It really is a thin line between love and hate

Uncovering core wounds and figuring out if I am capable of outgrowing them

As I write these words, the lyrics of the Pretenders song carried in the title of this post are running through my head.  Written about love, there is so much truth in that song, and Chryssie Hind’s plaintive voice really make it hit home.

I’ve been corresponding out of necessity with someone who falls into this bucket for me.  It happens every time we have to get in touch.  And no, she’s not my wife.  For some reason I just don’t have that depth of feeling towards my wife.  She feels not worth hating.  And it is hard to hate someone who is not in your heart, and maybe never was.  

She used to tell me that she thought I hated her.  I always denied, what a strange thing to say to your spouse.  But she might have been right on a certain level.  Not from my behaviour, but from her own guilt of feeling that her husband was disgusting to her, sexually repulsive.  What was she doing with me then?

She has accused me of using her to have children.  Which is kind of beautiful.  That is certainly what she has done, but what do I care.  My children are the most beautiful things that ever happened to me.  And as they have struggled with our divorce, have struggled with having a transgender father, and I have struggled with both of these things before them, they have blossomed in so many ways: as people, as academics, as individuals.  I so look forward to watching them step into their own moral sense of selves.

I have a tendency to wander down the byways of the mind, never really knowing where I will go and somehow hoping that things will just work out.  It is similar with the way I live life.  In my correspondence with this person, I was able to finally articulate that it is possible to hold conflicting feelings for someone at the same time.  It is possible to have an ache to see someone and to simultaneously have a desire to never see them again.  To love them and to hate what they did to you.

I look at that, however, as a sign of beauty that was.  Where there is intense feeling, there is substance.  I got onto a thread with a lifestyle domme recently who was gutted by the way submissive men have treated her, to the point of questioning whether she wanted to put herself through it all again.  I know that this is what love-pain does.  But I also know that running away from it is a way to die.  That we are most alive when we are vulnerable and in pain.

Okay.  This is not what this post is about.  I don’t usually write about why I am posting a lot or a little, but in this case, I will.  Even though I am not working at the moment, I have been busier than ever.  I am beginning to take control of my life, to grow up, and that is very, very hard for me.  That means taking care of loose ends.

I look forward to writing in detail about my divorce someday because it is a saga that is dumbfounding in its process.  I cannot, for the time being, as one of my readers cuts her eyes on these posts.

And my dear reader, I do not know why any of this would be of interest, but here goes.  Over the past month I have experienced many personal breakthroughs.  Unearthed some buried trauma.  I feel a bit like this giant bubble encased in hard rubber has forced its way to the surface from the depths of the very deep, dark ocean which sits inside of me.

Working backwards from my favourite therapist

I have a strange relationship with my favourite therapist.  Sometimes I call her mommy.  I understand that is not “normal” client-patient interaction.  I have been told off. Not by her. She is more than okay with it, as it is a gateway to one of my core wounds.  We have moved past the kinky part of our dynamic.  We got there over a month of frequent talk about being turned on by each other.  We got there in agreeing to set boundaries.

The coincidences which connect us are weird.  Not only do we have the same birthday, but we also were born at the same time, in the same time zone.  Our astrological charts are identical.  Her real name is one of my pen names, one which I have had for 20 years.  The number of kinky things that have been done to someone who carries her name are unreal.  I don’t dare give her any of those stories!

She teaches me to meditate.  I drive her nuts because I can be a brat.  It is weird.  In BDSM and in life, I don’t brat. But here, with her, I have realised that bratting is a deflection mechanism.  Another deflection mechanism is to tell stories.

It might seem silly to say so, and you might even say ‘duh’, but this blog is a small taste only of my life as a storyteller.  It is a core skill.  And I live life in a way that seems to generate stories, have a willingness to go with things, and have such fantasy, that stories are central to my identity.

As a deflection mechanism, they are without peer.  Do you know from animal behaviour how a bird will pretend to be injured and flopping on the ground if a predator comes too close to the nest?  That they do this to lead the predator away?  They might have a whole series of behaviours designed to do this.  

I think it is a beautiful metaphor.  A predator in this sense, is anyone who gets close enough to know your heart.  To know you.  Knowing you is a way that they can hurt you.  Closing the circle.  Stories are a way to avoid speaking of personal things.  But they are just one of many tools we use to hide.

