I dreamed of near misses and conversations that only went in circles. Of fears fulfilled that in waking hours I know I have no right to comment on. To care about. I woke nearly in tears over choices I made long since, that despite many long and aching hours of regret, I still know were the right ones.

I cannot seem to finally shake the last binding threads that tether this heartache to me. I know and believe and feel I have learned all I can from it. Without more to broaden my understanding it has simply become pain without purpose; without remit.

And I know it’s not going to stop…

I used to take this very personally. I know better now.

Even though I DO know better, the closer I am to the person on the other end of the equation, the harder it is to remember.

I have felt this particularly keenly with regard to my father and the time we have been spending together of late.

My dad was not an ideal parent. He was inconsistent, frequently absent, and always self-serving. For many years, I refused to communicate with him as he remained an intense source of toxicity well into my adulthood.

About ten years ago, I relented on my no-contact position; mostly out of practicality. I wanted to attend birthday parties and family events where he might be present, and I had been avoiding them so I didn’t have to encounter him. I did tell him that his presence in my life was conditional. That he was not allowed to ever raise his voice to me. He accepted this with reasonable good grace and has kept to it, with perhaps one or two exceptions.

Recently, his health has been in significant decline and he is preparing to be transferred to hospice. I have had to consider how I want my relationship with him to proceed at the end of his life. Having lost my mother unexpectedly last June, I have a very present example of what grief and unresolved conflict can feel like. I know without question I want our remaining time together to be marked by a conscious effort to remain open-hearted and present with him, despite any element of our history.

This has been more challenging than I expected. He is not an easy person to be around, in many respects. He has a terrible temper that has only been softened a little by his illness. He is stubborn to a degree I find completely infuriating. He is also uniquely tone-deaf to the feelings of others.

He has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been very focused on the mistakes of the past. A not uncommon end-of-life posture, it has manifested in him being deeply preoccupied with certain events from my childhood for which he feels regret. These are memories that are quite traumatic, and not something I want to revisit with him. I am still working through my own interpretation of these memories and still feel tremendous vulnerability when confronting them. Given his temperament, he is completely incapable of being a safe space for this process and his need for forgiveness shouts down any competing emotional demands from anyone else.

I have forgiven him. I have expressed EXPLICITLY that I have forgiven him. Long since. Not due to any virtue of his, or even a change in the essential qualities in him that caused the initial harm, but for my own peace.

Nevertheless, every single time I have seen him in recent weeks, he brings up – again – some transgression of his for which he wants absolution.

This is undoubtedly in part because he has significant functional limitations on his memory. He genuinely doesn’t seem to remember we have already talked about this multiple times. Even still, it is excruciating to have the conversation repeating itself in a grim groundhog-day-like loop every time I see him.

I have made a significant effort to be patient and compassionate with him each time this happens. To engage in a way that might help him find some comfort or resolution, even if it came at a cost to my own peace of mind. It has only been in the last week that my therapist has helped me realize I do not necessarily need to continue to participate in this exercise.

I had been anticipating the next visit, prepared with a script about how I care about and love him, but that having this conversation over and over isn’t helping either of us and I’d like us to focus on happier things in our remaining time together.

Then, my sister texted.

My two younger sisters have a different relationship to our father than I do. They are significantly younger, and had a mother who was engaged enough to ensure he showed up for them in a healthier way than he did for me. While they each have their own difficult experiences of him, neither of them have had as much reason to protect themselves from him; physically or emotionally.

When he and I have had conflict in the past, they have taken his side. Over the years and with more experience and understanding, they both seem more sympathetic to how different a father he was to me than he was to them. I was under the impression these wounds had healed. It’s always surprising to see the way an impending death will expose buried or forgotten pain.

She wrote to say she had been having some “not great” feelings about some things that had been going on. One of which was the way I was treating dad. She went on to say he told her that every time I saw him I was giving him a “guilt trip about being a shitty dad.”

My blood ran cold, and then very very hot indeed.

I have been doing my absolute UTMOST to avoid telling him that. He is the one who keeps bringing things up and wanting to rehash these painful memories. At worst I have elected not to argue with him when he expresses that a particular decision he made was a bad one. Mostly, I have told him I know he is truly remorseful, that it is in the past, and that I forgive him.

I told my sister as much, and after brief reflection, she conceded my version bore the greater ring of truth.

