Disordered Relating…

I have been surviving on crumbs. Anorexically relating. Sometimes a nightly phone call of limited duration. Maybe a few texts during the day, mostly not though. It is the idea of the relationship that keeps me coming back, it is the love that I feel from the person, occasionally, that keeps me coming back always believing that someday I will be provided a full meal…but showing up to crumbs instead.

I know it is my fault. I know I am the one who keeps showing up expecting some sort of relational smorgasbord. And I have been wasting away into nothingness with each passing year. Waiting for this person to actually serve me some full helping, some nourishment for my body and soul. It could come as appreciation, it could come as desire, it could come as showing up, it could show up as effort, each one nourishing in their own special way.

I am not talking fancy trips or lavish gifts, just simple ways to show that while difficult circumstances abound, love, and desire and longing and appreciation exist. And are capable of being sated.

And I see, now, that I am starving at a table which should be replete with nourishment.

I have a relational disorder. A toxic attachment to what I cannot have. I just keep thinking that if I show up again, that someday I will be satiated. But it never happens, but it always seems like satisfaction is just around the corner…maybe, this time.

Overlay all of that with love and it really does spell disaster. Lay on top of that a relational cynicism from years of sitting at the feet of love’s demise and what it created is the perfect storm of codependence resulting in a disordered way of relating and loving.

The person you love puts forth the most minimal of efforts. And you cannot figure out why. When you do the relational math, it seems that everything adds up to you being amazing and wonderful and something that should be valued, prized even. But when you look at the effort expended, you see the trail of breadcrumbs, and see that there is never going to be a meal at the end of that road.

And now, even if there was, you have existed for so long on almost nothing, long droughts that are bereft of sustenance and hydration. Your container for loving is so shrunken and misshapen, that you know that you couldn’t handle a full meal without making yourself sick. And so you persist because the dance, the tenor and pace of the relationship just keeps being enough to keep you alive.

And so survival becomes the norm. You aren’t really living or even loving anymore. You are just existing waiting for some day when your love is reciprocated from a person who is just not capable. And while you really need them to be capable, they just are not. And so you eat the promises of love’s future like that will sustain you, but promises are like air, and they cannot ever really nourish you other than in the fantasy world you have created where this relationship survives.

And so you have disordered loving. And while you can see how you ended up here, you are now so married to your own internal commitment to the ideal, that you don’t know how to do it any differently. And so you work, diligently to maintain your status within a relationship that you do not really have any status in whatsoever. You are just always there, and you are always starving. And you know that they serve meals and food and sustenance elsewhere, but you are stubbornly committed to the insistence that it is THIS relationship that will satiate you once and for all.

The truth is that it never has. There have been moments sublime that keep you engaged and ever hopeful. But the ultimate truth is that you are wasting away in front of this person who professes to love you, but then makes the barest of efforts to lift a finger to engage, or show up, or anything at all.

And you make excuses for them. You marginalized yourself further by co-signing their stuff. You are so far in on this one that it seems too hard to back out. And what does that even look like now? There is a part of you that is wholly unsatisfied but there is this other part that whispers in your ear, “you don’t really want a full meal, so you are fine where you are. You don’t want to be fat and happy, you like being slim and agile.”

Total mind fuck. And you are doing it to yourself. You keep not getting anything you need, but you keep hanging around surviving on crumbs of attention and affection and you are calling that living and loving. When you know, at least you hope, that love and living have so much more involved. There has to be more involved!

You have been surviving on relational crumbs, at first because you mistakenly thought there would be more at some point in the future. But now, a long way into what once was that distant future, you see that you have been relating for pure survival, and never ever feel satisfied. So you keep eating, because you have to, and now you are so emaciated that nothing you put into your body ever feels like enough.

The love you feel is real. Unfortunately so is the not so benign neglect that masquerades as love. And there are always a good many plausible reasons for the other person’s lack of attention, but in the cold light of day, they all evaporate under daylight’s truth.

You are starving. And so you are dying. Moving ever closer to your own demise and further and further from any point where nourishment, support, and love exist. You have bought into the notion, the idea that this relationship is it. And you both pray that it isn’t and is at the very same time.

No one understands why you remain. And no one understands why your reflection in the mirror alters the way you treat yourself. No one understands why you don’t just have enough and push yourself back from the vacuous table, and go seek sustenance and substance elsewhere.

And you don’t completely understand it yourself. I mean you can trace the origins, but just like back then, you have absolutely no idea why this person that should love you, show up for you, care about you, want you to feel full and well and cared for, just always seems to fail to give you anything more than crumbs.

And so you find a way to exist in this place where there is never enough, you tell yourself that you will eat tomorrow, that tomorrow is the exact day when you will finally stop the nonsense and you will begin to take care of yourself in all the ways. But when tomorrow comes, you find yourself mired in the old habits and ways and it becomes easier to tell yourself the lie one more day than it does to change.

And it is then you see yourself, caught in a trap of your own making, inflamed by a wound that does not appear can ever be healed. Caught in your own shitshow, left alone to try to figure it all out but all you do is spiral into more madness and ailment.

Why do you not demand more than what you are getting? Why do you persist in believing that someday this relationship will ever provide you with what you want or need? Why are YOU ok subsisting, of loving in this very anorexic way?

And so it morphs into bulimic relating. You binge and purge and binge and purge, thinking that while you are never able to hold it all down, you are at least taking it in now. But the joke is on you, because this is just a new way to remain dysfunctionally relating. It got you nowhere except more stuck in something that leaves you hungry and wanting all of your days.

And you feel hopelessly stuck. Trapped in the love you feel and the love you don’t. Knowing that you should care about yourself more, I mean if you don’t, how can you really expect someone else to? But here you are nevertheless. And you can’t leave and you can’t stay. You see no future that doesn’t include them but you also know, that your own starvation will be an end if you persist.

You know you are dysfunctional. You know you need to change. You know…but that is not enough. You must surrender to the idea that self knowledge will never save you. In fact, self knowledge is the thing that keeps you forever stuck. And yet, you still believe that this time it will be different, that if you can just find the words, then you will be released and vanquished and able to solve all the disordered relating in your life.

Again, still.