We might selectively reveal.  We might emphasize things out of proportion.  Some people might even lie (this is not something which I keep my armoury—I am bad at it, and it makes me feel dirty).  We might even fool ourselves.  We might not even know ourselves, and can say with honesty, “how can you know me if I don’t even know myself?”

I wasn’t really feeling in the mood to speak to this therapist yesterday.  As a trans woman, however, there is an ongoing formal obligation to have two therapists who follow me.  As a person committed to growing up, having a regular and respected session is critical, whether I like it or not.

Not feeling in the mood had me telling one story after the next, but then all of a sudden I touched on what had been coming up from the depths, and ended up in tears with her.  Once I could breathe again, I want back to stories and laughter.  Bratting.

Towards the end of our session, as we were scheduling our next time, I said, “I’m sorry I was difficult today.  I could tell you were frustrated.”  She guides me in meditation, and often uses hypnosis in session, and has previously expressed frustration at my “difficulty” to meditate or get out of my head and into my body.  There is some on this in my review of the book The 5 Personality Patterns. it is a wonderful book by the way.

“No, you were good today.  You opened up and cried about deep emotions in ways that you have never done before.  We know that your stories are ways to cover those feelings over, and you can’t wear them on the surface all the time.

Submission for all the Wrong Reasons

There are good and bad reasons to submit.  I am trying to separate the two.  Growing up is very hard for me.  I am a baby.  I want a mommy.  I know that about me.  But I can’t expect one.  Looking, even, is wrong.  Seeing a professional is a way of addressing the symptoms while we gain the strength to go after the root causes.

I have never wanted to be a “baby” in the way that so many women refer to the men in their lives.  Incapable, unreliable, emotional midgets, selfish, narcissistic.  Not only do I not admire those traits, but they are very far from my lived reality.  I have joked often about how becoming a woman, of stepping into my femininity as a trans woman, has made more of a man than I ever was before.  Within the joke lies a deep truth.  I feel deeply that once my balls have been cut off, the seemingly true seat of physical masculinity (just as a woman has her ovaries), this will become more true.

The divine masculine as I perceive includes traits which are very strong in me.  I possess them in an unflinching way.  To be solid and present for someone, for a loved one.  We say a ‘rock’, but this denies the organic humanity of it.  I am a fucking mountain of rocks.  Aquamarines: clear, shining, ancient, and very, very here.

Submission for the right reasons is to be the divine masculine.  This is is a fundamental truth.  The divine masculine is a container.  An unshakeably strong container, with an infinite ability to absorb and stand firm.  

I know that these traits are core to me, and the perverse reality of my feminine journey is that they are clearer to me and are being strengthened.  The more shit that life throws at me, I seem to be getting stronger.  Stepping into my feminine, embracing the discrimination, objectification, and the very physical reality of becoming weaker every day, is to make me stronger.  [As an aside, there is even a blood marker for this…and my new endocrinologist is looking at it and pointing out how my blood work is showing how my body is digesting muscle, consistent with a pattern of someone going from a male body to a female one].

But what of a being a baby?  Of being submissive.  And I don’t mean this in a sexual sense or a fetishistic sense.  I mean instead wanting to someone to take care of me.  Wanting someone to provide structure and a framework for me?  I have some beautiful friends who know that I love this, and they feed it to me from time to time in ways that are healthy.  A small example came when I was out to dinner with a woman who is dominant but who is only exploring this.  I might, out of politeness, not eat the last bite of a dish we are sharing.  And she might then look at it and say, “you will eat that bite now,” and when I do, she has this flash of a smile and a ripple of delight where she feels the joy in the power, echoed in my joy in answering it.

I love this.  But when and how does wanting or needing it reflect something which is unhealthy?  To look to someone else for structure, for guidance?  To need someone to help you grow?

The Snow Queen recently told me over a delicious meal shared that she is no longer interested in men, in having a relationship with a man.

“But what about sex?” I asked of a woman who teaches female orgasmic pleasure for a living.

“I have sex with God.  There is no man who can equal that.”

And with all that I have expressed and that is going on in my life, I do genuinely mean that I am feeling the birth of dominance inside of me.  That I am drawn to dominate, but it is exclusively towards men.  Towards women, I remain submissive.  And I am puzzled by how they sense in me.  My ballet teacher said in front of the entire class (and knowing absolutely nothing about my sexuality), “be careful.  If you don’t get this right [your hand placement] I will place handcuffs on you so you never forget.”  Apart from her being the most beautiful woman in my life right now, this just resonated through me.  My natural reaction is to de exactly what she says…the lure of a ‘good girl’ or even a ‘good boy’ is so powerful that it transcends any other feeling.

