Gravitating to poison

 

How does an extremely intelligent woman with career expertise and a solid, comfortable life figure out why she is attracted to a sociopathic doctor who is solely about sex? As with most questions of dysfunc­tion and self-sabo­tage, the answer is within, in the com­plex chemistry attendant to the psycho­logi­cal birth of the human infant, toddler, child, ado­lescent. The answer is not in the mind or in books or in adult motivation. Many people are sure they have good self-esteem, but to search among the roots of their early development is to learn they have no organic sense of value, of identity, because their parents did not give it to them. We have the proven theories that describe a person’s attraction to the “bad object”; his aversion to a decent person whose offer of love would trigger his childhood emotional starva­tion; her regression to Stock­holm Syndrome’s infant in awe, cradled in the hand of the all-power­ful psycho­path. But these theories are simply the descriptions of sensa­tions: “I do not feel that I am anything. I am cold and dying and I need someone to see me, which numbs the burning cold and makes me not alone. Love is trying to bring the buried child back to life, so I can only tolerate distance and alluring words, can cling in dissociation and need but not be clung to. I am an infant with no power and so I need someone with complete power.”

Most clients who believe they have self-esteem have only prosthetic, résumé self-esteem: their fragile mental conceit, their career or felt philosophy. They live on fantasy and the survival urge. They want to know why they are attracted to poison. But in fact, they want to know anything and every­thing, because adults don’t know until they leave their tower, go to the ground where they were born and crawled, with deep feeling, toward or away from their caregivers.