I am FURIOUS that he is characterizing these exchanges as me browbeating him. I am not SURPRISED he is doing so, on a fundamental level. He is notoriously bad at accepting responsibility for his actions and very fond of sketching himself as the victim. But the way he talks to me in these conversations and the way he describes them to my sister bear absolutely no resemblance.

Both he and my sisters seem to think my difficulty with him is about things that have happened in the distant past. The truth is, he is still behaving in ways that hurt people and refusing to acknowledge his role in the unfolding consequences.

He is hurt he is not getting some particular kind of emotional tenderness from me that he HAS NOT EARNED. He is resentful that I do not seem to care about him as deeply as my sisters do, while remaining an UNSAFE person for me to be vulnerable with. I have been acting with profound effort and considerable intention to remain present and open-hearted toward him, and to find that effort is being met with the petulance and self-pity he exposed in his description to my sister makes it hard to imagine the value in persisting in the effort.

Yet, even with all of that being true, I know it is worthwhile. Not for any value he might derive from it, but from what I will know about myself. That my compassion can exceed the pain it is confronted with. That my willingness to be present and vulnerable through intense difficulty is a strength I can be completely sure of. That a mirror cracked through circumstance still shows the truth, even if only in fragments.

My dad has always been a musician. He wrote and recorded an album, played in a few bands, and when I was young would often sit at the piano and play and sing. There were lullaby’s at bedtime, silly songs in the car. It’s possible I so strongly associate him with music because he is the obvious source of my own talent; my favorite thing about me.

One of my favorite things he would play was what I would call the “glass of beer” song. When I would ask him to play it, he would almost always oblige. It was so beautiful and sad and powerful. I loved it.

It wasn’t until I was somewhere in my 30’s, listening to the Elton John album Tumbleweed Connection, that I realized he hadn’t written it. I laughed about that one for a long time. He never claimed he had, he just never said he hadn’t and for most of my childhood, if he sang something I didn’t recognize, I assumed he made it up.

He and I have a complicated relationship. In a different way than my mother and I did. In his case, I know he loves me – to the best of his ability. But, much like my mother, he seems incapable of seeing past his own wants and needs to express care or concern for others.

When he and my mother split up, it was quite amicable. They still spent time together socially and shared a group of friends. Even when my mother got involved with my step-father, things were friendly; this largely owing to the fact my stepfather was my father’s 2nd cousin. Convenient, right?

As time went on, and the relationship between my mother and stepfather became more serious, things began to change. Andrew had a terrible violent temper. He would punish us for the most minor transgressions, usually with physical abuse. In retrospect, it was almost inevitable it would unfold that way. He was only 16 when my mother, then 23 took up with him. He was living in our basement to escape the violent abuse he had suffered at the hands of his own father. He didn’t work, so my mother left him in charge of her 2.5 and 5 year old children. Children who had – up to that point – been rather overindulged and subject to almost no discipline.

He had no other tools in his arsenal than screaming and hitting. My mother seemed to think this was just how things were done and never objected or intervened on our behalf. We would go to school with bruises we were supposed to hide. My grandmother and his both knew what was happening. There was a lot of tut-tutting, but no one acted to prevent this abuse. Not even my father.

He still can’t articulate why he didn’t get involved. I’ve asked him any number of times. For my part, I am sure it is because having 2 small children around interfered with his social life to an unacceptable extent.

One Sunday, he was bringing my sister and I back from his every-other-weekend visit. We got back to our house, and no one was at home. He was instantly furious. Like his cousin, he didn’t have a short fuse, he had NO fuse.

He knew my mother and Andrew socialized with some of the neighbors up the road. He marched us next door and asked if he was there. We were let inside and an argument immediately commenced. Dad was angry no one had been home to take us off his hands. He could also tell Andrew was high and that set him off as well. Rich, coming from the person that gave him weed in the first place, but I digress.

As the shouting intensified my sister and I stood there watching them getting more and more aggressive. Finally, my dad reached out and slapped Andrew across the face. I have no idea what possessed him to do that. He wasn’t ordinarily a physically violent person. Whatever his thinking was, it unleashed a fury in Andrew like I had never seen. He turned on his heel, ran into the kitchen, and came back brandishing a huge butcher knife, screaming he was going to kill him.

At this point my dad grabs my hand and my sister’s shoulder and we run outside. We pile back into his car and go back to his house. Later, when my mom was finally home from work, she came and picked us up and took us home.

I was about 5 at the time, but even then I remember thinking, why is he sending us back to someone who threatened to kill him right in front of us?