I went out with a gorgeous older woman the other day, and she was just so naturally dominant of me in every way.  It was wild.  Even in her giving of leadership to me.  “You will order for me,” she said, “because I am confident that you will know the menu well, and you will also know what I will like.”  There was also in there an admonition to not get it wrong.  It was wonderful to go on a date with a cis woman and to be treated like a woman, like the submissive partner even.  Such a treat.

One of my dearest and most beautiful friends, a woman who I love deeply as a friend, and who am immensely attracted to, is another case in point.  She likes a particular kind of man, a kind of man that is toxic to her.  She is also an utterly dominant woman, only she doesn’t realise it.  She would eat me alive were we to ever be in relationship.  Even still, I know that she sometimes processes me as partner rather than just friend.  This is not me fantasising.  I have known her so long and so well that I have seen her dynamic with friends and partners.  She dismantles men.

Sometimes she does the same to me.  But instead of fighting back with her, I end up crying.  She’s not used to that and it triggers a protective instinct in her.  And somehow, after she has hurt me emotionally, she is gentle and mothering.  She too knows of my submission, and she uses it with me to help me towards my goals, ones which are relentlessly positive.  It is strange when a friend knows me well enough to say that she might punish me if I do something which is really important and good.

How do I keep this healthy?  For me?  For any her who comes along?  In other words, play must be play, but life must be lived as an adult.

Rediscovering Abuse

Over the past two years or so of blogging, and at a slower pace over my preceding life, things have surfaced which I may not have ever really connected the dots with.  Abuse is a terribly strong word, and it isn’t one I like to carry, because of its association with being a victim.  I do not see myself as a victim and would never want that.  I don’t accept that narrative for myself, for to do so would be to diminish me, to accept defeat.

My main therapist and I have dug into this topic of being a people pleaser.  Of being a doormat.  Few people in my life recognise this part of me, but as I read through the workbook I am doing with my therapist, I am crushed by the realisation that I have used people-pleasing as a survival tool since I was born.

How did I process not being breast fed?  How did I process never developing the attachment relationship that a baby needs with her mother?  To never have felt her heartbeat in my body as she held me, to never have fallen asleep in her arms in a sea of total certainty that I was safe, so safe that I didn’t need to think about it?

Why, in other words, did I become an infantilist?  And how does that relate to being a people pleaser?  Being a good baby, the best baby, a perfect baby, of staying a baby, was my way of trying, my way of being a ‘good boy’ (or ‘good girl’).  Insert into that dynamic the very real consequences of a mother who consciously regressed me so as to keep me in that state, perhaps as a way to apologize, perhaps as a way to make us fall back to a time before strife.  She encouraged me to keep many accessories of my baby life well beyond their sell-by date.  I understand that, and I understand why.

I also keenly felt her words when she said, “I wish you had been born a girl.”  Those are not words which are appropriate to say to a child, to wish that they are something other than what they are.  Star Child was convinced that this was what “turned me” trans.  That my mother dressed me as a girl through nursery school and pre-school, only putting me in boy clothes when I started grade school.  I know this is not the case.  I was born trans.  I feel that in every fibre.  I was turned into kinky.  Can I live without becoming female?  No.  Can I live by not being kinky?  Yes.  

As I become more female I have less of a need for being kinky.  I am no less kinky, but it tickles me in a different way.  I have often written about sexuality being a language which speaks from our shadows.  I believe this more and more.  I also believe that there are no clearer signposts available to us as humans that speak to this world.  It also holds true that our salvation lies through our sexual healing.  And the corollary that our sexuality is the closest we come to being able to speak with God, is as true as I am flesh and blood.  To deny our sexuality is to deny God.

Please don’t misunderstand.  Not all sexuality is healthy.  Some is downright off.  But understanding it and using it as a portal through which we access our shadow selves remains central to our development as human beings.

I wrote recently about how bodywork as therapy has put me in touch with things buried deep inside of me that have welled up and which would have never come out had I relied only on talk therapy.  In the same way, my little bit of experience with BDSM cracked open that which I needed to be able to come out.

Over the past few weeks, something equally momentous has come to the fore with me, and it all happened when a somatic therapist just held me hand, connected with me, and suddenly, that which I had skated around, came tumbling out.

Are we surprised?  It has to do with parents.

