Get:
- some form of therapist in person,
- book form or
- attend relationship workshops.
I’m biased (and healing) because I’ve done all three and teach workshops, write relationship books and counsel folk but I’ve found spinning that three pronged cycle has made me more conscious. And that’s what you’re looking to do be more conscious of your patterns, of what you’re attracted to, what your area of trauma/damage/dysfunction is and then how to alter the pattern or retrain yourself to redirect.
I grew up with parents who were addicts—-drugs and alcohol. My father “harsher” than my mother and she went to rehab in my teens, slipped once then was sober for the rest of her life. She did act out addictions with money and food and enabling behaviors with my stepfather.
My maternal grandfather was a raging, roaring, mean alcoholic.
My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was an alcoholic who would be all normal for months on end, go to the store and call six months later from Idaho. The family lived in Rhode Island and then New York.
My grandmother’s mother was emotionally restrictive so my grandmother raised my mother and her siblings teh same way. It wasn’t until the last 2 years of her life that my grandmother broke down and routinely hugged ad kissed my mother and I, who were living with her to help her, her favorites. But that withholding affected my mother a lot. She felt rejected by her mother on one level even though they were so close on another. My mother then sought comfort in men but she also had a raging alcoholic father that my grandmother threw out the year before I was born. He died of a head fall and heart attack alone and a few months later I was born. I many ways my grandparents breaking up gave my mother the distraction to hide her pregnancy at 22, save up money, move out at 8 months pregnant and have e. My grandmother and eldest aunt had forced my mother at 16 into a home abortion, killed the baby and threw it out.
But all of that turmoil was a lot of turmoil for my mother and father,.
My father and his brother came from Louisiana to attend college. My cousin introduced my parents, he was at Pace my mother at Baruch. But at the same time it was also the end of the 1970s and Black Power movements so he joined first the Black Panthers and then the more militant Black Liberation Army. The BLA did fundraising—-by robbing banks throughout the country. My mother realized they were using her apartment as a safe house when Mike Wallace came onto 60 Minutes and announced JoAnne Chessimard—-Assata Shakur—- was wanted by the FBI for crimes within the BLA. My mother knew her as her bestie “Gloria”. The armed gunmen guarding the door, the maps, the codes, it all sort of coalesced in my mother’s head and she told them and my father they had to leave. A year later he was arrested and went to prison for 7 years.
My stepfather after that was Stan a great guy and black belt in several martial arts. Then for some insane reason he tried PCP one day and tore up the apartment. Scared of him, my mother broke up with him.
Then came Terry the chef. They seemed matched. He loved us, made a lot of money and my mother was working as a data technician for AT&T so suddenly we went from a 2 bedroom to a duplex three bedroom and my mother managed all of the money. The problem was that Terry (like a lot of chefs) balanced out his high octane career with drugs and alcohol. But they loved partying. And there was a lot of money. I remember when I was 7 they bought matching mink coats, with hats and mufflers. It was wild. Eventually though their battling while partying got to be too much and my mother left-him.
Then my father contacted us. And honestly they were soul mates so we visited for a year, they married and he was released and after a year of having a great job, money, even an Amex! (I was 10 and it was the first time I held an Amex card! The things you remember!) He started dabbling in drugs. Mainly because he’d been such an activist, doing wild extreme things—-my father was 6′4, built like a perfect physical specimen and no longer was there a Black Power Movement “war”.
He craved excitement. So they broke up and later my mother discovered that the Imam (yes, we converted to Islam for a year) hadn't filed the marriage certificate so they weren’t even married.
This period is when my mother focused on us—-family therapy, getting sober and Terry came back. He was good for awhile. Helping my mother after my father/break up but then his old habits came out and my mother felt the money, the two of them making over $100k in the late 1980s wasn’t worth it.
I think then she started to settle for attention over motivation and aspiration. Jesse was a very nice Pisces man. He was a bumbling fuck up and screwed up money so that ended after a couple of years and then my mother got a huge settlement from a car accident (where my father was driving the car. You can’t make my family up if you tried.), had money galore and frightened of an empty nest :bought: Mike who was 10 days out of jail for selling crack to an undercover cop. She was attending AA meetings in mink coat and he brought her flowers. He didn’t work for 7 years as they lived back and forth between the co-op in Brooklyn and the big house her and I had picked out in Pennsylvania mountains. They squandered the money, were near destitute for awhile then slowly worked back to living in Charlotte, buying a house, her starting another business and then she got tired of basically living. Stopped working as a traveling/international paralegal and settled for SSD, dying obese, diabetic, out of control, financially a mess right at 65. He’s still in the financial hole with a house completely underwater that the bank won’t take back.
