Almost: When "Almost Loved" Becomes a Way of Life
Sometimes there are ghosts and wounds of the past that show up and loud and proud, and then there are the quiet ones - the ones that become so woven into the fabric of our lives that we stop seeing them altogether. We simply live them. We build relationships around them. We call them normal.
This week I met one of mine - the wound of almost being loved, but never fully. A wound so immense I had been dragging it through my entire life like a mountain of luggage strapped to my back, never fully realizing its enormity, only feeling its weight, its exhaustion, and the way it quietly shaped my life.
Every relationship became another fractal of what my narcissistic mother and emotionally unavailable father offered me from birth into adulthood. No wonder I have been traumatized throughout my life. Always the longing. Always the hope. Always the mirage and hope of finally finding the love I needed as a child but never received. A carrot dangling from the end of a long stick. Always just about there, always just out of reach. Almost there, yet never reaching it.
All of us are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure.
_John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development