The first revelation came in relation to being a people pleaser, a doormat, and how I have no desire to take this character trait along for the ride as I shift from the world of men to the world of women.  And the lived of experience of so many women includes this behaviour set.  But I do not accept it.  And yes, this is maybe the scariest thing I have ever affronted, because it is so deep inside of me, has been there since I was a baby, and has been so central to the way I relate to the world around me, that I am so utterly afraid of what it means to take this on.  But I will not be a lamb, but an absolute lioness.  And nothing will stop me from becoming that.  Nothing.

The revelation was this feeling of trying to do something with my hands, something complex and delicate, and then discovering I had no hands.  A feeling of total impotence, most obviously not in a sexual sense, but simply not being able to do.  And I realised as it poured out of me, that my mother tried everything to control me.  That I had this awful sense of being manipulated like a marionette, and that I could feel her keen disappointment when I was disobedient.  Asserting myself by defying her was my way of coping with retaining agency.  And she so tried to break this in me.

I stopped it by distancing myself from her.  By withholding touch, by refusing to let her touch me, by freaking out when she did.  “Get off of me,” or “don’t touch me,” was already common to me by the time I was 5. 

What did she do?  She took me to psychiatrists.  And they would try to pry open.  And I hated going.  Hated being made to feel that there was something wrong with me.  Hated the idea that if they could just get a glimpse inside they would hand that info over to my mother who would use it against me.  And a psychiatrist has the added tool of drugs, so by the age of 6 I was “diagnosed” and medicated.  And can I ask you this?  Does a 6-year old have agency?

Is it any wonder that I shut down and became obsessively private and to myself?  Is it any wonder that I have had trouble letting people in?  Is it even weird that I chose to see a dominatrix who had as one of her core offerings treating a client like a baby, and despite seeing her often, it took 6 months before I was even ready to discuss it with her, even though she knew this about me from the first approach?

My mother’s way of punishing me was to lock me in the closet.  I can’t remember whether my fear of the dark came before or after that.  I remember the pain of being on top of a jumble of shoes, with sharp heels digging into my legs, and how scared I was of suffocating as the thin plastic bags of her dry-cleaned dresses hung down so low and stuck to my face, or got sucked into my mouth…and how I knew I wouldn’t be let out if I raged against the door, or if I cried out.  There had to be that.  She had to hear me broken, and then she needed a long time of silence after.  Perhaps it was the time that I was thinking about whatever it is that I had done wrong.  Just being the wrong child.

[I remember a moment from childhood. I wrote a previous post about not feeling that my childhood was characterized by abuse. But when I was 5 years old I called the police on my mother. And this beautiful black woman answered the phone and talked to me, and listened to me, and told me that she could report my mother, and told me what would happen if I did, that I might lose her, might be taken away and put in a new family, and was I sure that it was what I wanted. She was so kind and took the time with me, and in the end I asked her to keep it to herself].

Stockholm syndrome is what happens when a prisoner falls in love with the prison guard.  When you want the person who beats you to be the one who kisses and makes it better.  That is how we internalise abuse and it comes back as a desire to be the baby that she wanted me to be, and how it eventually became sexualised.

Loving and Hating my father

I have written about how my father was an abusive asshole.  He physically struck my siblings, his wives.  He was loud and aggressive, belittling.  I have almost no memory of him from my early life.  He was gone already when I was two.  My parents were divorced when I was four.  My first memories of him were of him as an angry and dangerous person.  I felt very unsafe around him.  Scared.  I tried to be invisible.  And when I couldn’t, I simply decided, ‘you are not my father, you have no right to tell me anything’.  And that became a very valuable survival tool.

I don’t think I have ever loved him.  And yet, he never hit me.  Not even to spank me.  Can one be grateful for that?  Can I be grateful that my father was much less messed up than his siblings, and that I and my siblings have gone on to further break the cycle of abuse, and have all raised beautiful children?

What else did he do?  The second I moved away from my mother and moved in to live with him, he took me off of the “medication” my mother had me on.  His motivation was impure, in the sense that he didn’t want to have a son who had something wrong with him.  But the end result was there.  I didn’t need it.  What was evident was that a drug had been used to parent me because my mother was incapable of it.  And so, yes, even without love, there is a deep gratitude for this, because it became an important life lesson.