These were my initial love examples.
What Was My Mother Thinking?
My mother's love examples were that her parents were married for 37 years before my grandmother kicked him out, they’d raised 4 kids, my mother the last and then he died and about 15 years later my grandmother died. My mother’s picture was a house, white picket fence, normal family-—Middle Class for a Black family—-they and we were never “poor” but it was hell inside because Daddy was crazy and Mommy was emotionally starved.
My father, Robert, Stan and Terry were all good, hardworking men, all highly educated and good/nice fathers.
Jesse and Mike I can't speak for. Jesse was nice but even as a teenager I knew, twice my age, he was basically a teenager. Neither Jesse nor Mike had their GEDs, careers, and my mother could control them. She told me about her intentions to breakup with Jesse in a Wendy’s parking lot as we were eating. She explained that no matter how good the sex was or nice a person was they had to have ambition a work ethic. I was shocked but not shocked, my parents were always blunt, graphic, people who dealt with me as an only child/mini-adult. The same criteria happened for Mike 7 years later because my mother was lonely, had a lot of money to compensate for his having nothing and she used him for attention and t be a male front in her businesses.
It sounds like a good life for Mike but she treated him like a child/dog. He used to have to bring her back proper, correct change from the store. Every decision was hers, every whim, hers. I remember once driving to the house in PA and her just railing—-no, like a woman with a razor strap-on just fucking through his head about how less he was, how incompetent he was, how if she stopped the car in the middle of the Pennsylvania mountains and threw both him and I out of the car, no wallets,. I’d get back to NYC before him because he was such an idiot.
In that moment I thought to myself, if this man halls off and hits my mother, I seriously couldn’t blame him.
He didn’t.
But my mother emasculated him then complained loudly about how useless he was, how mismatched they were for almost 20 years.
As she lay dying, and he was acting out towards me maliciously and overfeeding her, I pointed out to her that yes, she was getting all the attention she wanted, me having moved to Charlotte but that this was for finite time, she was dying. And to him for all of his petty attacks I pointed out to him that he’d taken the bullet for me when I left for school as he moved in and it had cost him his life, his future, everything. He’d spent 20 years being razor railed by her so that the prime years of his life were gone, he’d amounted to getting his GED at 45 and becoming a security guard. And now Mastermind was absorbing the last of the money, time and energy so that she could die and leave him.
She’d explained years before that she chose him because his mother had died at 13 so she knew, from her psychology degree, that he’d over-attach to her even if he thought he was scamming her and never leave her. The other option had been a model/manager, Shah, who was 10 years younger. But not only was he 10x finer than Mike he was a solid, good human being who genuinely loved my mother. But she couldn’t control him. So she chose Mike.
Once again let me stress Shah FINE and a good man, who loved her honestly and openly.
I watched all of this from toddler to when I went off to undergrad at 21.
I often have to correct Black and Latino people that though my mother technically had 5 husbands, it wasn't in a poverty way. She earned a hefty salary for years, did movie premieres, owned businesses separately and with them, I went to parochial/private school, we lived in fine apartments and houses and eventually my mother started buying properties. My mothers’ standards and ambitions are reflected in Terry and my father, Robert. My mother’s weaknesses are reflected in Stan (I remember he was very handsome, like Michael Ealy the actor with brown skin and bright green eyes; Jesse was fun like a big brother and Mike was able to catch all of my mother’s narcissistic attention so I could escape her web and become a man/full person.)
Terry was good—-when he wasn’t drunk and my father was overwhelmingly impressive before his crumbling. But none of them were “bad” men. Scary, misunderstood, foolish, but even in arguments the abusive drama was never a Law & Order SVU episode—-though the SWAT team did come for my father when he broke parole. And like the Black Panther he used all of his paramilitary guerrilla skills and got away. Yeah, my father is like Jack Reacher.
I grew up with this dissonant images—-Jesse and Mike being in my later teens, 20s so they really didn’t formulate how I viewed relationships. My mother wanted to be married long term so Robert, Stan and Terry were all multiple, committed years. My mother never tolerated other women. And even when my women was associating with women in his street drama,my mother took it as affairs and broke up—-though I do believe him, a Virgo, his actions didn’t include the sexual, just street level excitement and danger.
