Stories I Tell Myself About Men And Relationships

Or; so THAT’S why I’m single

One day in my male therapist’s office, I told him that men are afraid of me. He responded, “Oh, Carol, I’m sure that’s not true.” I answered, “They TELL me.”

I don’t remember where we went from there. He was a Gestalt therapist, as am I, and we don’t spend much energy on cognitive fallacies. We explore their deeper meanings and where they originated. I now know mine originated with my father. Big surprise. But I didn’t know it then. My father was emotionally distant in an effort to hide his dark side from us. He was addicted to porn before the internet, when you had to work harder to find it, and that was a relatively small part of his issues. His efforts to hide things from us resulted in my being attracted to emotionally unavailable men for most of my life.

I didn’t know it for a time because my initial nine years of therapy with a woman, who was an excellent therapist, focussed on my mother issues and those with my previous relationship with a narcissist. That was when all therapy looked first or primarily at the mother in the family of origin. Freud, after all, was a patriarch.

My colleague and best friend, Judy Gaither, LPC, M.S, practices Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. She asks her clients, and has them ask themselves, “Is it real, is it rational, is…