Scary Truth

I

It was only a meme, but my response was like the kid bouncing in his seat with his hand forcibly stretched high seemingly trying to dislocate his shoulder socket as he waved vigorously, desperate to be called on to answer the question.  I did not have to even think about the answer. Immediately, the picture of the defining moment exploded on the big screen of my cognition in vivid color.  I could easily answer that the worse response to hearing “I love you” is to freeze in terror and give a prolonged awkward pause before deflecting by mumbling a self-deprecating remark.  

The harder question to answer was, “Why did I do that?” It took me years of introspection and even some scientific research to answer that question. As part of a research team studying adverse childhood experience, I participated with a group of survivors of child abuse.  My initial motivation was seeking a way to overcome the recruiting barrier we faced of not being able to ask people about their experience of abuse before they consented; How do you get such persons to self-identify.  It turns out I had to self-identify to join the group.  I identified more than I expected.  I came to recognize a common thread in myself and in the other group members.  Survivors dealt with a persistent sense of low value, i.e. residual shame, a pervading sense of unworthiness, particularly feelings of being unworthy of love, and a lack of a sense of empowerment, agency in their own lives.  All of these were at play in that moment. 

Part of the panic was cognitive dissonance.  My sense of unworthiness conflicted with the reality of the statement.  I was more comfortable with unrequited love.  In fact, over a year before, as we were walking back from seeing my neighbor perform in Master Harold and the Boys in the campus main theater, the same person had stopped me in front of North Hall to express concern over repeated incidence of  awaking in the morning to find that some mystery person had  left poetry at her doorstep in the middle of the night addressed to her.  It was only after she expressed great anxiety over not knowing the author’s intentions that I relinquished my denial of my culpability in the act.   The motivation of a person with a low sense of agency and a low sense of relative value does not subsist on any reciprocal response, but on a compulsion to express, with some level of abstraction, like music or poetry, the emotion which vexes and terrifies them. 

Still years of friendship did not prepare me for moment of her expression.  Another cognitive block was that the one person I can remember from my childhood telling me, “I love you” was just grooming me for a later assault.  Years later, that caused me to be triggered by a boss who would frequently open our discourse with, “I love you, but…” Degradation always followed the conjunction.  As much as he was a master manipulator and was my first recognition of the art of gaslighting, he somehow always managed to leave the sandwich open faced and never ended the discussion with a compliment or anything encouraging.  

My friend surprised me, but she did not ambush me.  During the years leading up to that moment she would frequently say, “I value you as a person. . . I value our friendship.”   It took me months of systematic desensitization to not deflect with humor when she said that.  It took me years to be able to reciprocate and say, “Your friendship is very important to me, always has been, and always will be.”  That was even years after the incident herewith being discussed. 

Instead of shock, I should have anticipated the moment. I had been to her place and found the poems I wrote displayed under the glass cover of her desktop.  For months I had participated in her regular business travel by dropping her off at the airport on Sunday and picking her up on Thursday before stopping to have dinner together on the way back.  The context of her statement was being away together on a weekend trip.  On the second day of the trip, we were walking in the sun along a path parallel to the ocean front.  Antecedent to turning and making her statement she took my hand.  Still the words evoked terror, even though my faint vestiges of value, worthiness, and empowerment had been subconsciously working for years toward that moment. 

I was just not comfortable with the idea. I did not seize the moment.  Later that day, on the way home my friend and I had our first and only big argument.  I did not even have the good sense to recognize that the subject of the argument was distal to the cause of the argument.  Months after that trip, I found comfort in a relationship that presented more familiar territory, someone who declared from start, “I don’t believe men and women can be friends; I would never be friends with a man, especially not a man I was married to,”  and someone who managed to deprecate even what I viewed as my good traits like keeping a budget, having a savings account, and desiring to continue my education.  Even though all my earlier romantic fantasies included my life partner being my best friend first, I went for the more familiar path, one more in keeping with my developmental experience. That was not the basis of a healthy relationship. 

At least from that, I learned I need to have the courage not to chase validation in the face of invalidation.  It took me years to grow past that.  Progress was gradual.  After decades on this earth, I finally learned to accept compliments; I learned to fight off the impulse to respond with some self-deprecating humor (bringing the exchange back to my comfort level) and just say, “Thank you.” 



Still, there is the part of me that wants to retreat from human interaction and all such potentially awkward encounters as, “I love you.”  That part of me thinks that all I need is a cabin in the woods with facility enough to write, play music and do art.  Maybe a bit more facility than the cabin pictured here, which is a historical site in Harrisburg North Carolina.  I visited Harrisburg for a Labor Day family cookout at my sister’s house this year.  It was like the ultimate test of my development. There were a lot of people there who greeted me with hugs, even some kisses, and said, “I love you.”  I was able to accept their expressions without any sense of panic and even reciprocate in kind.