So I bounce along, singing too much Prince in my head and I’m just a freaking—-Black, White Puerto Rican—-girls, boys it don’t matter. My collective parents gave me if not permanently solid homes, they gave me maturity in that I wasn’t restricted in thoughts, travel, money, actions like other Black kids I knew in school. But this meant I had to learn everything by query or experimentation or witnessing it. I asked girls out with flower bouquets, even took a date to Trump Tower for lunch—-promptly slamming my head into a clean glass container that I thought was cologne you could smell. My mother told me bluntly that the girl Cheryl Cash, would only amount to her name, was fast and would try to get pregnant and to dump her. Bluntly, she was extremely right about Cheryl.
Coming out happened when I was 18 but our family therapist, form my parents breakup, had prepared my mother that I wouldn’t be entirely straight. My mother’s drama and dilemma over my sexuality I think had narcissistic control roots. She couldn’t control the Oedipal transference if my sexuality contained men, to always include her on a deep level. I don’t think my mother was homophobic, she had many close male and female gay friends and enlisted them to mentor me, I think she was threatened by my sexuality being something she couldn’t control.
My father/stepfathers never got a vote in my identity, sexuality, just as I wouldn’t give my mother or family votes either. I prepared myself with private counseling in high school then broke up with my best friend/boyfriend (he was Puerto Rican like the Prince song! lol) and promptly thought about killing myself, then panicked and ran to the hospital and it all came out in the doctor’s office. That teenage anxiety though was forged around the steel my parents had raised me with so I turned to my family and said—-it is whatever I decide it is, if you have a problem with that I’m prepare to cut YOU off.
They got the message and accepted me. Sort of. My mother said that she and my father had raised me to be too strong, too self possessed that she should’ve built more trap doors into my psychology. Yes, it was like being raised by Emma Frost and Spock, who were also Klingons. They deeply loved me and took care of me but I was never coddled. Which again I noticed as different when growing up or dating or eventually with me.
For two years,before there was big money to set me free to go to college I worked in Manhattan and then Greenwich Village across from NYU. I didn’t drink but I regularly went to nightclubs. And there were make-out rooms. And once you’ve been in the VIP make out room you get invited to private, loft orgies/sex parties around the city. And I was young, sober, self possessed ad I tried, safely, every possible Baskin Robbins flavor on the sex-sexuality wheel. Twice. Then a third time just to make sure I liked and disliked what I liked.
I was raised to be a libertine.
Then I started experimenting with seriously dating and found that men were attracted to the Robert/steel inside of me and that I was a super-dysfunctional caretaker but I was just different enough to not be turned on by their simpering, weakness, extremely gay anxiety and terror at their butt, their feelings, the moon, the color green, etc., etc.. I also don’t like frilly, cutie tootsie, lace and simpering girls.
I like Men and Women. Because that’s who raised me.
But in love you have to make space for your vulnerability and theirs. That was my challenged. Seeking not perfection but being disappointed when after 90 days, you saw the real person. It was like being hard as a rock coated in diamond for someone then day 93, thinking—-”This little bitch isn’t even a really little bitch. Ick.”
Then I went to college and my writing made me popular, in extremely racial, sexual, prolific ways and then I became the first undergraduate TA—-ever and then I won awards and then and then and then and then, I just exploded in writing, publishing, teaching and I was unabashedly out but not your “gay friend.” No, I don’t want to shop with you, or pass you Kleenex or hear your coming out drama. I told my parents, family and friends to fuck off and went into my bedroom to pack to leave them all at 18 IF they opposed my sexuality and you want to tell me about your “rough Thanksgiving dinner? Please.”
That sense of personal power and decisiveness meant that I had to over the years learn to accept, not tolerate, what I (or the parents in my head would perceive) as weaker men and women.
Then I started teaching LGBTQSGL workshops and getting into relationship theory. I’d done sexuality—-Who And What Are You? workshops undergrad—-where I made the campus newspaper by making it clear at 10 workshops to hundreds of undergrads—-”You don’t have to like me, ignore me if you will—-I’m not interested in fucking some kiddies with questions—- but you try some violence shit and I will natural NYC style fuck you up!”
