Hey,
Mood: I just got out of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, won, and I’m breathlessly trying to bring you up to speed. In other words, I’ve been digesting a shift so large, honestly? I’m having a hard time putting it into words…and I’ve read way too much Goblet of Fire to my children this weekend. 🤦🏻♀️
First, a recap from this past season of Real Housewives of Substack:
I’ve written here about how I’ve had a hard time extracting myself from certain relationships because of my father’s death when I was a kid. I absolutely intellectually understood what was going on with me and why. Yet I just couldn’t seem to stop this relationship pattern and despite all my introspection, I was doing it yet again with Sweet Yogini. As a reminder, I started dating SY very shortly after the Bear 🐻 and I broke up (again!) last fall.
I have (had, I had – sorry spoiler alert) a super-hot boyfriend (Sweet Yogini) who loves me in a way that literally every woman dreams of being loved. It’s kind of insane. He has his own life, hobbies, all of it. Not needy yet totally crazy about me and isn’t afraid to show it. Me: Also, super grounded in my own life. Productive, great and connected friendships, also totally into said boyfriend. Oh, and we have incredible sex. Incredible. Sex. (Sorry, I don’t mean to rub it in, but it’s worth mentioning.) We are compatible in all ways. Including being into the same shit like meditation, wellness, our children, all of it. Even when we have conflict, we both own our part in it and learn things about ourselves that were perhaps hidden in the shadow. It was literally like that ideal couple in the Yung Pueblo posts. Dreamy, right? Now here’s the “but”: All I do is push him away. Constantly tell him the reasons it won’t work long-term for us. Like, yes – we are perfect, yet I break up with him once a week. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Have you ever had a yo-yo relationship like this?
Well, about a month ago the yo-yo string snapped.
After one of my subconsciously fake breakups, he finally said, Okay. I believe you. This won’t work. I’m looking for a long-term partner. Peace out! ✌️😳
This, of course, tapped into a very deep sorrow within me. The kind that all the sad songs are written about. I’ve known this sorrow before. You remember how I felt after the Bear. (This is my specialty after all – pushing men away and then grieving deeply.) But this time, I lost The One. The One who accepted all my shit. The one who could finally handle my avoidant attachment style! Sure, my husband managed it for over a quarter of a century. But the sexual part of our relationship was no good. With this guy everything was in place. Fuck!!!!! (Literally and figuratively – 😇)
I was committed to getting to bottom of my pattern once and for all.
I put a therapeutic plan in place for the following week: Monday I would meet with my Hakomi therapist and Tuesday, my regular IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapist. I felt a giant hairball lodged inside me and intuited this one-two punch may be helpful. (See? I’m still ambitious! I just point it inside instead of out! 🤪)
So that Monday morning, I told my Hakomi therapist about the breakup. As I was telling the story, I put my hand out in a stop gesture. He immediately said, “Keep your hand there. Tell me how you’re feeling in your body in this moment.” Somehow through my hand in the stop position (therapy is like witchcraft sometimes!), I had the first-time realization that my father was my primary caregiver. I had never looked at it through that lens. But he was the one that took me to and from school and to extra-curriculars Every Single Day. Until his death when I was 16, he was The One for me. I had been in total denial about this fact for my entire life – even back then. Why? I never knew him not to be very ill. He’d had many heart attacks and even a few strokes. He was a big smoker and had diabetes. His impending death was like a 7th member of our family: It had a seat at our table at all times. And while he did often go to the hospital (including the time he had a heart attack when I was alone with him), he always got better. He was a superhero to me in that way. But his looming death subconsciously made me keep him at arm’s length. He always wanted to play with me, to connect – but I just wasn’t having it. There was a block. I just physically couldn’t accept and melt into his daddy love. I was always holding him back, rolling my eyes, ducking out of his clutches if he tried to hug me as though his frail body had a stench I needed to escape. I often think about the message he wrote in my 6th grade autograph book, “Atoosa is a bad-tempered girl, but I love her anyway.”
And that just set the tone for all my relationships going forward.
