Mirrored Wound Magnetism

Shattered Reflections of Past Future Selfs (Cath O'Connolly)

I've never studied psychology beyond a few breadth courses at university, but having spent more than my fair share of time in counselling with a variety of mental health professionals, I've swallowed a fair bit of psych speak over the years. One concept I find intriguing and able to explain a significant number of my own challenges is that of mirrored or twinned wounds. Essentially, in as far as I understand it, the concept is that we are drawn to those who share or mirror our own deepest emotional wounds. Clearly this is an over simplification as humans are far more complex than that and many of us carry a mixed bag of issues, but it certainly presents an interesting lens through which to examine patterns of dysfunctional relationships.

If time were sufficient investment to yield equivalent degrees, I would have a Ph.D. or two in dysfunctional relationships. Looking back through the years, I can point to exactly one romantic relationship that was based on a healthy friendship and mutual respect. Not surprisingly, we dissolved the intimate side of that relationship because it introduced too much complexity into a friendship we cherished too much to ruin. In other words, I was too damaged and he too healthy to bind us to one another. The upside is we're still friends 20 years on.

All other relationships were a mixed bag of short-term physical attractions between strangers that fizzled out nearly as quickly as they started and a few messes of rapid intertwining too complex to pick apart before it was too late. At 40, I have had exactly three long-term relationships (anything over a few months, by my own definition). The first was with a horribly manipulative individual who made it his unspoken mission to build me up for the express purpose of rigging me like a puppet fully under his control. After a few fun happy weeks, I was so tightly wound in his web I couldn't make a single independent decision, was incapacitated by fear of his rejection and wrath, and isolated myself from every friend and ally who might have saved me from him. A few months in, I made a split-second decision to drop out of the prestigious university to which I'd spent a lifetime busting my ass to gain entrance and generous scholarships in an effort to appease him and return into his favour. He was cruel and held sway over me for two years before I finally grew a spine and saw him for the petty manipulator he was.

This relationship was founded upon the most insidious and overt manipulation. I was too young, too naïve, too inexperienced and far too motivated to please to see the endless stream of red flags: he dictated not only with whom I could spend time, but also how much, where we could go and what we could do; he was not only uninterested in my pleasure in the bedroom, he forbid me from doing anything that might enhance my sexual experience because it was "an insult" to him; he determined my preferences in food, entertainment, activities, and experiences by praising me when I "chose correctly" and reprimanding when I did not. He once hid my passport the morning I was departing for a three-month study abroad program just to see how I would react. The "correct" reaction was to throw up my hands and say, 'oh well, I guess that means I just get to stay here with you! Yay!', rather than my severely "incorrect" reaction of freaking the fuck out that my entire trip/degree was going down the toilet because my passport had mysteriously disappeared. He then made himself the "hero" of the hour by "finding" said passport once I was in full crisis mode. I could write an entire book about all the horrifically fucked up things he did or said to me over those lost years, but I have no desire to waste any more of my life on him.

To say I walked out of that relationship with a twisted sense of who I was and what I was worth would be an understatement. I was completely lost. I nearly starved myself to death and jeopardised my chances of going on to grad school in the fall out, trying to regain the internal compass he'd so completely destroyed. I started this blog in the tumultuous aftermath of his destruction, an attempt to write my way through the quagmire.

I won't claim to have crawled out of that mess significantly wiser, but I was certainly more wary. I was suddenly self possessed enough to realise I was physically attractive to others (the glorious conclusion of ugly duckling syndrome), but I had no idea what it meant to be attractive on any other level. I lurched from one heady micro-affair to the next with zero awareness of what I was inflicting on others. I lost respect in my community of graduate students and built an army of enemies without the slightest inkling of what I was doing. I was labelled a "man eater" and derided both behind my back and to my face until finally I found someone who made me pause, someone with whom everything snapped into deep focus.

Four and a half years, most of those spent co-habitating, sharing all friends and co-workers, living completely in one another's pockets, was not a significantly healthier alternative to the previous nightmare. I was no longer being coerced into shedding my own identity through praise and censure, rather I was coached, for my own sake, how to behave in order to fit in. The instructions were no longer coming from a single individual, but rather the whole community around us, so I worked diligently to behave correctly, fit the mould, and firmly affix my mask. I became socially acceptable and expected this would yield happiness.

Instead I became increasingly anxious and unable to function without my partner's guiding hand. I still do not fully understand our particular dynamic, but after I extracted myself most gracelessly from our entanglement, a friend passed me a book that outlined the characteristics of an enabling relationship and I saw how directly our relationship reflected that of his parents. It then made sense why his pattern was to get into a relationship with a strong, beautiful, independent, intelligent woman and reduce her to a non-functioning, depressed shadow of her former self all the while wondering what the hell went wrong. He was literally creating the image of his mother he was trying so desperately to escape. He was not an unkind or manipulative person, in fact, he was quite the opposite. It seems that he went to such extents to try to be supportive and helpful out of the good in his heart that he inadvertently destroyed the other person's sense of autonomy and self.

There were many wonderful and positive things that happened in the course of this relationship, so it was far from a miserable experience, but there was one key moment that completely opened my eyes and changed the course of my search to better understand myself. In a heated argument over something now long lost to time and memory, he blared that he wasn't my father and to stop projecting my "daddy issues" onto him. My mind flashed an instantaneous non-thinking thought in response, "not my dad, you're the mother I want". It was such a surprising beam of insight into a deeply buried secret previously held within the complete darkness of my subconscious I was struck dumb and didn't even respond. I'm sure he thought he'd hit the nail on the head, however he'd instead turned the key in a lock I didn't know existed. 

