BROKEN DOLLS
What does it mean to be a nice guy and consistently find fucked up women as partners? Seems every day I hear it from a man of how he always seems to find the gal who has HUGE issues.
I was online with someone recently and he told me he can pick them out of a crowd on social media without even speaking to them. Mentioned he saw a cute chick on Instagram last week and noticed she followed some of his friends, so he followed her. He rated her a possible… in the way we men quickly assess a woman for her looks and as a possible bedmate.
Sure enough, the next day she’s posting about BPD and Depression awareness! He laughed and remarked how uncanny it was that he could spot the broken doll just from her looks.
Now… that may or may not have been coincidence, but I have heard enough variations of this one to know that there is merit in it.
But why is it that we do this?
I was lucky in that I had a big pool of women around me most of my life and could afford to run at the first sign of crazy. One I stayed with for almost 25 years when I could have made better choices.
Yet I suspect there was something else to my loyalty.
Not-so-Nice trait #13.”Nice guys frequently have problems in intimate relationships and issues with sexuality. Nice guys tend to form relationships only with partners whom they believe to be “projects” or “Diamonds in the rough.” So, in a way, they think they are better than their partners and are entitled to repair or polish them.”
Maybe, maybe not. I don’t buy it to this the degree that is implied here. I think that there is some of that and I also know better.
Let me add that I choose to see you men as much more noble fuckers than you probably will give yourselves credit for.
Let me explain: it’s the eyes, you see. (Forgive that, I couldn’t help myself)
It’s the eyes… the windows to the soul…
It was Carl Jung who alerted me to the way this works.
It’s like in Commando Krav Maga when we say wherever the nose goes, the head follows.
You might get this now: Our eyes see out. Not only that, wherever the eyes go the brain follows. Our eyes see out.
Jung said we wanted to work on ourselves and our problems and make them better but our gaze is external and so we project our pain and our dysfunction “out there.”
We go find it in our environment. We often use the people in our lives as a tableau upon which to paint our internal pain…
When you find a broken doll to fix you are trying to mend yourself.
Sit with that for a minute.
Most of us arrive here with a TON of guilt. Before you continue to slap yourself around indefinitely, let me step in and see if I can help.
Hear me know: We ALWAYS make the best decisions for ourselves at the time. Sure, we could do better in hindsight but that’s cheating because the truth is if we did not decide and choose better at the time, it probably had to be.
My favourite psychology professor taught me that. God, I loved her for a lot of things but for that especially.
What if we have TOO MUCH guilt? Our self-blaming then becomes all-consuming masochism.
Healthy Guilt arises from an act that can be remedied or amended.
The guilt is limited to the screw-up and usually teaches something about living.
Unhealthy Guilt is hard to pin on a specific instance, and because of this there is usually no way to make things right. It is wider in scope than any specific act and since there is no redress, it’s ripe for repetition. Most of you will fall into this category if you are not careful.
Personality disordered folks have problems with daily affairs and relating to others and will insist the reasons for their problems are outside of themselves (external locus of control).
In contrast, neurotic individuals assign too much blame to themselves for anything that goes wrong.
Which are you?
People with personality disorders are rigid and inflexible in the way they live, do not learn from their experience, and fail to change and adapt. Repeated experiences clearly showing they contribute to their own struggles teach them nothing.
Instead, when a pattern repeats, they see it as proof that others are to blame for their hassles. This is the very meaning of maladaptive.
So be careful of where you land on the feeling guilty continuum. You don’t want to be at the extremes.
If you have had a failed relationship, it is likely that you had good intentions the whole time, especially at first.
Shit just went south. You will figure that out in time.
And if you are still in a relationship and know that it is heading south, what will knowing what I am telling you do? Will it make a difference? Could it if you wanted it to?
Could you use her “issues” as a signal to forgive yourself and thereby, forgive her? Could you find that kind of love & power?
Who would you have to be to make that happen in your life if that is what you want?
The whole time you were trying to please her you were trying to nourish your own soul as well.
Now you can direct your gaze where it needs to be. Not so that you can take a year off, relaxing from all the dead ends you went down while pursuing a vague and intangible wholeness missing from your daily existence.
“Putting myself first” doesn’t necessarily mean having more of the external trappings of life and more fun and friends and adventure, though it might be some of that.
No. it’s more. It also means you work on you.
You can finally fix yourself my brother.
It is what you were trying to do all along…
true and free…
cw
