even a few hours and spend them alone.

With the limiting disabilities that I have been enduring now for the past three years, life has come around full circle from those days I once enjoyed spending alone. Ironically, I now prefer my own company more than not. Having these disabilities temporarily in my life has been a blessing in disguise. They have forced me to revisit a relationship that I left many years ago which was a relationship with myself. On many days, I’m in too much pain to do anything but sit in the house and work on a puzzle or lay out in the sun and read a book or magazine. What’s funny is that a bunch of years ago I would have dreaded the idea of doing one of those things for a complete day. Now, I cherish a day like that.

There’s a simple truth in why I like doing things with just me today. I like me. I like who I’m becoming more and more everyday. I like how I’m living my life because I feel more more pure than any other time that I’ve ever been alive. And I like the changes that God has been doing within me since I decided to let go of my own self-will and follow God’s instead. I can finally look myself in the mirror today without disgust and instead can say that I truly love myself. Even better, I do things regularly now alone because of that growing love. That’s a far cry from a life where I once couldn’t even function without having to have someone by my side all the time.

The bottom line with all of this is that the life I lived in addictions did nothing more than drive me away from getting to know and love myself. Today, I like taking myself out on dates alone because I love that person I’m going out with. But even more importantly, I love who God is having me become and the more I become that, the more I seem to like spending time with just me.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson