trauma bond

Feel like a little beacon sending out my signals, seeking that connection I never got as a child, that essential feeling of belonging, somewhere. Like a little tracking device, radar, homing in on any 'source' that might give me what I need. Keep trying to attach, attach, make up for what was lost. I think some people meet that need (or attempt to meet it) via the modern idea of 'romance'. If you want to know what I really think, I'm beginning to believe that all modern-day versions of so-called 'love' are more or less some attempt to satisfy that deep-seated need, to whatever degree it went unmet. And in most western cultures? It went severely unmet. Read Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, anything by John Bowby and Mary Ainsworth on attachment theory. Anyway...

I, like many others, still carry that hunger inside me. Every day, sometimes many times each day, that hunger awakens, and gnaws away at me, trying to get my attention, trying to get me to do something about it. I read somewhere that the vagus nerve modulates the 'connection' impulse - that is, it's directly involved in the translation from 'need' to 'action', and that when satisfaction of the connection 'need' gets repeatedly blocked by one's life experience, eventually a sort of numbing occurs, a separation between the upper and lower halves of the body, as if a major wire had been cut. I experience this viscerally, the image that comes to mind is of that magician trick where the assistant appears to be cut in half yet still alive, each half contained in apparently separate boxes.

(Randomly popped into my head just now: Wonder if the whole phenomenon of 'cutting' fits in here somehow? Unbearable emotional pain blocked from conscious awareness demands expression, relief; cutting floods the system with many of the same pain-relief/pleasure chemicals that 'love' does? I bet bulimia works along similar lines.)

I speculate that what is called 'sex addiction' (do I have the right term? I think it's a stupid label, just as I tend to think all pejorative labeling does no good whatsoever, only adding insult to injury) is a response to this 'disconnect' - sex, particularly orgasm, triggers all kinds of 'bonding' chemicals that appear to be essential to our physical, mental and emotional well-being (chemicals such as oxytocin, for example).

So the drive to have sex is actually an appropriate response, in some ways - the organism is attempting to get its needs met in spite of the so-called 'logical' brain's message telling it that its instincts are bad, dangerous, wrong or harmful.

The problem is that when one's 'connective' hardware, or programming, or whatever language works for you, goes haywire, then no amount of sex is going to cure the problem. Sex without love, without intimacy, without a whole hell of a lot of patience for the emotional turmoil that inevitably accompanies the untanglement of such deep-rooted trauma, will generally only serve to exacerbate the problem. It would be like substituting soy burgers for a real beefsteak - the body craves iron, red-blooded heme-source; the soy tickles the tastebuds, but fails to satisfy. You could eat a million of them, and get really fat, and still be starving. In the same way compulsive sex becomes a really horrible kind of junk food for the soul.

Following this train of thought, the article (which I may try to hunt down a link for, no promises) suggested that sublimatory activities such as exercise (which is often suggested by self-help books as a way to take the edge off), may actually be counter-productive, in that it takes energy and focus away from the real need and distracts it toward a substitute which, while possibly triggering some of the same chemicals released in the body by loving, connected touch, in no way shape or form compensates for the lack of love. In other words, it's yet another kind of junk food.

Our culture seems very attached to this junk food approach to life, on all levels, and seems to become more so every day. Going against this lemming-like march into a robotic, sanitized, emotionless future feels like a gargantuan, sisyphean task.

There are many ways people find to cope with, hide from or mask these unfulfilled needs. Some ways are considered more socially acceptable than others. The one thing that seems to be unacceptable in our culture is to actively, openly seek to have one's needs met.

Because needs are, in and of themselves, shameful - a sign of weakness.