conditional 'love'

The small intestine is where the body begins the process of sorting good from bad in terms of the absorption of food. The unwanted 'junk' gets sent to other parts (kidney, liver, etc.) to be filtered out and eventually eliminated from the body.

But what happens when this mechanism gets confused? When there's some kind of meddling with the sorting process, interference - where somehow bad gets classified as good, and good as bad? This confusion can happen when the body gets too much junk food and has to try to find tiny crumbs (literally) of goodness out of a pile of bad stuff.

When there is too much 'non food', the body (and the mind - only Westerners split them apart in this unnatural way) becomes sick. (Maybe I should just start calling it the 'being', and skip over such convoluted westernisms such as 'bodymind' and other argh-y English-mangulating crap. Anyway...)

In eastern medicine, there's a psychic/metaphysical component to this as well: It's where our 'gut' instinct for sorting good from bad in our lives also occurs. Bad people, bad vibes, bad situations, etc. There's literally a whole separate set of wiring in the gut that makes it like an entire, separate brain from the one in the head (though of course they're connected, as all things are). In fact some would argue that it's the more powerful of the two 'brains', that it's the one that really runs the show, the back seat driver of the psyche, being the one that's been in existence the longest - the lizard brain.

So I'm sitting here noticing this, and wondering, Why does my gut hurt? What's happening that I need to be paying attention to?

And I realize that it's to do with the fact that unless I'm actively feeding somebody (metaphorically, as in emotionally) I can't feed myself.

Working my way back from that: I was a really smart little kid, with a really, really needy mom (emotionally, that is).

So she had this giant need, a huge vortex kind of like an emotional vacuum cleaner, sucking around at everything nearby trying to get what it needed.

And here I am, this newborn baby, trying to get my needs met.

What I learned was, the only way to get mom to pay attention to me was if I took care of her. Otherwise, I was just this pain-in-the-ass, noisy, smelly thing that made big messes and stressed her out.

So it became my job to become the 'good' baby, to be quiet and peaceful and never disrupt my mom's equilibrium.

I basically disappeared. I was complicit in my own virtual (?) erasure, making my needs invisible so that I could actually survive at all. As soon as I expressed a need of any kind - poopy diaper, hungry crying, needing to be picked up, falling down and needing a boo-boo kissed - there was this angry, scowling, critical face, making it all my fault. All my fault that her life had become this endless round of cleaning and tidying and chasing after some ungrateful two-year-old who couldn't take care of herself. Damn babies, anyway!

So now I carry this pattern along in my adult life: I feel that unless I'm actively helping somebody in my environment, that I have no value whatsoever. So I'm constantly (at a subconscious level) trying to feed other people: Make them laugh, help them solve a problem, make sure that the thing they need is sitting there waiting for them almost like magic, so they don't even realize I've done it for them.

And of course they took it for granted, since I never once demanded any payment or recompense - I was just this silent, perfect, needs-meeting device.

Well, I tell ya WHAT, it fuckin' SUCKS (literally), and I ain't doin' it no more.

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But the bigger problem is, how to keep this from happening in my daily life? I can often see the pattern in retrospect, after it's too late, it's already happened, I've already set up a pattern of interaction with somebody that establishes me as the 'giver' and them as the 'taker'.

I've become more and more conscious of this over the years, and have become very angry about it at times, becoming angry with the other person for taking advantage of me.

But what is it in me that allows, or insists, that I behave this way?

I contend that it was that early, unconscious (subconscious?) training by my mother to put her needs ahead of my own or else I'd be treated totally like shit. Like I was an evil being, to be reviled and treated with contempt.

And of course my mother wouldn't remember any of this - I never called her on it, not til many, many years later (like, in my 40s) when I finally felt strong enough to stand up to her, unwilling to accept her silent threats of disapproval (and oh how powerful a parent's disapproval can be! Don't tell me it hasn't powered the entire lifetime of most of the people of the planet - the eternal search for the parental 'smile' that one never got as a child. That unconditional acceptance, that most important component of love of all: Mutual respect.)

So now I see how it plays out in current relationships, but sometimes it's exhausting to be so aware, so conscious of every little detail of every interaction. It's like learning to speak a second language - it never flows freely from some unwilled place, but rather constantly requires effort, the struggle to make oneself heard and understood.

What I want to know is, how come so few people ever engage in this process of self-reflection and self-knowledge? Answer has to be: Because they don't have to. Because, for whatever reason, they manage to survive, are able to get enough of what they need from life, without ever having to change a hair on their heads.

How the fuck does everybody else get away with this, but I cannot?