05.11.2017 by darkrecess
My ex girlfriend once told me "You have not had an easy life." Ain't that the damn truth.
By the time I was eight years old, I had been abandoned by my birth father following a house fire (after he healed from a broken pelvis he left for his home in Kentucky). I had been a witness to and a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, including having been the person to call the police multiple times from either the house phone or a neighbor's phone.
My dad came back, and within a few years it was a better home situation, but my mom and dad were both disabled and thus we were very very poor. By 12 years old, not only had I gotten into drugs and drinking, but I was also a rabid thief, stealing food and cigarettes and whatever else I might have needed to get by.
At 13, I was taken by children services and placed with my aunt and uncle. These were probably some of the easiest years of my life. They were upper middle class, I went to a good school and did well. Until I screwed that up and got kicked out four days after I turned eighteen.
Since then, I was married to a woman who was verbally, emotionally and, in the end, physically abusive (she tried to attack me the day I left). Depending on your definitions there is an argument to be made that she raped me. This went on from 2008-2012 until I finally had enough trust in my friends at the time that I was able to get out of the situation. Even still... a few months after I left I was hospitalized for a mental breakdown. Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder with aggressive tendencies.
She then refused to sign off on the divorce until 2016 because she didn't want to lose the alimony payments she was drawing from my checks. (Her last words to me when I left were "I will bleed you dry.)... And even then she only signed off because she had lost the alimony payments anyway due to a provision in the law.
During 2013-2014 I was involved with a really beautiful woman who in many ways helped me overcome some of the worst of what I experienced. Or maybe so I thought. Even to this day I still feel like I've put much of it behind me and just focus on the future. Or maybe the fact that she ended up cheating me on twice at the end of it undid all the good work. I don't know.
I've taken some of these tests... I scored like a 144 on the Alex test, and a 38 on the AQ. Recently I've been coming across words like "dissociative" and of course alexithymia and some of these just describe what I sense. A disconnection from the emotional centers... I think at one point I described as if all of my emotional context has been taken and locked behind a door, I can hear the noise indicating they are in there, but I can't make out anything specific.
It's been long enough now that I do feel like I've gotten over my ex gf in that sense, and I'd like to begin trying to make new friends and maybe at some point see if I can get develop a new full relationship again. But how do you do that when you feel like you lack the capability of emotionally connecting with other people?
One of the few new friends I've made recently refers to me as her "best friend" and it really did feel like my heart warmed over. I cooked dinner for her kids the other day and it showed me how much I've missed by not having kids of my own. I want it. I just have no clue how to get from here to there.