There was never a satisfying answer for this. Indeed, I didn’t hear from him at all for over six months. Andrew held a grudge like no other and said if he ever saw my dad again he would kill him. My father’s response? To stop coming to pick us up at all.

Time went by. I turned six. I went to the phone booth and looked him up in the book and called him. I told him he couldn’t just stop being my dad because of what happened. He was chastened, and started making arrangements to meet my mom in a parking lot to pick us up so he didn’t have to come to the house.

The rest of my relationship with my dad is filled with examples of this dynamic. Me, asking why he abdicated his responsibility to keep me safe, and him having no good answer.

I learned early I would need to protect myself. One way I did this was to close my heart to him. After so many disappointments and acts of active harm, I no longer trusted him. Somehow, his treatment of me felt like more of a betrayal than my mother’s indifference. I had once felt tremendous love from and for him. To lose it was much worse than never having it.

For many years, only music acted as a tether between us. He arranged for me to have studio time to record my album. He gave me his piano. He tried, in the only way he knew, to keep some connection between us alive.

Over the last decade or so, his health has declined precipitously. He is now at a point where the repeating cycle of medical emergency > surgical intervention > return to original health-damaging behavior > medical emergency, etc has escalated to a point of no return. His surgeon advised us that to treat his current condition would require multiple additional surgeries with diminishing hope of meaningful recovery. He urged us to consider palliative care as an alternative, and after significant discussion, that is the option he chose.

We spoke at length about his fears and regrets. He begged me, in tears, to forgive him. I told him I had done so long since, and that any forgiveness he felt was withheld was for him to grant himself.

And in the dawning realization that he is already in the process of dying, my heart is softening. I know there are a number of reasons why this feels possible now, when it hasn’t before. Not least because having lost my mother without warning just nine months ago, I know how much I don’t want that to happen with him.

It is painful to re-engage with these feelings, but I am grateful to have them. I would rather be present with the true core of my love for him than deny myself – and him – the opportunity to experience it. Now at this time where I finally feel safe from any chance of him hurting me, I can once again be vulnerable enough to access the parts of my heart where my connection to him has been hidden for so long.

It’s hard to articulate all of the feelings this process is bringing up. Gratitude, sorrow, frustration and ambivalence are all taking their part. I have never been involved in end of life care for anyone before. The only way I feel sure I can connect to him, and help him feel the depth of my wish that his pain be eased, is to be present.

We talked once about how certain songs always made us cry. For me, it’s America by Simon and Garfunkel. For him, it was The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. As much as it is FIRMLY on the nose, it feels like the right offering to bring to the moment. Remembering all the times he sang the song I loved for me, I will sing the things I cannot say, and hope it speaks to his heart.

I was recently reflecting on the notion of time operating like a spiral. Where we can move through phases with echoing familiarity from a new and – hopefully – more fully informed perspective. Just at present it feels less like a spiral and more like Escher’s stairs; my vantage shifts elevation based on the degree to which I have integrated whatever lesson previous experience may have afforded me.

Lately, it has felt like I am in the basement trying to determine how long it’s going to take me to get up to ground level again, let alone gaining additional ground. Revisiting music I wrote 20 years ago catapults me into an eerily similar set of feelings about a completely separate set of circumstances. Heartache from wounds long healed echoes through my body and soul amplifying present pain. Having written a poignant soundtrack to my despair, it feels almost as though I am condemned to proceed through the same sequence of bewildering romantic calamities.

It would appear I have not, in fact followed Ms. Mann’s advice to “Wise Up” Part of my failure comes from a creeping complacency developed over a decade bereft of the primary substance of my emotional life. I felt nothing as intensely; neither pleasure nor pain. It was easier to deploy intellectual understanding to make “good” and “correct” choices. My heart was moved but little, and did not clamor with longing and illogic.

And now it does. As it did before.

I remember what has come before, and thus I know things, but I cannot seem to apply any of them to the moment I am in. A moment full of yearning, regret, and a typically futile desire to turn back time and make a different choice.

“I’m holding my breath. And I’m turning blue. Forget what I said; let’s decide it’s not true.”

I know that wisdom and deep feeling are not mutually exclusive. Many of the greatest sages are passionate in their expression of enlightenment, but that feels beyond the reach of this moment for me. I am still too raw with renewed feeling toward everything and occupied with a panoply of griefs. My pedantry tokens have an abysmal exchange rate for the lucre of emotional-bandwidth, so I am unable to meet the task with sufficient resources in hand.

