True love dies hard

True love dies hard. What is true love? These deep feelings I still have for Gregg, what is their source? Is it ego? Loneliness? A simple desire to be loved?

Certainly, if it is a desire to be loved, then these feelings have no right to exist. Gregg loves himself, all others stand in line. He has not shown me love. He has shown me benign neglect, abuse, abandonment. There is no logical reason why I should still have strong feelings for the man.

That he is intelligent and well read is becoming. That he has a wicked sense of humor and a boyish playfulness is endearing. I find his form beautiful.

It breaks down when relationship enters in. He cannot relate to another human being with love and compassion, because he does not feel those things for himself. He does have a huge ego, but somehow self-love does not enter into it. How can it be?

The human being is a complex creation. There is the spirit, the consciousness that allows us to be part of the Universal Consciousness, which ebbs and flows through us. Then there is the constructed ego, one might call it the soul, others might call it the mind, but it manifests as ego. This is the image we project out into the world, how we want the world to see us, the images and beliefs we have created as we have developed our perception of the world.

This is a construct. It has been growing along with the body. One might say that at some point in a man’s life, the two merge. The ego grows thinner, the spirit grows stronger, until there is a bleeding through. When we see a 60 year old making his life choices at the level of wisdom and emotional development of an adolescent, we know somewhere along the line growth has been inhibited.

What is this construct, this ego? From the earliest years we strive to please, to fit in, to conform. If we are sheltered in a family of adults who are self-actualized, who have allowed the spirit its proper place in balance with the ego, then that which we seek to conform to can be harmonious to our nature. But if we attempt to grow in a hostile environment, where the adults are still striving in an adolescent mind frame to manifest a composite ego that is full of unresolved conflict, the newly forming ego will be riddled with conflict and uneasy.

Dysfunctional families come in all shapes. His is the dysfunction spawned from alcohol addiction. I don’t think alcoholism is itself a monolithic entity, but rather a covering for a complex underlying malaise. One type evolves from the unwillingness to resolve childhood ego conflicts, perhaps because it will set us at odds with people we love, and so the drug of choice becomes the medication to numb the pain and discomfort. Early social drinking creates a feeling of fitting in, of belonging, which is in contrast to the isolation and feelings of unworthiness of a child’s conflicted ego.

With the drinking come all kinds of pathologies. One great obstructer is the need to keep secrets. “Son, don’t let your mother know I’ve been drinking.” Dad comes home stumbling drunk, but we must not remark on it. We must ignore it, take care of father’s needs and prop him up as if this is normal behavior. Lie to oneself about what is really going on. If a child feels vulnerable, frightened, confused to see his loving parent suddenly emotionally abusive and out of control, or weak and stumbling, he must stuff these feelings down. There is no one with whom it is safe to acknowledge these feelings. So he locks them away.

Then the cycle is repeated, as the child becomes an adult. Feelings are difficult to deal with, having no instructions or healthy modeling. It is easier to join the party, medicate away these painful feelings with the drug of father’s choice. Be a man; drink with the guys.
This is the man I am in love with. What am I in love with? The promise that was born inside him, which cringes in fetal form yet while the body withers, prematurely ravished by alcohol abuse. That is one theory.

AA counselors would call this a ‘rescue’ complex.

Perhaps I am a megalomaniac, a Svengali looking to bring a weaker human under my control.
Perhaps I have reached the end of my tether of loneliness and isolation. This is the first viable man who has looked at me romantically in easily twenty years, maybe more. [What a dog I must be, eh?] I am just grasping at the faintest glimmer of hope that I might not spend my dotage alone. Even if it means spending it with a crazed pickled immature addict.

And maybe I am in love with love. Not the romantic love that springs up at first blush, but the feelings that go way deep from the hair roots down to the toenails. The feeling of surrendering yourself to anothers will, needs, wishes, of blending into One.

Will I ever know the answers. One thing is for sure. It is best, wisest, if I never let that man back into my life. I must amend that to say, there is only one condition under which I would let that man back into my life, and it is upon the successful completion of a 4-week 12-step addiction recovery program.

I post this here on a somewhat public forum to make myself accountable for these words.