I can understand the primary reasons leading him to presume my issues were grounded in my relationship with my father. First, pop psychology feeds us a steady diet of women's "daddy issues" and how these translate into dysfunctional relationships. Second, for as long as he'd known me, I'd been estranged from my father and rarely spoke about him. What he didn't know, was that up until the catastrophe that was the relationship described above and my snap decision to abandon my private university aspirations, my dad and I enjoyed a wonderful and very healthy father-daughter relationship. The rift between us was forged and carefully fostered by a prime manipulator who ultimately wedged herself between him and all others in his life so she could covertly embezzle all of his modest wealth. My 20-20 hindsight reveals the clear pattern between my father's and my propensity to fall prey to cunning charlatans.

But the notion that I was somehow desperately seeking for him to fill the mother-shaped hole in my heart made no sense on the surface. My mom and I were very close, more like friends than mother and daughter, a characterisation she worked diligently to foster. Yet that flash of insight sent me down a rabbit hole of deep self examination. Recurrent childhood nightmares, in which I struggled futilely to reach her and get her attention, rushed vividly back to me. I began recognising how much of my childhood was dedicated to meeting my mother's emotional needs, rather than the other way around, leaving me in a confusing wash of disillusionment that I have spent the better part of the past 16 years trying to make sense of.

Unfortunately, I still didn't possess the emotional-cognitive skills or capacity to sort it all out before that relationship imploded. I still had more lessons to learn and apparently needed a more ruthless teacher to cut through all the crap. I don't spout many maxims, but I think if you really want to examine your daemons, you need to get together with someone more fucked up than you. So, when I was ready to pack it in and accept a life-sentence of solitude, the universe sent me G-Force. I was actively avoiding entanglements to such an extent I rarely left my lab except to go home to sleep and take care of my cat. I won't go into the details of the ridiculous efforts G-Force made to get into a brutal and emotionally abusive "relationship" with me, but the one gem he left me with was the enlightening observation that I didn't believe I deserved to be loved.

My initial reaction to this outrageous statement was to call 'horse shit' on it, as with most everything that poured out of his brilliant but feral mouth, but I paused just long enough to realise the bastard was right. My entire life, as it related to others, was based on the premise that no one would ever actually love me because I was fundamentally unlovable. My constant striving to excel at everything, whether academic, athletic, or artistic, was a constant attempt to attain an undefinable state of "loveableness". My painfully misguided belief that I could achieve my way into the good graces of the world left me with a shining résumé and a patchwork heart.

While there was still much unravelling to do after this revelation, it at least gave me a legitimate starting point for deeply examining the conundrum. Sadly, there was no one on hand at that point to highlight the propensity to propel oneself toward those suffering from the same flavour of broken-ness. I tried to formulate a plan to avoid the pitfalls I'd identified in all previous relationships, but this fundamental flaw inside of myself was a bug in the code that needed another iteration before it could be identified.

The second counsellor my husband and I went to pointed out our shared or mirrored wounds, proffering this as an explanation for the constant pain we inadvertently inflicted upon one another in spite of (or perhaps due to) our overpowering love of one another. He brushed it off as psychobabble and insisted he'd done all his work and this all came down to my issues. But it takes two to tango and after a few more years of trying to fix one side of our see-saw, I'd had just about enough of it. I've written previously about the inescapable downward spiral and fall-out that precipitated as a result, but I'm only just starting to understand the dynamic that thrust the final wedge between us.

I'm obviously not qualified to diagnose anyone with any sort of mental health disorder, but there are a few people in my litany of seriously damaging or damning relationships that fit a striking pattern. Not just a pattern of their behaviours, but my self-destructive moth-like attraction to them. The one commonality I now see clearly is their deep-seated fear of abandonment and my overpowering desire to mollify that inner terror. There are clear signs of borderline personality disorder in some of these individuals, enough to warrant deeper exploration to help me better understand what this means for me personally.

It's interesting to explore this through the lens of ASD. There are several shared characteristics of BPD and ASD, enough so that many people on the spectrum (especially women) are initially mis-diagnosed as borderline. This was my doctor's initial suggestion when I asked for a referral to seek a diagnosis. The irony of the similarities and common misdiagnoses is how many autists report being subjected to manipulation and suffering horribly at the hands of those with BPD. We're so inherently trusting and loyal to a fault that we're the ideal target for anyone who desperately, pathologically needs to be idealised and praised by someone who will keep coming back no matter how much horror they're subjected to. I've read so many stories of autists who grew up with such diminished senses of self worth that they were never strong enough to break the cycle of abusive relationships until very late in life, if ever at all. I've read stories of many young autistic adults still pinned under the thumbs of emotionally abusive parents. All these stories make me want to do whatever I can to help stop the cycle, weave together all these lessons learned and use my brain and voice to pull the hand break.

This is one of many reasons we need better and earlier diagnosis of ASD. The earlier we can help someone recognise, accept and embrace their differences, the earlier we set them on their path toward a healthy relationship with their self, which is the foundation for healthy relationships with others. But we also need counselling and support for families to see their children in a positive light and address their own histories of trauma, which are transmitted and entrenched more readily in autistic brains. Current scientific research is showing that part of what makes autistic brains different is their propensity to reinforce any and every neural pathway from an early age, rather than rapidly and repeatedly breaking and reforming pathways throughout life, especially in the early years. So when the autistic child is steeped in negativity about their identity or worth when they fail to conform, it is hardwired into their brain in a potentially unbreakable pathway. I cannot think of a more compelling argument for treating autistic children with the heaviest dose of compassion we can administer.