Codependency Part Three: Difficulty Communicating in a Relationship

If you don’t trust your feelings, it’s hard to even know where to begin expressing them. A lot of internal conversations happen before you even open your mouth.
You feel slighted in some way, so you feel angry. You assume this person slighted you because they obviously don’t really care about you. And if they don’t care about you, then fuck ‘em. This leads to option one: unbridled rage.

Years ago, I used to get angry. I’d aggressively react with the matching intensity of which I’d felt hurt. It had to balance out.
Eventually I realized being overtly angry wasn’t helping, and i kept being accused of being a psycho. It also made me feel like i cared too much, which was embarrassing, so I resorted to option two: passive aggression.

This meant I’d act like everything was ok, when inside I’d be fuming. I’d tell myself I’d look weak if I reacted at all, so I’d become deviously manipulative. Turn the tables. Ask why THEY’RE overreacting, I was fine.
Of course, this is also childish, so I eventually moved on from that.

My reactive sensitive nature finally achieved option three, final form, the last boss: Saying and doing absolutely nothing. Suppressing everything and stomping it out. Telling myself I cared too much, gaslighted myself. I turned everything I hated about what I did to other people onto myself. I never really fixed the problem. I just… found a new target. All to protect myself from the fear of being accused of caring too much.

Why is caring too much a bad thing? What’s so wrong about caring about a person? I’m not affectionate in relationships. I always give 20% less than what I’m given. I don’t put myself out there. Even when I try to, I express things in vague language that I could easily slip out of in case anyone were to accuse me of being “creepy,” or a “loser.” These labels are so childish, it makes me think this fear must come from childhood. (Like everything, right?)

I didn’t have many friends growing up. This was initially by choice, but my mom was so embarrassed by her antisocial daughter, that she pressured me constantly to make friends.

Making friends became harder once she pulled me out of public school. In the homeschool group, there were about five girls to choose from to befriend.
I chose the girl my sister had already conveniently started a friendship with. I inserted myself so hard into their friendship, even though I was a couple years older and decidedly much more awkward than both of them.

My sister Lauren was very small, and blonde, and feminine. A stark contrast to me, with my frizzy dark hair and bright red cheeks. I was dorky and tomboyish and fat. Her friend Shannon was also very thin and girly. They liked glitter gel pens and Jump 5. I liked non-fiction informational books about birds and chimpanzees.

One weekend Lauren and Shannon had arranged a sleepover, and I naturally assumed I’d be invited. I’d even coordinated a photo shoot for our Christian pop singing group that I’d founded and named (despite the fact that we didn’t have any songs or musical abilities.) When I excitedly shared these plans, Shannon told me, “You’re not invited. Lauren is my best friend, and this is for best friends only.”
This shattered 9 year old me. I thought we were ALL best friends. I didn’t feel angry, I only felt hurt.

Flash forward a couple years later, I was on a city basketball team. I had no friends, due to homeschooling, so the girls I saw at practice were the only “friends” I had. Most of them immediately recognized me for lame nerd that I was, but one girl, Betty, was kind enough to tolerate me.

One day, towards the end of the season, I told her that she was my best friend. She looked super uncomfortable and finally said, “I barely know you,” and then finished tying her shoe and ran away.
This crushed me, and I think I decided in that moment that I didn’t matter to anyone as much as they mattered to me. So the only reasonable thing for me to do about it would be to just forever downplay others’ importance to me.

Little things along the years further confirmed that I was meaningless to the important people in my life, like my best friend of 16 years informing me a couple of years ago that he had “a lot of best friends,” and I was maybe his “fourth best friend” (which in retrospect is such a third grade thing to say, especially for a 31 year old man.)

Eventually I just realized that no matter how close I ever got to anyone, there was always someone somewhere else who was closer. I didn’t matter.
So all I could do about this was not let anyone matter to me. At least not THAT much. I’ve since kept everyone at a distance, and made sure they knew it.
It never occurred to me at any point that some of these people who have wounded me were doing the same, and that I have only perpetuated this cycle of avoidance pain onto others.

In reality, this defense mechanism is pretty stupid. What’s the worst that could really happen? What’s the worst that HAS happened? People just say they care about me less than I care about them?
Ok?
Does that mean that by admitting someone matters more to me than I matter to them, then people are going to come take my house away? Is someone going to throw acid into my face? Of course not. Nothing happens
Except something does happen, right? Something happens inside, and it FEELS like something is ripped out of you, and it FEELS like acid is thrown on your heart. It hurts. It feels like shit. And it’s embarrassing.

But what if… every 1 out of 10 people felt more vulnerable because of your vulnerability, and thus felt closer? How can you ever matter that much to anyone if you’re just a surface version of yourself?
And how do you become closer? You communicate. Communicating HONESTLY and specifically allows you to make an actual, meaningful connection with someone. Just sharing random thoughts and insecurities is the most shallow form of vulnerability. Letting someone know that you’re emotionally impacted by their actions is true vulnerability, and I need to start being brave enough to do it.