Ironically, I discovered Harville Hendrix and his wife Helen and their Imago work—-that we unconsciously choose our parents in love relationships—-their imago imprint—-but it isn’t them, instead it’s familiar like them and the work is to recognize that—-usually in high grade attraction—-and readjust. A boyfriend might get angry like my mother did but instead of shutting down or being ambivalent, I,as an adult, can deal with his anger, face it.
Harville Hendrix, Imago and Keeping the Love You Find and Columbia University Cameo
I actually bought a copy of Keeping the Love You Find undergrad, read it slightly then went and had disastrous relationships. If I had finished the book, life would've been different but at the same time then would I have the tales, experience and even books that a decade of drama and fool brought? I’ll take the drama pizza-fest.
But a decade later teaching workshops I kept coming across mention of Imago work—-on Oprah, in books, etc.—-Oprah explained that after having him on her show, she took Harville into a limo with her and Stedman and drove round a park for hours working out their relationship and it’s how they were able to set t and make it work—-so I studied it and started teaching it to my workshop participants and then a few years before I would actually attend/teach at Columbia took a group of 20+ Black men to Joe Kort’s workshops on gay male relationships. I kid you not 20 of the 40 White men there got up and left when I brought in my group. So Joe starts teaching and mentioning Imago stuff and terminology and my group, not as ragtag as would look good in a movie—-but generally, normal men between 21 and 60, Black, educated i the subject matter, start jumping up and answering and redirecting and explaining Imago stuff—-because I’d been teaching it to them for 6 months before. Joe asked me during the break—-who the fuck was I, were they?
It was hilarious but he was able to really delve past explaining the basics and do some great exercises with the men there because everyone was on the same, advanced pages.
Then of course teaching this I started doing the exercises, emotional prompts ad seeing my history, the DL guys, the quasi-Out guys, the loads of passionate sexual relationships, the mismatches as I attempted to take care of dysfunctional folk (like my parents) but suppressed my needs.
I started to see my own patterns—-how dysfunctional family, childhood sexual abuse, premature maturity—-affected how I related to myself and romantic relationships. How I was stifled in some ways and over-expressive in others. How I could now understand the attraction of imbalanced relationships, loneliness, using money to control a man, weak men, perceiving men as weak—-what weak means to me, how I could relate to and love children but not want to teach them in classrooms. I also learned how to have a better, stronger voice with my friends, family and professional life around boundaries. because I was constantly accomplishing so much people never saw how sometimes I did things out of reaction, that were successful, rather than conscious, happy choice.
Basically i was a fantastic employee (and business owner) who worked for and with assholes who were destructive predatory people and it took me a little too long in the relationship to shut that shit down-—so what could’ve been a discussion/separation, not even a deeper engagement month 1 turned into and explosion of pent up anger month 18. I learned to acknowledge and identify and trust my instincts on assholes—-romantically attractive and platonic—-and remove/avoid them.
I also learned how to go back and review my feelings that were confusing or messy or imbalanced and apologize where necessary but acknowledge the insanity sometimes that they were presenting. I always took the me optional brunt of maybe it’s me, maybe I’m so talented in these other areas that I don’t speak emotions well before than allowing, believing and trust YOU were the problem, the asshole and dumping you was the right move.
Oh, I dumped guys, ghosted them, but it took a while before I could clearly tell them WHY.
I learned to understand that sometimes the infatuation I felt was parental love style familiarity and that I wasn’t sexual abuse broken for not fucking dysfunctional guys who were my Imago. I would crucify myself that I’d been in a sling at a sex party enjoying—-the room—-and yet I couldn’t do this little simp who I felt so much emotion for. What was wrong with me? Then I learned to see that simp clearly and that bluntly, a couple of them I felt would either turn into unsafe sex or that I wouldn’t get my cock back. But that loss of self, vulnerability is good and healthy unless I was ignoring my instincts about other dangers from them. I literally had to learn how to untangle my emotions and identify them. I then had to learn how to trust my feelings, decisions even if someone else was let down, disappointed, went unfucked.
Teaching all of the Imago stuff for years sometimes sent me privately into a tailspin but it also gave me space to listen to others, to see roads badly traveled, unresolved parental relationships, HIV infections from emotional drama, destructive-abusive relationships, acknowledging good and bad, for me, not for others. Just me. First.
