Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [63]
The therapist had me close my eyes and try to visualize the part of me that felt needy as a small child. I did it too. She was in there, like in my stomach, or maybe my womb. She was probably about six or seven. The therapist had me like kiss her and hug her and stuff, and even though I did it, the whole time I was thinking how ridiculous it was. I mean, I could love this part of me all I want, but as a woman I was still going to want a man to love me.
Carla’s story exemplifies how many of the therapeutic approaches to help us stop needing male attention probably won’t help. There are lots of exceptions, of course. Some women will find success with twelve-step programs or with the sort of visualization that Carla described. But most of us don’t, because unlike most addictions, part of what we are after is perfectly healthy—love, attention, and sex. Not only is it perfectly healthy, but it’s also necessary to a satisfying life.
So, before anything else, girls like us have to accept that that part of us that desperately wants attention, that desperately wants to be loved, is never going away. That time is past. Way back when, my mother didn’t love me enough, caught up in her own narcissism. Mandy’s father left when she was two years old, and she can count the amount of times she’s seen him since on one hand. Carla’s parents were so busy with their own unhappiness that they didn’t care to see hers. The other girls and women I spoke to had mothers who tried to kill themselves, fathers who ignored them, fathers who bullied and were sexually inappropriate or outright molested. Others were raped or simply became caught up in the cultural pressure to be sexy and to put out so that guys would find them worthwhile.
We all have our stories. They are ours to keep, a part of what makes us who we are. We will never be rid of them. Never. When you can swallow that fact, when you can acknowledge that you will always feel that ache, that it will resurface every once in a while, and that it is only yours and that no one else has the capacity to make it feel better, then you are ready to move toward real change.
SHARING OUR STORIES
Leigh knows she will always be a loose girl, and in some ways, that was the truth that helped her feel like she could move forward with her life. She spent her teens and most of her twenties trying desperately to get male attention, trying to turn every glance from a man into a relationship. By the time she met Chris, the man she’d wind up marrying, she knew she had to find a way to stop relying so much on men to make her feel worthwhile. She came to me at that point, wanting to hear how she could not screw up her relationship with Chris. When I told her the first step was to acknowledge that she would always feel the way she feels, that she would always have the propensity to seek out other men, she grew angry. She said, “How does that help me?” But over time, she saw that it was true. To change her behavior, she had to stop beating herself up for her feelings. She had to recognize that she had those feelings again and again to know that she need not act on them. Just because she felt the desire didn’t mean she had to act on it.
The other process that helped Leigh was finding a group of women who struggled like she did. Many psychologists understand that stories can heal. Sharing stories—telling your own and listening to those of others—is a therapeutic process. Much has been written about using narrative in psychotherapy—psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral therapies—as a way to help clients integrate their histories, their multiple selves, and as a way to make better choices. When we tell our stories, we are forced both to claim ourselves (“I did this”) and to claim our responsibilities to other people, such as