Dear Boris1010,

good to hear from you again! I understand your struggle with the AA’s view of the higher power, specially in helping heal addiction. I’ve suffered from an eating disorder for quite a few years, and my belief in God helped me partially, but it wasn’t enough to stop my ED.  What did help me was healing my wounded inner child. Because addiction is there to soothe the pain, and the pain is always, without exception, the pain of the wounded inner child. If you heal that pain – which might or not involve higher power – you have a very high chance of healing addiction too.

You might want to check the Internal Family Systems therapy created by Richard Schwartz. It works with various parts of our personality: one is the wounded inner child (the most vulnerable part of our personality, which is in pain), the other is the protector part, whose role is to protect us from being hurt again (so we e.g. close our heart and don’t trust anyone, we pretend and aren’t authentic), and the third part is the so-called firefighter, which soothes our pain with various addictive behaviors.

In that model, you don’t even need a higher power. However, you’d need a healthy adult self, who’d be able to act as a loving, compassionate parent to your wounded inner child. For some people, God or higher power take the place of that loving, compassionate adult self. People then talk about divine father or divine mother, who replace our not so perfect and even abusive earthly parents.

Dear Boris1010:

In your various threads, starting a year ago, on April 27, 2020, you shared that at 10 years old, after your parents separated, your “whole world came crashing down”, and as a result you became “intensely shy, withdrawn, socially awkward and timid boy”. You were later diagnosed with “an extremely high-functioning Asperger’s”.

Wikipedia: Asperger’s is a previously used diagnosis of one of the Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs),  differing from other ASDs by relatively unimpaired language and intelligence . In 2013, Asperger’s became part of one umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5). Autism is characterized by difficulties with social interactions and communication with people.

This is what you shared about your subjective emotional experience through life in your threads since last year: “The more depressed I became, the more emotionally numb I became, absolutely indifferent to people.. just neutral, numb, indifferent. Plodding, marching… but never dancing.. Things are either bad, or not  bad, but never good. I absolutely cannot remember the last time I was excited over something, or eagerly looking forward to something“. In regard to your wife of now 49 years, you “don’t feel much of anything for her.. never really did… we do things together and have our little routines and rituals and all.. but it’s so sterile for me, no joy, no real happiness“-

– what I understand today about the subjective emotional experience of a person suffering from Asperger’s/ an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that the person often feels neutral, numb. indifferent, etc., sometimes feeling very anxious or depressed/very distressed, but rarely feeling any joy. The reason for rarely feeling joy is that a person suffering from an ASD rarely feels connected to another person (that’s what the disorder is about: difficulty connecting to other people).

People are social animals, like dogs: when a dog sees another dog or a human, it is eager to connect, and anticipating the connection,  the dog wags its tail. It is joy in the wagging of the tail. A person suffering from an ASD does not expect to connect to another person, therefore, no joy, no wagging of the tail.

Back to you, at 67, you met a 52 year old woman in AA, and you experienced “joy, anticipation, eagerness, a fierce desire to protect and nurture.. it’s like she threw some switch that somehow turned on all those emotions… I find myself crying.. or  just in joy of being alive. I finally feel alive and happy”.

You wrote regarding not having her in your life: “The thought, now, of going back into that dead, gray emotional void is just intolerable”- that dead, gray emotional void is often the subjective emotional experience of a person suffering from ASD.

You shared: “I’ve been living from the neck up for the vast majority of my life.. I’m quite literally a stranger to my own heart, emotions, and body”- the dead, gray emotional void is in the heart (the emotional part of the brain/ body). You lived much of your life in the rational part of the brain, strictly thinking.

Your contact with the AA woman to whom you felt connected (a rare experience for you), was limited to AA meetings three times a week and to emails, texts and some phone calls, “but no more than that”. Yet, she “completely occupied (your) thoughts for over two.. years”. But as of late January 2021, “nobody has seen or heard from her. She’s entirely dropped off the radar, won’t answer emails, texts, calls… nothing”, and you were “absolutely in mourning over her disappearance”.

Following her disappearance, you did what you have done most of your life, back to strictly thinking: “I’m wondering if A: I actually love HER, the woman, or B:) what I’m attached to is my mental image of her, the idea of her”, etc.