As ever, patience – in perpetually short supply – is the likely remedy. As much as the play-through of this catalog is intermittently agonizing, I am also sure beyond doubt there are other songs in my future. Songs that confirm the magic of the precisely correct moment. Ones that contain harmony I’ve never heard before. Songs that will Save Me.

I have been spending a lot of time alone lately. Possibly a little less than usual, but it has felt like more. The emotional awakening I am experiencing has been – by and large – a good, if painful process. I feel more myself than I have in a decade, and as I remember me to myself, I am also struck by how much more immediate both the pain and joy of life feel to me now. I recall how this used to be my lived experience all the time, and I mourn a little for the years lost to inner estrangement.

The Hermit is a symbol, above all else, of solitary reflection. He stands apart from the bustle of other cards holding a light up to a looming shade. As the part of the Major Arcana that represents the approaching dark night of the soul, he has paused for a look at how far the Fool has already come on his journey.

When the Hermit appears it is an invitation to pause and reflect. To spend time alone and reconnect with the inner wisdom we all possess. It is tempting to fill time with distraction and noise, lest feelings of isolation overwhelm us, but the Hermit understands that being alone does not have to mean being lonely.

In the years of my emotional estrangement, I didn’t feel anything with particular intensity. I grew to strongly prefer my own company over spending time with others. I knew this grew out of a number of conditions; being partnered to someone who’s company I could barely tolerate, and the circumstance of singlehood which required me to learn how to enjoy my life without companionship. It was something I had actively cultivated in the past, but in that time came quite naturally.

I assumed it was due to some profound emotional growth that I could be alone – indeed even prefer it – with such aplomb. I saw it as an asset to my happiness, though I worried about the degree to which it might be difficult to find a partner who could understand and respect my desire for space.

Recently I was exposed to the idea that the kind of self-isolation I was practicing might not be about me having achieved such profound equanimity, but in fact that the opposite was true; that extended periods of alone time were a trauma response to cope with emotional disregulation.

This suggestion absolutely bowled me over. Still awakening to myself, I was able to more readily access my deeper feelings and know immediately this is what had been happening for me over the last few years. That being alone was the only way I could sufficiently control conditions to allow myself to process what I was feeling. That the sometimes desperate impulse I would have to be by myself was due almost exclusively to my inability to access my emotions in situ if any other stimuli was present.

What I had framed as a measured response to upsets and conflict was instead a powerful strategy to disassociate in moments of stress. To distance myself from feelings that felt unsafe or unmanageable until such time as I could approach them without additional distraction or obligation to consider the experience of others in the same moment.

Understanding this suddenly shifted my perception of what alone-time really meant for me. Coinciding with a renewed intensity of desire to feel connected to others, it illuminated how often I was denying a penetrating loneliness; rejecting the notion that I want and need emotional intimacy and presence to feel fully nourished meant I was not seeking or maintaining it in any meaningful way.

The appearance of the Hermit put much of this in context. The last few weeks have been particularly instructive regarding how connection and aloneness interact. How by the development of a more nuanced perspective I more clearly felt the distinction between solitude and loneliness. In tandem, it became more conspicuous the differing quality of attentive presence versus simply being in company. An intentional effort at connection or a distraction in the form of companionship.

It is more obvious than ever to me that solitude and connection are meant to be in harmony, not treated as rival claims for temporal resources. Just as the experience of being alone does not need to mean loneliness so too should time spent with someone be treated as meaningful in its own right. Without agenda or objective, being present with another person is a gesture of love for both people. By giving freely of my authentic self, I free you to do the same. By knowing I am listening with open-hearted care, you are assured of my considerate attention. This above all else, is how love is demonstrated as an act, rather than a nebulous desire or abstract intent.

Looking back with the hope of illuminating the future path is the essence of what the Hermit is urging. Understanding the value of solitude in pursuit of this aim is the lesson for this moment. Cultivating an attentive pose toward this work will be the best purpose for however long my time alone may last.

Ultimately, I think we place too much emphasis on empty courtesy over authentic kindness in this culture so niceness isn’t a quality I put a lot of value in. That said, she had a way of talking both about and to her children that strays about as far away from nice as you can get.

