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Mixed signals happen when we act out of alignment. I've been there -- people who avoid our own feelings are notorious for this. We don't realize we are the ones who create the push-pull dance of ambivalence.
I was talking to a good friend about this last night. She told me a man she was dating seemed surprised that women keep having feelings when he's clearly verbalized to them he's not emotionally available, never accounting for the way he acts toward them
This is a thing those of us who disown our feelings do. We think that words speak louder than actions. We take you out to dinner, we whisk you away on romantic adventures, we escalate dramatically then we act aggrieved that you "caught" feelings.
This magic trick turns our active participation into your problem. You caught the feelings. We were totally fine by ourselves until you came along being a needy mess. You want too much. You are too much.
This magic trick is a combination of projection and gaslighting.
This magic trick is a combination of projection and gaslighting.
You aren't the problem. You might have a problem if you're attracted to people like us a lot, or if you don't recognize rapid escalation as a big red flag, but that doesn't mean you're broken or that you deserved the mindfuck. It only means you need to tend to your healing.
The mindfuck -- the combination of projection and gaslighting -- is not your baggage. That's on us. We are grownups responsible for developing our discernment and our boundaries. We have the power and responsibility to choose people who better match our needs.
If we keep choosing people who "are too much" or "need too much" or who want to enmesh, then it is our responsibility to ourselves to do the work we need to break this pattern. It's not your fault or the fault of women or whatever category we've invoked to hold the blame.
It is not your responsibility to help us understand that we're scared of intimacy and desperately delayed in emotional regulation. Go tend to you. If you could save us, by the gods, please believe that we would be saved already.
It's up to each of us to run these rescue missions into ourselves.
Feel free to clue us in on your way out that we're not just scared of intimacy (most of us know this and feel okay with this), but terrified of abandonment (most of us are not consciously aware of this, the part that makes us act so out of alignment). But keep walking.
Feeding on limerence (the electricity of connection) is a coping mechanism. It says we need to tend to ourselves. As with some other coping mechanisms, many of us need to hit bottom in order to see that the way we're managing our wounds is not working.