The problem with my dramatic parental collective, that you probably fell into was that they were fascinating fireworks, car wrecks and spotlit stage performances.
But Kyle was often ignored for all that drama. Kyle’s needs were often not met or overlooked so that my collective of parents could go shopping or on weekend benders. I remember for years with my grandmother my mother would go to work Mondays through Thursday. But Thursday, payday she wouldn't’ be home by 6pm. She’d come back Sunday night and resume for Monday like nothing happened. At first there were phone calls (she did it once when I was 7 and arrived to the police waiting, I’d been alone all night and called them). But now with my grandmother she could disappear at will. I used to think she was dead and surprised every Sunday when she reappeared. Every Thursday through Sunday, I thought she was dead. And I’d run through the scenario of a sickly grandmother, the insurance my mother told me was on her, having to live with my aunt and then she’d pop up Sundays.
Terminal, sober, dying, on her deathbed, her and I hashed out some stuff. That I was not exaggerating and that she didn’t remember because she had the benefit of being high/drunk. I was never high nor drunk. My parents played lots of reality, you’re confused game with me until my teens when I stomped that shit out. It took years of smashing them hard with the truth until they got that the truth was no longer up for addict interpretation.
If you can, you must confront your parents on their shit. I did it in writing, ironically form my mother’s encouragement, and then in person as she lay dying for 2 years. Oh, and dying is natural. If you can watch Jeopardy, you can help heal your child before you die. Dysfunction people want too much sympathy ad compassion. Sympathy and compassion are earned. Hold people accountable. It makes it easier to hold yourself accountable, 100% for your mistakes and corrections.
While they initially created anxiety, it also created resilience and detachment which then adult translated to I really wasn’t upset at the relationship or emotionally present…until it was over. Like years later. lol (“Oh!!!!! That’s what he meant!” lol)
IT’S WORK!!!!
Yes, this is a ringing, highest praises possible (they saved Oprah and Stedman’s relationship too) praise for Harville Hendrix.
Do the work.
Attend meetings if you can. Listen to other batshit crazy folk until you realized youse a bat too.
Every decade of my life I do therapist for 1 year. And I also do an intensive life coach for 6 months, in person or a deep inventory like Tony Robbins Personal Power Systems.
I listened to Marianne Williamson and rad all of her books for a decade—-to get a different, healing perspective on myself.
I’ve studied A Course in Miracles for over 20 years—-I’m on Lesson 316!——no, a calendar year is not spiritual lessons “year”.
If time, space and the body and death don’t exist—-why are you so upset? one of my spiritual mantras.
I have always had the mantra—-I am sovereign unto myself. since I was a child, like under 6.
I am mine first and then I share myself from there. I had to learn boundaries and clarity about the fact that not everyone, even my parents were aligned to that sharing, giving in healthy ways—would take advantage of it. Once I accepted them as giving and taking humans, I healed a lot and like unnecessary leaves, batshit folk fell away, didn’t come into my garden as much.
I have to be diligent,. A confused, overly confident, pseudo-addict with internal restrictive sense of non-motivated ambition who is emotionally manipulative still pings my radar.
But now a whole fleet of battleships lines up in front of me between this person. I can feel an attraction but now I can examine it and see if they’ve healed the bullshit that I’m pinging or are they just rip roaring for a few years of drama.
I Am Kyle Phoenix
I fulfill myself first—-a lot of the magnitude of my writing,bogs,books, TV shows, films, musical composition is that expression. I coo, I dance, I avoid non-dancers,
non singing out loud folk, unhappy people. I rarely pickup my phone or text back immediately. I don’t watch TV. I treat myself to $175 tickets to see Medea with Bobby Cannavale and Rose Byrne because they’re both great actors. And he’s been on my fucking hotness radar for a decade—-had to see that sammich—he even got undressed!— in person! Yeah, I said it.
And yes, I unabashedly say aloud that I have a dollar extra (As my mentor Carlene Hatcher Polite said about my rather expensive clothing as an undergrad when we first met. She's actually one of the first Black people who saw that I came from Middle to Upper Class and made no bones about it.) ad spend it on me (or whatever I feel like charitable or not) because I’ve created it, earned it, made it.
I and my resources don’t belong to anyone but myself. One day kids, and then dispersal in a will, but THIS—-me, my body, my sense, my worked on developed talents, my sex and sexuality——all mine, baby.
Now.
Go find and create YOURS!
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
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