I was born profoundly cross-eyed. It runs in the family on both sides, but no one else has ever had such a severe case as mine. I was also a redhead, like my dad, and she would joke that had I been born a hundred years ago, it was likely they would have labeled me a devil spawn and left me on a hillside.

She said a lot of things like that. Quips she clearly found amusing or colorful and repeated so often they became part of the lexicon of my childhood. She told my sister frequently that having a baby at 17 was a mistake. But, she didn’t put it that way. Instead she would look at her and say “You ruined my life” or “If abortion had been legal that year…”

The messages for me were different. They were less vitriolic, as a rule. While she resented my sister for the fact of her existence, I was to blame for a variety of character flaws personal to me. Among the list of my sins:

• I had been “the worst” baby. I never stopped crying
• I had been “born disapproving of her”
• I was intolerably conceited and she claimed “the universe gave you that lazy eye to keep you from becoming the most vain creature on the planet”
• That while my sister had been a mistake, I was at best a social blunder

Children rarely pause to consider the things their parents say to them as to the content of the claim. It certainly didn’t occur to me until much later that everything she ever said about me was really about her.

When my daughter was born she had terrible colic. She cried a lot as a result. Once, when my mother came to visit she said, “Jesus, she’s even worse than you were!” Objectively, she didn’t cry that much. Suddenly, this vision I had of myself as having cried non-stop for my entire infancy was called into question. It dawned on me that her experience of my difficulty as a baby was likely unrelated to how I behaved and tied primarily to her disinterest in parenting.

I had never really understood what she meant when she said I was born disapproving of her; if I was looking down my nose at her, blame the strabismus? I did challenge her a lot as a child. More, I think, than most children might. I knew she wasn’t making choices that put our well-being first and I criticized her for it. But, to attribute that to a baby never made any sense to me. After becoming a parent myself, I realized it was almost certainly a response to feeling a sense of guilt over her ambivalence about motherhood.

Vanity was, far and away, the quality she derided most vehemently. In retrospect it’s impossible to interpret this as anything other than misdirected self-hatred. She was beautiful, but she never felt she gained the advantage she felt entitled to because of it. In my case, I was an awkward, poorly dressed, and malnourished child that no one would accuse of being fussy about my looks. I had no concept I might grow up to be attractive, nor the expectation of the admiration of others because of it.

What I DID have was a confidence that I deserved better than what I was getting. Both from her in particular, and from life in general. My childhood was full of chaos and danger. My mother did nothing to protect us from that, and in many cases acted in direct opposition to what would benefit us. I knew she was wrong, I knew she should be doing better, and I had no problem telling her so.

To her, wanting to be safe and cared for – believing myself worthy of those things – made me vain. Deciding I could make different choices and create a better life for myself in the future was arrogant. When I started actively taking steps to achieve that and having precisely the outcomes I imagined for myself she would hiss “You are such a fucking princess.” This was her fiercest expression of contempt.

Though she said it to shame me, I said “You’re goddamned right” and embraced it wholeheartedly.

I do not know how I came by the character that allowed me to see past her vision of the world. My sister, who suffered far worse at the hands of both my mother and others, accepted the ugliness as unavoidable. Her life mirrored our mother’s in significant ways; almost as though she could not imagine a different outcome than the one written for her, no matter how awful it was.

Whatever was present in me, I am deeply grateful for it. Though we were estranged for the last nine years of her life, I know she would have been absolutely stunned to see what has become of me. The professional success, the travel, the security I have created for myself; all of these things she saw as unattainable and too much to hope for are firmly established facts for me.

And if it be vanity to believe in my own inherent worth, step aside so I can get a clear shot of myself in the mirror.

It is deeply human to tell stories. Whether through art, song, or the tradition of oral history. We tell stories to organize our thoughts, to express our feelings, and to impose order onto a chaotic universe.

I am by nature a storyteller. I craft narrative like it is second nature. I have a profound and persistent need to make myself understood and to create sense of my own lived experience. It feels most resonant to apply internal logic to cement my understanding.

I had always considered this a strength. A tidy way to interpret and communicate around an organizing principle; something that provides a common lens to consider my feelings and circumstances.

It was recently suggested that while having stories is both natural and helpful in its way, they can also become the focus of so much attention that the core of what has prompted the process can be lost.

I was struggling to understand my relationship to anger. For many years I have essentially refused to acknowledge any anger I may be feeling. It has felt too… dangerous; too risky. When I was confronted with an anger I could not deny, I felt overwhelmed and frightened by the feeling.

