A very thought-provoking discussion indeed.
Speaking in general terms, my attitudes towards men and women tend to mirror my childhood relationships with my father and mother respectively. My father was my primary abuser, but was also, perversely, the one of my parents who I fought endlessly to please, felt grossly disordered attachment for and whose psychological influence over and domination of my life were cemented in childhood and persisted into adulthood.
My mother was the classic enabler, distant, detached, coldly condemning and critical and completely emotionally absent.
As a result, my default reactions to women are of ambivalence and disengagement. I have no strong feelings one way or the other for most women (except those who display specific trigger qualities or behaviours) and struggle to form any form of attachment to even the most innocuous and supportive women. Women also do not tend to distress or trouble me particularly and often evoke a rather dismissive kind of disinterest in me.
All of the dominant influences, both positive and negative, on my life, have been men. I tend to have strong instinctual reactions, again either positive or negative, towards men, and can say that both the most evil, and the most precious, people I have ever known, have been men.
I do tend to mistrust most men by default, and yet the only people I have ever trusted in the world are men. My T is male and I cannot imagine ever trusting anyone else with my truths the way I have trusted him.
The fact that he is a devoted family man with 4 kids, who he talks about constantly in a very "real" way (complete with both the ups and downs of parenthood), is probably very very healthy for me, though it is also often very confronting and painful and feels like a jarring reminder of everything I never had as a child.
But it's good for me to surround myself with examples of the good in people, particularly as I also work in a field in which I constantly am faced with the attrocities that human beings commit upon each other and on children in particular.
Maddog
Speaking in general terms, my attitudes towards men and women tend to mirror my childhood relationships with my father and mother respectively. My father was my primary abuser, but was also, perversely, the one of my parents who I fought endlessly to please, felt grossly disordered attachment for and whose psychological influence over and domination of my life were cemented in childhood and persisted into adulthood.
My mother was the classic enabler, distant, detached, coldly condemning and critical and completely emotionally absent.
As a result, my default reactions to women are of ambivalence and disengagement. I have no strong feelings one way or the other for most women (except those who display specific trigger qualities or behaviours) and struggle to form any form of attachment to even the most innocuous and supportive women. Women also do not tend to distress or trouble me particularly and often evoke a rather dismissive kind of disinterest in me.
All of the dominant influences, both positive and negative, on my life, have been men. I tend to have strong instinctual reactions, again either positive or negative, towards men, and can say that both the most evil, and the most precious, people I have ever known, have been men.
I do tend to mistrust most men by default, and yet the only people I have ever trusted in the world are men. My T is male and I cannot imagine ever trusting anyone else with my truths the way I have trusted him.
The fact that he is a devoted family man with 4 kids, who he talks about constantly in a very "real" way (complete with both the ups and downs of parenthood), is probably very very healthy for me, though it is also often very confronting and painful and feels like a jarring reminder of everything I never had as a child.
But it's good for me to surround myself with examples of the good in people, particularly as I also work in a field in which I constantly am faced with the attrocities that human beings commit upon each other and on children in particular.
Maddog