What did I, do I feel, for my mother

My wife once said to me that she married me because I had a healthy and respectful relationship with my mother.  What the ‘f’?  I went through a period of 3 years where I refused to speak to her, because every conversation was about what a failure I was, how my siblings were better than me, how I was a quitter, whatever animated her at the moment.  This happened right after I had graduated from college (and this ‘failure’ had just come out of one of the top universities in the world and was at the beginning of a career which saw me go from secretary to divisional CEO of a listed company in just over a decade—11 years to be precise).  Pretty fucking great.  

At the time, however, I was suicidal.  I was just grappling with self-destructive behaviour.  Thank God I was dating someone whose parents were both psychoanalysts and their care for me as their daughter’s beau, helped me find my way to someone who helped me take control of my narrative.  Thank goodness she was also one of the people in my romantic history who I truly loved, so was prepared to do the work.  And thank goodness I was firmly within the bosom of therapy by the time that she ripped me guts out by having an affair and rubbing my face in it.

I remember how hard I cried, so much that I had an out of body experience.  I remember feeling, ‘wow, you’ve never cried this much, or like this.  It is good for you.’  And I also felt an incredible catharsis which came from it…I won’t say that two-three days of non-stop crying in the middle of the living room floor of a lavish apartment I was house sitting in on the Upper East Side was enough to be over it, but I don’t that I ever got over a relationship quite as well or as quickly.

This crying business works.  If you let yourself feel it.

The death of my mother and losing control of my emotions

When my mother died, my ability to speak in public went with it.  As someone who has moved crowds as an orator, one of the core skills I bring to work, I noted it for its absence.  I would cry in the middle of speeches.  Not from sorrow, but from joy, from love.  I could stand up and laud an employee and get all choked up about it.  So much that my colleagues and the people working in the business joked about it.  It was tender teasing.  It was very different for me.  Something was going on.

I was not able to speak at her funeral.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to.  Despite how cold and held off my emotions and feelings for her had been, I could no longer master them in her death.  All these things she had done to me, judgements expressed, inappropriate behaviour towards me sexually, emotionally…how dysfunctional she was as a parent.  Somehow I understood it.  I won’t say that I forgave her for it, but I did understand it.  Where it came from.  I also felt sorry for her as a woman who had married my father.

I also found that she was angry towards men, and even still, remained passive and subservient to her dying days.  In that way of being, I found the birth of my own feminism, and a frustration with women who are hypocritical to their own emancipation.  Why take his name?  Why give up your independence?  Why expect to be infantilized?

I fell in love with my wife because I thought she was a strong, independent, forceful woman.  She was.  But she stopped being that, stagnated, and became dependent.  I lost respect for her.  She didn’t want to do anything.  She wanted to live off of me—not in the financial sense (though that too), but for everything.  She stopped bringing anything new to the mix.  Even though she was a business partner, she stopped working for our common business and just sat around the house posting on Instagram about her wonderful and glamorous life.  And yes, we went to nice places but she became a cipher.  I might have continued to love and respect her had she continued to show up in our marriage as a partner.

She would tell me that she thought that deep down I hated her.  I denied that even to myself.  But maybe I did.  Maybe 15 years of being told that your sexuality is disgusting and 25 years of repressing your gender expression is enough to turn you on anyone.  All I know is how great it feels to be free of her.  And while she continues to oppress me through the courts and through lawyers, I don’t give a damn about her anymore, and I have let her go without guilt.  And although there is no winning in this, I have won, won on a colossal scale.

She now owns or controls everything.  But she is a bitter and angry woman.  She has begun to lose her children.  My relationship with our children has blossomed in ways that I can’t comprehend.  Our mutual love, respect and openness blows my mind.  I love them so much it hurts.  This is the greatest gift of all.

When my mother died, I felt that I had lost the roof of my spiritual house.  As someone who picked at me and was never satisfied, she was the original source of the ‘good boy’ comments that I thrive on within BDSM.  My insatiable need to please begins and ends with her.  I see it, and now I have to heal it.  And with her death, I can be the only one to take it on.

So, when I sobbed on the somatic-therapist’s table the other day, it was for that horrible feeling of being alone, of being not recognised, not seen, and not having anyone to hang onto.  And in the depth of those feelings of despair was born the conviction that I can do it, that I do have everything I need.  The harder things become, the stronger I feel.  The more filled with love.  And the more people who have joy to give come into my life.

My home seems to have become a bus station for beautiful and kind people, and quite a few troubled individuals, but who are also fun to be around.  If God has a sense of humour, then we might as well life along the way.