try a little tenderness

i am feeling a little sappy this morning i think. anyway, i thought i'd share this clip. for some unknown reason i still love this film. i don't often think that gay romantic comedies are either that romantic or that funny, but this is an exception. i laughed and i cried, mostly because i could relate to the complete fear of intimacy that is highlighted here. the humor is caustic which seems very authentic to me as well. and i hadn't heard so many opportunities to use the word "borch" in a sentence.

i am not often vulnerable with someone else. it's too tender. it's too scary. i tried it many many years ago and i felt as if i'd hiked through poison ivy. i itched and i scratched until it bled. and i just stopped hiking altogether. and i have been safe and quietly angry for these many years. i remember getting so angry at my friend peter because he had played outside our arrangement, that i broke a dish on the floor. but the anger that i felt frightened me so much because i had grown up around that type of expression of anger and i didn't want it in my life. so i think i vowed to myself that i would never let someone hurt me like that again.

and i haven't let that happen. but that is not the point of life. i found this at joy2meu.com

"Fear of intimacy is at the heart of codependency. We have a fear of intimacy because we have a fear of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection. We have a these fears because we were wounded in early childhood - we experienced feeling emotionally abandoned, rejected, and betrayed by our parents because they were wounded. They did not have healthy relationship with self - they were codependents who abandoned and betrayed themselves - and their behavior caused us to feel unworthy and unlovable."


"As children we were incapable of seeing ourselves as separate from our families - of knowing we had worth as individuals apart from our families. The reality we grew up in was the only reality that we knew. We thought our parents behavior reflected our worth - the same way that our codependent parents thought our behavior was a factor in rather they had worth."

"The simplest and most understandable way I have ever heard intimacy described is by breaking the word down: in to me see. That is what intimacy is about - allowing another person to see into us, sharing who we are with another person.

Sharing who we are is a problem for codependents because at the core of our relationship with ourselves is the feeling that we are somehow defective, unlovable and unworthy - because of our childhood emotional trauma. Codependency is rooted in our ego programming from early childhood. That programming is a defense that the ego adapted to help us survive. It is based upon the feeling that we are shameful, that we are defective, unworthy, and unlovable. Our codependent defense system is an attempt to protect us from being rejected, betrayed, and abandoned because of our unworthy, shameful being.
We have a fear of intimacy because we were wounded, emotionally traumatized, in early childhood - felt rejected and abandoned - and then grew up in emotional dishonest societies that did not provide tools for healing, or healthy role models to teach us how to overcome that fear. Our wounding in early childhood caused us to feel that something was wrong with our being - toxic shame - and our societal and parental role models taught us to keep up appearances, to hide our shamefulness from others."

As long as we are reacting unconsciously to our childhood emotional wounds and intellectual programming, we keep repeating the patterns. We keep getting involved with unavailable people. We keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned, betrayed and rejected. We keep looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong faces. Is it any wonder we have a fear of intimacy?"