Dear Timepassages2070:

You are welcome. Here is a thought before I attend to your recent post: for me to understand her, the platonic friend we are discussing (let’s call her B, to make it simple), I have to separate your accounts of what she said and did from your interpretations of what she said and did. You offered many interpretations, but they are heavily colored by what you need her words and behaviors to mean. Your interpretations of her words and behaviors indicate way more who you are, than who she is.

To understand her, I have to look at her words and behaviors without your interpretations; to have as close a view of her to a first-person view as possible, as if I was directly observing and listening to her.

And now, I will start with responding to your most recent post part by part (responding to one sentence or paragraph before reading the next), and take it from there, developing my thoughts as I go along, taking my time. It will probably be a long post:

You mentioned that you experienced “some childhood abandonment issues” with your father, that you reconciled with your father over 20 years ago, as an adult, and had “a pretty solid relationship” with him following the reconciliation, until his passing over a decade ago. In regard to your mother, you wrote that with her, the relationship “has always been extremely solid”.

This means to me, that as a child, you experienced a solid relationship with your mother and a broken relationship with your father. In comparison to your relationship with your father, your closeness with your mother felt extreme.

You wrote about your relationship with your mother that it “has always been extremely solid and I think it’s one of the reasons I have had a pretty easy time connecting with women as friends since I have been older. Women just tend to trust me and feel pretty safe around me”-

– when you were a child, I imagine that it was not only you who had a broken (opposite of solid) relationship with your father, but that your mother too experienced some brokenness in her relationship with your father. And within your familial dynamics, you were your mother’s best friend/ her solid place/ her empathetic audience and comforter. I imagine that you derived your sense of value from being that for your mother. Fast forward, as an adult, you are this same thing for some other women: a solid place, an empathetic audience, a comforter. You have an early life practice of being that for a woman, and you derive a sense of value from being that.

I continue to read what is next: “I believe this situation with my friend really triggered some long dormant issues… my issue was .. to just be treated as the good friend I believed I had started to become to her”- this is making me wonder about how you were treated by your mother, how she reciprocated your investment in her/ special attention to her.

You continued to share how B needed you, how she was afraid to lose you after she made a joke that she feared offended you, how she got extremely insecure when you didn’t respond fast enough to a text or voicemail that she sent you, calling you “multiple days in row and flat out said she would keep calling until she got me on the phone”-

– you shared this before, and it seems to be very important to you that she needed you so much, desperately: it is something you needed for too long, as a child, to be needed this way. I am thinking that your mother did not adequately reciprocate your great attention and investment in her. Maybe at times, after you felt so sure and certain that your mother truly needed you and felt so close to you- you were amazed and devastated when you noticed behaviors on her part that indicated that… she didn’t need you that much, or that she didn’t feel that close to you, after all.

Continued: “I certainly get that friendships ‘ebb & flow’ but an ‘ebb’ isn’t someone completely.. pretend(ing) that they hadn’t gotten as close as they had”- this is a sore spot for you, a deep, aching element from long ago- for your felt-closeness with another person to be denied, by that person. This brings me back to your felt-closeness with your mother (the flow) being denied by her (the ebbs) in some ways.

But as a child, with a broken relationship with your father, you had to believe that your relationship with your mother was extremely solid, otherwise, you would be standing on shaky grounds- no safety. Fast forward, as a man, you are still invested in believing what feels safer to believe: that B felt very close to you and that your relationship with her was (at least at the time) extremely solid.

Continued, you wrote about B: “she is extremely introverted and can get pretty obsessive when it comes to her business and can lose track of time”- this fits with her getting obsessive about you not responding to her messages and voicemails fast enough; waiting for your responses, she lost track of time, feeling that an hour was a day, let’s say, and she obsessed: when will he respond, why hasn’t he responded, maybe he was offended by the joke I made, etc.

You interpreted her need for you to respond to her quickly as her feeling very close to you, while it may have been evidence of her “pretty obsessive” personality. It is possible that her obsessing about your replies to her messages was not an indication of her emotional intimacy with you any more than her obsessing about her business was an indication of her emotional intimacy with her business.

“her email seemed to be her trying to redefine our relationship but doing it under the ‘guise’ of saying she needed space from everyone”- I am getting the feel, more and more,  that your relationship with your mother, past and present, needs to be explored. (Not that I expect you to do that, here or elsewhere).

Continued: “In terms of where that connection was leading to, or where I wanted it to lead to, I honestly don’t know that I wanted it to lead anywhere at the time. I just knew I really liked getting this close to someone again”- feels to me that your relationship with B is about your sub-conscious efforts to resolve your troubled relationship with your mother.

I say “troubled” relationship even though you shared nothing to indicate that you believe that your relationship with your mother is anything but “extremely solid”, because the trouble part of the relationship has sunk, I believe, at this point-  below your awareness. That repressed trouble has been activated in the context of the relationship with B, and the aftermath of that relationship.

“Perhaps she was just trying to take a bit of distance at that time and nothing more and I read a whole bunch of things into this that I perhaps didn’t need to”- seems to me that the extra things you read into the relationship with B are writings that we made in the context of your relationship with your mother, and that you wouldn’t need to read these extra things if you uncovered and addressed your relationship with your mother.

anita