Hi October,
I am not sure I understand what you are saying. It almost sounds as if you feel that you are invisible or disappear in the face of a strong personality. Or that you feel ungrounded unless another person is keeping you down to Earth. And that John was filling this role for you many times, and without him you feel you are missing an important part of being able to feel yourself? Do you feel like talkign about this? I know the touchy feely stuff is not my forte so I might be so terribly off base. I just felt that you were saying something important and I am not sure I got it.
Plucky
PS the Auschwitz thing is beyond icky. They are inhuman. If John was your bellwether, I know you can do better than that on your worst day!
Yes, all that is true. My best theory on this is that I had no parents worth the name, and that whatever parental attachment I formed was with ob. Only he was what an ob always is; volatile, unpredictable, not wanting a ys hanging around.
So now I seem to need an ob figure to see myself through, and to provide grounding. J was always willing to allow this, because it cost him nothing whatever, and he gained a lot from having me around. But what it means for me is that I still have not found how to exist as a single entity, rather than as half of a brother:sister relationship.
If I look back on my life this is consistent. There was ob, then friend at Uni, then h, then counsellor1, then J. Always a (usually) platonic male figure. There are women friends as well, but they do not get inside my heart in the same way. They stay outside. But the men seem to not just get close, but to be part of me, in a very unsettling way. I don't go round looking for this to happen, it just seems to happen all by itself. With most people it is normal, but once in a while there is someone who seems to complete something in me, and in whom I seem to complete something in them. If this were not mixed up with dysfunction, I would call it love, but perhaps it is not quite love.
I think this is what a mother should be, if you have a decent mother, and I never did. When I look in psychology books at the pictures of those poor monkeys deprived of a mother, and in particular the one with no mother, and no substitute - the one curled up in despair at the bottom of the cage, I see who I am. I want to pick that poor monkey up and hold it.