The pattern started soon after my dad died when I was 16: My then boyfriend’s name was Alex. He was so loving and enamored with me. I did the fake breaking up thing with him…and I will never forget what he said the last time I did it, “I will love you forever, but I can’t love you no more.” What he lacked in grammar, he made up for in wisdom. I felt unsafe, and thus I was a deeply unsafe person to love.
But back to therapy – on Monday, we dislodged something that just felt different. I felt different in my body. I went to bed right after my children that night, then cancelled all my appointments and got right into bed as soon as I dropped them off at school the following morning. This was really blowing my mind: My father was my primary caregiver. He wasn’t just this nice but annoying guy who took me to and from school every day. I slept deeply until my 1pm therapy session and held these new concepts tenderly in my consciousness. Here, we dug deeper. I honestly, don’t remember the session exactly. But as we were about to get off, my therapist asked me, “What are you feeling right now?” I told him I needed to get off the Zoom and cry.
And I did. I did.
I pretty much cried until the next day. (With a quick Visine-assisted break for school pick up, dinner and bedtime – All hail, Mommy Power!) But again, after the children went to bed, so did I and I cried and cried myself to sleep. For the first time in my 50 years, I felt in my bones how deeply I loved my daddy. How scared I was when he was sick. How much regret I had that I was never able to express my love for him as freely as my own children do for their beloved father. And how I could barely grieve his eventual death because of all this complexity. So that night I wept. I grieved my inability to love him fully. Grieved the loss of such a wonderful dad. And recognized myself as a woman who was deeply loved by her father. I didn’t have the disconnected father, I’d told myself I had. I just couldn’t accept his love and connection because his impending loss was too painful. I also felt such gratitude because my dad was so devoted to me and that’s how I had always pulled such beautifully devoted men into my life. That’s the standard I look for because that’s the standard my father set. God, I miss my daddy.
So much was now making sense.
Sweet Yogini came back around. “What happened to you?” he asked incredulously when I stopped the frequent threats to break up and started to reciprocate his love. I had finally FELT what I needed to feel. It wasn’t enough just to KNOW about my pattern. I had to feel those feelings that were bottled up…that I was so afraid to feel for all those years. And once that grief spilled out of me in that epic deluge of tears, I was ready for love in a different way. I was no longer terrified of losing my beloved for the first time in my life.
Ah…but relationships are not just about our patterns, are they? We all know the about the proverbial tango.
The purpose of this column is not to psychoanalyze anyone else. But when someone is devoted to a beloved who constantly pushes them away, they also have some things to work out. For instance, that may be their version of love based on how they were parented. Sweet Yogini and I broke up on Wednesday. It was not my choice this time. But with all that grief and fear out of my system, I can see the relationship more clearly. It was a perfect relationship for fear and grief-based Atoosa. And a relationship I’m so grateful for because although it couldn’t hold the newer version of me, it was so beautiful and worth fighting for that it really pushed me to face the feelings I’d been avoiding my whole life. That’s really something! Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely miss the man (and the sex!) but it’s easy for me to see how this breakup wasn’t my fault. I have no regrets. I’m no longer playing out the pushing-my-father-away-til-he-suddenly-dies pattern. I did that with The Bear. And I grieved that breakup as though I was grieving the loss of my beloved father…because I was. It was a misplaced grief. This is merely a relationship with a great guy that wasn’t ultimately a good match for where we’re both at. May all breakups feel this straightforward.
I don’t know how to say it other than I feel a wholeness I’ve never felt before and I’m looking forward to just sitting in it for a while: Get to know what I’m like without this Dad-sized hole at the bottom of my vase. But this is supposed to be the real Hot Vax summer so…tbd, tbd.
This was an epic voyage for me. Thanks for always coming along. Here for yours, too, 24/7, as always at atoosa@atoosa.com.
Paid Subscriber Perks: Oh, and hey, I’d love to answer some AMA’s for you, so please leave messages in the thread. Or you can email me for anonimity. Will share answers with all. Truly ask me anything: About my life, your life, our lives. After this last hairball, I feel very clear and ready for it. And since I literally HATED Sweet Yogini’s favorite picture of me online (see the photo above - I feel that by running it front and center maybe one day i will make peace with this truly horrific photograph!), you can scroll down to see the pics I sent to him as the ones I actually AUTHORIZE! 😉
xo atoosa
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