Welcome. This blog has been a long time in the making. The content creation commenced in 1971, some 54 years ago in Melbourne, Australia. Since that time, the author has continued to accumulate an inventory of poor decision making, mistakes, deeply engrained behaviour patterns and functioning that have impacted on virtually every element of his life, not least the people he should have been loving and protecting most. Despite having a professional career, the maladaptive and dysfunctional response to early traumatic life experiences has resulted in repeated sabotage of romantic relationships, failure to achieve expected career potential and a repeated cycle of guilt, perceived worthlessness and unworthiness and poor self esteem.
The idea of documenting my life experience and responses to those events has been brewing, as I am sure it does for many authors, in my mind for some years. The eventual trigger event for writing and sharing this blog with you, has been the repeated and wholly predictable cycle of commencing relationships, establishing a distant and refrained attachment style, setting the scene for a sense of insecurity and lack of safety, followed inevitably by sabotage of trust through inappropriate actions or infidelity. The process progresses to break up, a period of relative emotional and physical dissociation and reflection. Before a ‘too little, too late’ attempt at repair is inevitably, and universally unsuccessfully, made. I have actually maintained this type of cyclical behaviour my entire adult life. Despite literally years spent ruminating, regretting and repeating this behaviour pattern, I have failed to examine and address the underlying causal factors and to address these once and for all. I recognise now, that this type of cyclical self destruction cannot continue.
Several points of realisation have determined that this must be a point of reflection, of recognition of guilt and responsibility, of a search for inner peace, self-forgiveness and self-liking and most importantly the commencement of healing and evolution away from years of deeply engrained dysfunctional behaviour. Just as important is the young man who calls me ‘dad’, in whom I need to instill confidence, love, respect and care for both himself and his future partner.
Reflection on the years prior to and leading up to this pattern of functioning has revealed a lifetime of experiences that I believe created a progressive spiralling of maladaptive and damaging (to myself and others) behaviour that has been left unmanaged. It is far beyond time for proactive changes to relationships, trust and even self care and wellbeing. I have read on many occasions, that one cannot adequately love another until they love themselves. I have finally come to the same conclusion. I have constructed a spiralling need for confirmation of my own sense of inadequacy, worthlessness and sense of being undeserving of love. Destructive and hurtful actions have created and maintained a pervasive and soul destroying mental model of myself, I have found to be complex and difficult to understand, harder to put in to words for others to understand, and near impossible to modify until you one day wake up and realise that your life, your universe is falling apart. There is in that moment, an acceptance that real change is needed and the ongoing destruction to the mental health of both yourself and others is just unacceptable. A decision to actively process and understand a lifetime of contributing factors, to modify damaging behaviours in response to this knowledge, then to finally seek real and permanent change has proven the most difficult challenge of my life. I am just at the beginning of this journey, though already, I have realised that I can never return to the type of functioning and behaviours above. It has become clear to me that failure to identify and manage this spiralling void of self destruction had the potential to lead to a very dark and sad outcome. No one wants or deserves this.
With regards to my son, almost a ‘man’ himself, I hope this journal may at some future point help him understand life a little, and hopefully prevent the insidious evolution of this type of dysfunction, damage and destruction within his own life, psyche and relationships. If readers of this blog gain any insight from my words, then this is just the icing on the cake and my aim in undertaking this very personal task will have been fulfilled.
Finally, I am not a writer. The grammar, construction and context of the words written will appall anyone with an inkling of English literacy skill and for that I apologise. I hope in return, to provide others facing similar difficulties a little insight in to my life story, with the sincere wish that they take affirmative action to recognise and change damaging dysfunctional behaviours long before I have done and thus preserve their relationships with family or partner, improve their self-esteem and sense of purpose, self-worth, and self-love (I hate that term as it has a slightly narcissistic ring to it for mine, but self-liking and self-acceptance are probably more realistic terms). The content of the blog pages will most frequently be raw, unfiltered, unedited records of thoughts, reflections and hopefully mindful resolutions. Take in to your heart and soul the bits that resonate with you and throw away the rest.
Enough procrastinating. Let’s make a start. I don’t know where in the journey that start is. But a start it shall be.
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