The opportunity to please myself

 I spent my entire life trying to please women.  I hardwired myself at an early age to believe that if I wasn’t being praised I would never receive the love I wanted.  

This plan generally worked. Until now.  I  can’t get praise—from the one woman who matters to me.  Instead I’m ghosted, dismissed, ignored, and criticized. 

So what does someone like me do?  I get in a group of 16 women and try to be the one (nice) guy on a pickleball team.

I reach out to women friends in trouble—addiction, failed marriages, poverty etc—and buy them plane tickets surrounded by thoughtful solace. 

To my credit I also spend a ton of money on therapy and treatments to try to break my pleasing habit. To set boundaries. 

The results of this work have, indeed, changed me. I know what I want and need, and can describe that to others, better than I ever have. I’m still working on it. I have many helpful tools. And seeing my own needs makes it so much easier to understand that alcohol or certain friends or unrewarded caretaking are not good for me. 

Pleasing women is still my default neural response.  That’s why I believe that I have to live alone now.  I’m so atuned (whether accurately or inaccurately as I was with my ex) to the emotional state of women near me that my self-awareness plummets. 

I like myself better when I think of my own needs first. I want to be that David Foster now. For the first time. Soon I might be able to do that and live with a female partner.  Now, I don’t believe I can and I want to put myself alone and free to learn who I am and who I was meant to be. 

How new. How refreshing. How powerful. How honest.  

How difficult. How lonely!

How necessary. For me. 

Here's a problem. Though I now understand the contracts from my childhood that created the "pleaser" pattern and the obligation to be the "best baby in the world," and I aspire to abandon those contracts in favor of achieving independent self respect for the first time in my life--I'm stuck with the memory of my fucked up marriage which, sadly, I loved very much.

I've got the virus of a pretty nasty spouse, and thus far, nothing I've thrown at it has expunged her.  (Doron had to destroy his own memory to clear the decks.)

In fact, I worry that my need to live alone now is partially some sort of crackpot self-destructive behavior that leaves open the door to the possibility of my ex-wife's return.

She's shown her leopard spots so clearly for so long.  I don't want this piece of trash any more than the folks in Arizona or Quebec did.  But unlike them, I appear to be stuck with the infection.

It's so frustrating to have my brain polluted with the image of someone who meant me harm, when, finally, some new and interesting things (other than depression and PTSD, my other daily companions) are starting to occur.  My brain is allowing me the slightest signs of neuroplasticity, but right in the middle is the trench of trauma of the failed contract with Mina.  

The woman who I never pleased, who never said thank you, who never apologized because she was always right, the woman who was more interested in my masturbation and crossdressing habits than she was in my survival.  This beast who did not know the first nice thing about me, and still doesn't.  

She's STILL fucking me up, even as I move forward.  I do not wish her well--but I don't want to even think about her.  I'd do a lobotomy if it removed that damaged scar in my old one-track brain.  The track that loved her deeply, and had acid poured on it daily.