I’ve developed kind of a habit of listing to National Public Radio on Sundays.   During the course of the day, I overheard an interview with a graduate student that piqued my interest.  Her research revealed that babies as young as 3-months old preferred the toys who had exhibited better character.  Allow me to explain, for this may seem a little abstract.

This young woman basically played with babies by performing little skits using toys.  Her observations were that, once the play was finished, the babies preferred the toys who had been “nice”during playtime.  When asked how she knew how the baby was reacting to character rather than a preferred color, she explained that she would use two stuffed toys of different colors in multiple experiments with different children.  In spite of the color of the toy, infants predominantly chose the “nice” toy over the one whose part in the play had been “mean.”

I visited the San Diego Zoo for my birthday this year.  While my friend and I were looking on at the Flamingos, something unusual happened.  All of their heads shot up at once.  Their alarm was obvious.  I commented to my friend that their behavior was strange as they began to squawk and pace about in their habitat.

My friend suggested that it might be their feeding time so we meandered up the path a bit and stood on a small bridge over where their food would be delivered.  When my friend answered that the bridge didn’t normally sway, I knew we were in an earthquake.  It was a fairly sizable one, at that, and it lasted for nearly a minute.

The Holiday blahs have certainly affected me today.  There was a season when hope was still in my vocabulary and all things seemed possible.  At the time, I had no idea it was a false promise from a Narcissist.

Love is what we are told we need.  Attachment is the downfall of loving, I guess.  But I don’t know how one thing works without the other … and I’ve never seen both work together.  The paradox of that confounds me.

In the movie, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there was technology that wiped out the memories of love.  I sometimes wish that it existed.  But I have discovered another clue into why my soul cannot seem to leave the horror of my abusive partner’s betrayal behind.  I’m quite certain that he would be entirely off my radar by now if I had not been so traumatized by him.

All the holiday commercials on TV this time of year sometimes serve as a rancid reminder about emotions that I once felt.  The illusion of love propagated by our culture is designed to make us want it but, what is it?

When my former beau reached for me, the anticipation of his touch was like an electrical arc charging the air.  Every smile, kiss and impassioned embrace that I shared with him was, to me, an expression of my love for him.  For him, a Narcissist and serial dater, it apparently was some game that he played to prove to himself that he had the ability to amuse, seduce and sexually satisfy a woman.

That’s the title of a movie that I watched again last night.  Although it is moderately amusing and the acting is very well done, there are similarities between the player’s justifications to his peer-aged lover and experiences that I had with my Narcissistic Partner are stunning. 

There were some major differences, however.  The female character, played by Diane Keaton, learned within a few weeks of falling in love that her new sweetheart was nothing more than a shameless womanizer.  The second major difference is that Jack Nicholson’s character actually experienced curiosity about the effect he had on his former lovers and sought them out in order to better understand himself. 

Of course, he had suffered an event which gave him cause to recognize his mortality… 

Time may or may not heal all wounds but I honestly can’t describe my present frame of mind any better than this awesome song by Carrie Underwood.

If you’d like to pick up some of her heart-felt and beautiful music at Amazon, check out this link.