In your April 29, 2021 thread, you wrote regarding your recent AA experience: “it feels like the ‘forward’ momentum is stalling.. I recently lost a woman I was very close to (at least in my own mind I was close to her..) in the program, and just a week or two ago I lost the best therapist I’ve ever had”-

– I think that the momentum stalling is about you losing the woman you felt connected to, and then losing a therapist you felt connected to. Your tail was wagging, so to speak, whenever you anticipated contact with the woman, and then with the therapist.. and the wagging stopped when such anticipation. What you need is to feel connected to other people from time to time, to take the elevator, so to speak, down from above your neck to your heart, below your neck.

anita

Dear Boris1010:

You are welcome and thank you for expressing your appreciation.

“I didn’t then (and still don’t now) trust my own ability to see such things and come up with an accurate picture of what the real situation is”- people who fit the ASD diagnosis have trouble deciphering social cues/ hints and vague communication. But lots of people who don’t fit the diagnosis have this difficulty as well, some are more lost in the dark than others, in this regard.

You felt connected to this woman, maybe she felt no connection to you, and expressed it indirectly, in cues, for example, rolling her eyes or turning her head away from you when you talked to her. Maybe she expressed it verbally but vaguely. For example, she may have told you that she is not looking for a relationship with anyone,  but you didn’t notice the cues and didn’t interpret the vague communication to mean that she did not feel connected to you, and that she did not welcome your felt-connection to her.

In the future, when you feel connected to a person, you can say to that person: I feel  connected to you, do you feel connected to me? You can further define to the person what you mean by feeling connected to him or her.

In other words, give and ask for concrete, direct communication- that way you will not be dependent on cues which are difficult for you to decipher. You can explain to any person you interact with, whom you feel somewhat connected, that you were diagnosed with Asperger’s/ ASD, which means that you can’t decipher cues and you therefore need concrete, direct communication.

anita

Dear Boris1010,

you’re welcome. I’m glad you’ve decided to sit with the difficult emotions, instead of shutting down and going into that grey void again. It’s human to love and lose, and then love some more…

No, no anger at her loss – – I blame myself entirely for it. Nothing there but sadness and regret. Not her fault if I wasn’t ‘the one,’ or even anyone.

Not her fault if you weren’t “anyone”. These words show that you have a pretty low self-esteem, Boris. And it showed in what you’ve shared about yourself before:

I also have a personal history of not knowing what I want… discovering something, becoming interested, immersing/learning, gearing up to do… and then just losing interest altogether right when it comes time to actually start DOING the thing I got interested in… so I absolutely do NOT trust what comes out of my head, either.

Head = untrustworthy, Heart= unknown territory… I simply do not know what to do, where to turn. 

I’ve long felt myself ’empty’ or ‘hollow,’ like there’s nothing *but* the facade I project in public… like there is no ‘wearer’ of the many masks.

I think I’d enjoy writing… but I find I have nothing to say. 

Music is another means of expression, as are art, and dance, and poetry… and in each case, I find that there’s simply nothing inside that wants out.  Nothing to say. 

Managed to land on my feet (strictly through the efforts of my wife, who of the two of us is the only one that possesses a working brain and the drive to put it to use).

So, according to yourself, you are: hollow, have nothing to say, wearer of masks, don’t trust either your heart or your head, don’t possess a working brain or the drive to put it to use.

I think that before you can have a quality relationship – be it romantic or friendship – you would need to work on your self-esteem. It’s been damaged. I don’t know if the damage started happening when you were 10, or even earlier. How were your parents treating you before they divorced? Were they mostly loving or they criticized you (or one of them was mostly loving, while the other criticized you)?

With the divorce and you losing your secure base and your stepfather coming into the picture, things definitely took a turn for the worse. Your self-esteem took a plunge, and it never recovered, it seems. Have you worked on your self-esteem in therapy?

Dear Boris1010:

You are welcome. Three years of text history is too much to go through, better not. The texts during the one month before you received the cease and desist message would be enough.

From what you shared today, that you sent her the message: “can we talk  again”, and she answered: “yes, I’d like that”, followed by her not answering your texts or calls- seems to me that she may have been too fearful to say No, so she said Yes, and then behaved according to the No she failed to articulate. Next, her sponsor articulated her No to you in his own words (the cease and desist message).

anita