Dave Bockman

For the vast majority of my life I was locked away inside a foggy cage while my learned self (the self who arose as a kind of reaction formation, a protection mechanism to save me from annihilation through the abuse and neglect of my parents) again and again and again sought to re-create and orchestrate relationships, situations, and pursuits which would allow it to manage the emotions I had no choice but to manage as a child.

My mother-the product of a brutal and cold, indifferent and physically violent family herself- had no love for me.  My earliest recollections of her all are playing at her feet while she smoked, drank, chatted on the phone, or visited with friends.  In all my years as a child I never remember her at my eye-level. A little later into my adolescence a long dark period occurred in which I would return home from school, make myself an enormous snack, and disappear into our darkened basement where I would sit for endless hours watching television. Never once did my mother come downstairs to ask me how my day was, why I was sitting in a darkened basement, why I was so sad.

My mother derived pleasure from me in only one way: When people would compliment her for how I looked physically.  There's no doubt, I was a beautiful child-- a genetic random arbitrary throw the dice-- and I quickly associated glowing praise on my physical appearance from strangers and family friends  with my mother's love.  She would often tell me things like "oh, you're going to be such a heartbreaker", or "it's a sad but true fact that attractive people do much better in life" or a bit later on, "the phone never stopped ringing off the hook for you, always some girl wanting to speak with you.  I couldn't keep them straight in my head".

This type of positive reinforcement over something I had absolutely no control over, with the total absence of love and affection and real communication on every other level that a child desperately needs from their mother, fucked me up in every conceivable way.  For the rest of my life, again and again and again, I would seek out unstable, physically gorgeous women who (no doubt operating under their own reaction formations learned in childhood) were maniacally attracted to me. And not just one relationship at a time...  1, 2, 3... five or even seven at a time, I would not stop seducing and charming, until I was juggling so madly, so crazily spending so much energy keeping them from knowing about each other... inevitably I would slip ( consciously I know now) and all the relationships would shatter at my feet, always with it raging bitter acrimony aimed at me, emasculating insults, slaps to the face, clothing and contents of drawers hurled at me... at which point I would collapse into a dark and deep, miserable depression for weeks, or perhaps even months at a time, where I would self attack in a variety of ways and swear I would never do it again.  Swear I was a changed man... swear that I was a good person... swear that I if I could have just one more chance, I know I could be in a deep and meaningful monogamous relationship with a good person.

And then I'd do it all over again.

The periods of self attack were characterized by wild pendulum swings of obsessive compulsive exercising and physical grooming and on the other side, massive and quick unhealthy weight gains in which I was determined it seems to eat myself to death. Each pendulum swing was wider and wider than the last, so that by my mid-30s  I was exercising between two and three hours a day, lifting weights, becoming grotesquely overdeveloped physically, and thoroughly miserable. That particular "pendulum swing" ended one day while I sat naked on my toilet, crying, about to inject for the fifth time into my thigh an anabolic steroid. Trust me, you haven't felt shame until you sit poised with a glistening hypodermic needle full of an illegal Class III substance, ready to inject it into your own body, and suddenly asking, "Why am I my doing this?  What is wrong with me?" I threw the hypodermic away, and didn't touch a weight again for the next three years.

I know very little about my father's history, just bits and pieces. His mother, whom I recall from my childhood as stone-like, emotionless, sarcastic, and who referred to black people as 'Darkies', sent my father to boarding school, divorced her husband, married another man, and never told my father any of this until he was ready to come home on Christmas break. I now know that it was my child-self seeking to recreate in me his enormous size and presence when I started bodybuilding-- the size disparity I sought to create in myself vs. others was the disparity I felt between me as a child and my towering father.

She became wealthy with this second marriage, and after my father graduated from high school and sought to go to college, she refused to pay his tuition. He ran away from home, joined the Marines and went to Korea, returning after 4 years. His mother again refused to pay for his college, too busy taking trans-oceanic cruises aboard the QE. He applied and received tuition from The G.I. Bill. It was at school that he met the woman who would become my mother.

My emotional memories of my father from when I was a child are that he was an enormous brooding black cloud of rage which could explode in violent temper at any time, over anything, and employ a kind of brutal and withering sarcasm that could absolutely destroy me. And that he did often.

That power paradigm slowly dissolved as I became physically more powerful than he; nevertheless he still employs scorn and haughty ridicule to great effect when it will land a blow.

How did I get here? My reaction formations to my fathers abuse led me to seek out debates and discussions on the Internet surrounding the tyranny of the state. People who advocate the initiation of the use of force in order to get what they want are "pro-statists", and it was their illogical, absurd and often sarcastic responses to forum posts and online discussions which helped feed the addiction I had to managing the emotions my father provoked in me. One day while reading a 'minarchist' website, I saw this article:The Gun in The Room, which led me to this amazing philosophical discussion. Soon after I landed here I began to explore the psychological root causes of ALL my behaviors and relationships, which helped me in getting into therapy and find out the truth of my horrible destructive behaviors with regard to women.

Welcome, stranger.