Interdependent Isolation

I have, since I was a very young parent, imagined that people only want me around if they depend on me for something. That the only ethical thing I could offer such people was a path to independence. That my duty was to keep people from mistakenly getting attached to me, and to train them to not need me.

As I got older I imagined that people only depended on me because there were no better options, and that absent the circumstances that isolated them a better option would certainly become available. I imagined that my own selfish desire for connection made me manipulate people into such situations, instead of doing the right thing and helping them be happy
without me.

When it happened with the Kids it was important to be sure they didn’t like me more than Mother, at least not for the sorts of interactions Mother wanted to have with them, or the sorts other old people might
see. The Kids might need me to actually get what they needed but they first had to ask Mother for it, so that she would feel properly included. So that she wouldn’t notice them needing me. So that when I
did it later my help felt like relief to her instead of an attack.

There’s a lot in the world that enforces this arrangement, not just Mother’s narcissism. Parental rights are as always a big factor, along with the societal roles we enforce for child rearing. You can’t let people see your siblings treat you like their parent because they are likely to hurt you if they do. As a young person commonly perceived as male you often can’t be seen to be involved in child care at all, even for your own Kids, ag least not without being accused of role-breaking or sometimes even sex crimes. Under no circumstances may you, the functional parent, be seen parenting your legal superior, nor may you contradict their preferences about the care of other people, even if it is obvious that you have a superior capability.

It didn’t help that I was often a shitty parent. Bad enough that I could see it. Even if I had resources and control, which I rarely if ever did, I was only sometimes up for the emotional work. I only sometimes had a solution for the practical challenges of keeping children alive. I only sometimes could act in a way that actually helped, because my role made it impossible to do the right thing without significant consequences.

I still feel this way today, even when I can see it’s not very accurate. I feel like Dog is only here because I’ve tapped him. Or worse that I’ve trained him to need me, as part of my selfish demand for connection, and so even if he could escape he would choose to stay. That he would choose to keep me happy over himself because I’ve tricked him into dependency.

I feel this way about M. Like I’ve engineered a way to keep you from escaping, a way to keep you dependent on me so that I can demand your attention even if you wouldn’t otherwise give it. Like the only ethical action on my part would be to segregate the support I offer from myself, so you can accept or reject them seperately.

But even if found a way to do that, it still wouldn’t convince me. I’d still cook up a reason to match this unshakeable feeling that people only interact with me because they need me, and that the existence of such a need precludes them from genuinely liking me.

Maybe what I mean is this, if I cosinder myself on the other end of the situation: I never got attachment from the people I depended on, wasn’t allowed to have it with the people who depended on me, and I still have no strategy to change that. Because of societal abuses I’ve built a social component around it, where I imagine there’s something better than me available, or would be absent my involvement. And so I train people to not need me. To not miss me when I inevitably stop being the best available option in their life, or when I have to flee to protect myself.

It’s tricky though. I’m triggered by so many aspects of dependency and of parenting and will be forever ¹This is one of the hopeless bits of complex trauma. There isn’t ever a point at which you’ve addressed most of your triggers. You can work to reduce the frequency and severity of them, you can work to overcome the biggest barriers. But there is no amount of trauma work I can do in my lifetime to even discover all of my triggers, let alone … Continue reading. While I have escaped my personal prison our society is still busy enforcing others. It’s still busy asking me to stay out of the lives of “other people’s kids” even when I am better able to help than their assigned owners. I’m no longer without resources or emotional capability but I’m still asked to act the same way because I still don’t have the right role in the patriarchy.

There’s probably space to put some more resentment back into this feel, to push out some of the guilt. That too is tricky, since I burned my way out of my prison and lost everything to do it. Ben wasn’t even a teenager when I abandoned him, when I decided I had to be angry to free myself, even if it hurt him. It’s hard to trust myself with the tool of anger again, because last time I used it in the realm of attachment there very little was left in my life. Last time I used it I couldn’t seperate connection from dependency and I fear I still can’t.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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