When I brought this up my therapist and I discussed the feeling of anger – which was in both my body and my mind – versus the experience of it. She mentioned that for some people, they not only experience their emotions in the moment they are in, but can also get caught in the story about the anger, causing them to relive the moments that triggered the feeling initially, not allowing it to run its natural course and exhaust itself.

It caused me to realize how often I do that. I dwell in the stories I have told myself, both good and bad, almost to the exclusion of presence in the current moment. Realizing I can experience a feeling in the moment it occurs, without deferring it for a moment after I can create a story about that feeling, makes me realize just how often I was avoiding the experience of life in the present.

I have spent the time since then actively cultivating my ability to stay present through intense emotion. To experience it in real time and know that even if I am not done processing it, that I have engaged with the truest encounter with my response. In this way I no longer have the feeling of my life unfolding only in retrospect.

It still happens that as I am blundering around, a narrative will arise, but I am better at recognizing and understanding the purpose this has served in the past, and allows me to pause and wonder if that is what will serve me best. Better, it creates space for me to create a different ending.

Everything feels hard right now.

Not only difficult, but hard. The constant barrage of horrifying news. The escalating violence and fascism. The ever more flagrant disregard for decency, rule of law, and the inherent dignity of others. My jaw is clenched. My muscles poised for flight. There is almost nothing soft or yielding about my body or soul, just now.

Every message I have gotten from the universe via tarot in the last week has stood in defiance to this. Cups have been tumbling out of the deck with an unusual frequency. It feels like I am being constantly challenged to face fear without yielding my compassion. To remain open-hearted in an atmosphere intended to shut down courage. To defend my emotional sovereignty despite all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Softness and strength can and do coexist and I have my cards to thank for reminding me.

After taking a PTSD inventory under guidance from my therapist, along with the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) questionnaire, we agreed that I meet the diagnostic conditions for Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. CPTSD is distinct from PTSD primarily in the duration and frequency of the traumatizing event(s).

“Complex PTSD is understood as more likely to develop after a repeated or chronic series of abusive or hurtful incidents lasting months or even years, especially during childhood, and the symptoms of c-PTSD tend to be more severe, and longer-lasting[…]”

This diagnosis has been incredibly helpful in systematizing a number of behavioral and emotional challenges I have faced throughout my adulthood. The overlap of some symptoms with both ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder has been particularly useful to understand.

Less immediately obvious were the ways it has effected me physically. The first inkling of this was related to studies linking a higher incidence of chronic illness and suppressed immune function for people who scored high on the ACEs test. To put it in extremely simplified terms, physiological responses to stress and trauma can create systemic and enduring changes to the autonomic nervous system.

My immune function has always been laughably bad. I was constantly sick as a child and only moderately less so as an adult. I have had COVID no less than 6 times, even with masking and other precautions. Surrounded by other people who didn’t get sick as often as I did, I joked immune system was missing. I had no idea there was actually an underlying link between the atmosphere of fear in my childhood and the outcome of being unusually prone to illness.

This morning I came across a discussion about how being neurodivergent can impact proprioception; the body’s recognition of its place and posture in three dimensional space. Given the overlap in symptoms – if not necessarily causation – between other types of neurodivergence and CPTSD, it seems reasonable to imagine this might also apply to me.

Once, in consultation with a neurologist, I was advised that my functional proprioception was significantly atypical. They suggested this was possibly due to an inner ear malformation in utero. but had no way to confirm the hypothesis. Knowing that the condition existed seemed much more important that knowing why. At least at that point in my life.

It continues to surprise me all the dimensions of my life that the CPTSD has touched. This has come into particularly acute focus both with the death of my mother and the realization of how much of my childhood trauma had gone unacknowledged. It resonates with the thematic tone of restoration to uncover a deeper understanding of the source of a wound, the better to truly heal it.

It also allows me to develop adaptations most likely to ameliorate the harm they might cause. To practice habits that result in a well-regulated nervous system; to understand the systemic impacts of doing so reach far beyond a sense of momentary tranquility. They can work to improve balance emotionally and physically.

And I can learn, with complete confidence, to stand firmly on my own feet.

attachment to a cause

b) affectionate regard

a deep attachment to nature

c) psychology : a strong emotional bond that forms with another

also : the process by which an infant forms such an emotional bond

I have been engaged in some form of online dating since WAY before that was an okay thing to admit you were doing. Legitimately, around 2003-2004.

I have seen my fair share of fuckery and certainly encountered almost every online dating trope at one point or other.

• Unsolicited Dick Pic? More than I could count
• Ghosting? Never doubt the internet is haunted
• Aggressive men who would not take no for an answer? Plenty
• Declarations of love from people I just met? Unfortunately

That said, it is also how I found all but one of the partners with whom I have had a long-term relationship as an adult. I have social anxiety and resting bitch face. I have no idea how to find or approach attractive people in the wild and with only one or two exceptions, haven’t been approached either.

So, as painful as it is, online dating tends to be my sole option that yields any opportunity to find a romantic partner.

I was out of the mix for most of the last decade. For a little more than half I was in a relationship, and for at least 3 of those years I actively didn’t want to be in one. I have now returned to the dating pool, I am starting to notice a new declamation in the profiles I come across

I am seeking someone with a Secure Attachment Style

I have, of course, heard of this method of categorizing the kinds of emotional bonds people develop with each other. The underlying concepts seem resonant and simple to grasp.

Reading the literature and developing an understanding of the underlying logic, I can identify for myself that given the chaotic and unsafe nature of my childhood, I certainly wasn’t taught to have a secure attachment style. I am also clear that some elements that influence the nature of a particular attachment are out of my control. My attachments are not a monolith; my capacity for intimacy, trust, and vulnerability vary based on who is on the other side of the connection and their capacity for closeness, candor, and self-assurance.

Of course I understand why people would want to raise the subject and to clarify their own style as a means of demonstrating what they both want and have to offer a partner.

But

It feels eerily like the way that any mention of seeking a “feminine” partner codes for “submissive” or “agreeable.” Like the way claiming they are “masculine” either reveals an insecurity about being perceived as not or as a way to signal they plan to act like an asshole and if you don’t like it, well, you were warned.

It feels like an egregious oversimplification to make a claim about attachment style in a vacuum. Certain qualities can trigger different attachment signals depending on the context. Is someone evasive or are they being pursued in a way that feels unsafe? Is that request for a text message “when you get home safe” a thoughtful act of concern or a means of keeping tabs deployed by a controlling partner?

What’s missing from this discourse is the acknowledgement that attachment style is heavily influenced by what you are attempting to attach to. When trust has been damaged, when the other person is not capable of emotional regulation, effective communication, compassion or empathy, how can a secure attachment be maintained?

It must be acknowledged that the conditions on the ground impact the experience of each individual. Just as it is more difficult to maintain a healthy diet absent certain resources, information, and access, so too is it extremely challenging to stay securely attached in the landscape of an unhealthy relationship.

For example, if we look at the traits of the fearful avoidant style, this would seem like a less than ideal person to undertake a relationship with.

However, each sign in this graphic could be seen as a trauma response to real lived experience with a given partner. When a person must adapt to unpredictability, they may themselves appear unpredictable. Hypervigilance is a well-known coping mechanism to deal with an explosive or abusive partner. When love is conditional, the sense that it must be “earned” is not a failure of secure attachment, it is adaptive pattern recognition.

There are any number of personality/relationship assessments that can be deployed to try and evaluate the potential for success. Love languages*, Enneagram, Astrology, and attachment styles can all act as a sort of shorthand for a person’s preferences and tendencies. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it is important to acknowledge that these are merely points of reference and cannot encompass the entirety of any person or relationship.

In this particular case, I think it is more meaningful to conduct a serious internal inventory and consider if you yourself are capable of secure attachment. If so, which is the direction you move toward when under duress; are you more likely to feel anxious or avoidant? Understanding yourself both in safety and in stress, can help foster more meaningful discussions about how individuals deal with the difficulties that naturally arise in any intimate relationship.

Moreover, let’s accept that it’s possible to learn to adapt to the particular ways a potential partner identifies. To understand that when a person with anxious attachment is in stress, an extra effort to reassure them may break the pattern they are stuck in. When an avoidant retreats, being patient until they re-engage will allow them to come back close, safe in the knowledge their space is respected.

Identifying that someone is capable of a secure attachment is a perfectly reasonable relationship goal. It is also important to realize that more than one thing can be true, and adopting a curious and open posture while discussing how else they may respond in moments of stress is an excellent first step toward fostering the kind of meaningful intimacy a secure attachment implies.

*Problematic for their lack of any meaningful sociological evidence and created ad-hoc by a person committed to upholding and enforcing the patriarchy.