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Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

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Blog 32

 Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

Relationships and MCS – Part One

July 2010 

How many days do you think each of us gets to spend on this planet?  Ten thousand?  A hundred thousand? Perhaps more?  If the average life span of a person in the US is 73 we can multiply that by 365.  That means we have only 26,645 days total to do what we feel we have to.  One of the most challenging things we will do in our time on this planet is create primary intimate relationships with other people.  As far as building these relationships is concerned we can knock off the first twelve or so years leaving only 21,000 days (approximately).  The right partner can accelerate our lives forward at a thrilling pace.  The wrong relationship can drain our resources, hold us back and cause tremendous harm.  Twenty one thousand days is not a lot of time for such an important task.

 

Under even the best of circumstances learning how to attract and maintain a healthy relationship with a quality partner is not often  easy.  We have to balance time constraints, self esteem issues, cultural norms, and the perceived applicant pool to name only a few.  Throw Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome (MCS) into the mix and the challenges can increase exponentially.  For myself when I am in the thick of an MCS reaction I don’t even want to leave the house let alone attempt to be charming when I do.  Just like when I was drinking, the Vodka Fairy never left a pint under my pillow while I slept, Cupid has never thrown a great relationship at me when I was at home playing Nintendo. 

 

One of the most profound things anyone has ever told me was that in order to attract the sort of person I am most interested in I need to improve myself to become who that person would naturally be attracted to.  The biggest challenges to this are:  most of us are creatures of inertia and don’t really want to change, and that most of us don’t have any real clue what we actually desire.  Just about all of us have gone to school for years to prepare ourselves for a job/career but how many of us have even read one book on attraction or relationships?  It is expected that at some point we be very clear on what kind of job we want but have we ever sat down and become clear on what we want our primary relationship to look like?  Have we ever thought of improving our selves so that we can naturally attract the quality of relationship we actually want?  Let me come back to these questions in a few.  For now let me talk about my experience with MCS and relationships.

 

Since the onset of MCS I have been by no means celibate.  I certainly have not achieved the level of success I would have hoped for but in retrospect, given the circumstances, I am rather happy with my results.  Looking back I can see that as I recover from MCS and alcoholism the quality of my relationships have gotten correspondingly better.  While some of the less then stellar relationships I have had in the past don’t really need a full airing; I can say that anyone I would want to date (or who would want to date me) in the early stages of recovery is not the sort of person I would want to have a relationship with a few years down the line.  As I evolve the quality of relationship I am capable of havening has also evolved.

 

So, personally what has been some of my biggest stumbling blocks in this area?  I was a ‘Sensitive New Age Guy’ or ‘Wuss’ depending on how you want to say it.  Being a wuss is any man’s biggest roadblock to generating attraction in woman.  Combine this with an upbringing that lacked in interpersonal skills.  Sprinkle in a little low self esteem added to the belief that any quality woman would run away as soon as she found out I suffered from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) and I find it rather amazing that I ever dated anyone at all. 

 

About three years after quitting drinking I rediscovered a book that had been referenced a few times in my psych classed in collage, Daniel Goldman’s, “Emotional Intelligence”. Coming from a lineage where emotions were not valued, I decided to check it out.  The book blew my mind, not only were emotions a good thing (completely contradictory to my upbringing) but they were necessary and above all inevitable.   Trying to burry my emotions was not only anti-productive and unhealthy, it was impossible.   If I could not escape them I may as well learn to make them work to my advantage.  After all that is what emotions are there for, they are an advantage to help us navigate our world. 

 

This book brought me a revolutionary way of looking at the world.  It said that the best way to know what someone else was feeling was to ask myself what I was feeling.  I could not, at least on some level, help but pick up on the emotions of the people around me.  This was amazing, after only a few weeks of me focusing on my own emotions, I found that the people around me were not so much of a mystery.  Making the futile attempt to suppress my emotions had been the biggest stumbling block to easily interacting with other people.  Understanding my own emotional state was a huge assistance in relating to the emotional state of the women I dated. 

 

About a year later I found the councilor I have  previously mentioned in this narrative.  After seeing her for only a short time I realized that the next issue to be dealt with was low self-esteem.   Perhaps to call it low self-esteem is a bit of an understatement.  It was really an underlying belief that ‘I sucked’.  Deep down I believed there was something inherently flawed in me.  I thought this flaw was rendering me not just unloved but actually unlovable.  The biggest emotional breakthrough I had while seeing the councilor and yelling in to pillows was breaking this belief down and seeing where it had come from.  It took months to even get to the point where I could even look at this belief.  It took months more to get to a point where I could challenge this beliefs validity.  We talked, I screamed, I cried, got pissed off, and eventually vomited as some of the last layers came off.  For me the real breakthrough didn’t actually come in the councilor’s, office it came a few days later after I had coffee with a friend and her new born daughter.

 

My friend had her new born with her at the coffee shop and I watched as she paid rapt attention to her daughter.  Several times it was almost as if I was not at the table, all that mattered to her was the baby.  I could see the love she had for her child, it was amazing to watch.  The next day I had lunch with my mother and I described to her what I saw with  my friend.  My mom, being the overly rational person she is, said that a million years of evolution had made a cascade of hormones course through her body so she couldn’t see what that baby really meant.  My mom’s statement was a little shocking but I let it slide for the moment. 

 

For the next hour or so my mother’s comment sat at the edge of my conciseness.   After a while it hit me what she had meant by this.  What she had communicated was that this child was going to be a burden on her for the next untold years and that my mother had known better, despite the million years of evolution, when I was a child.  It hit me, it hit me so hard I had to literally take a step back from the impact.  My mom had not showered me with rapt attention when I most needed it.  She had not seen a shining object of love when she looked at me, as my friend had, but as she had seen something else entirely.  She had done to me the same thing I was sure that my overly emotionally controlled grandmother must had done to her.  For the first time I knew that it wasn’t me, it was her own emotional programming that left me feeling unlovable.  I had been as bright and wonderful as my friends baby had been but the lesson my mom could not help to teach was one of rejection.  I understood for the first time in my life that I what I had always believed at my core about my worth of love had not been the truth.  It had only been a teaching, an illusion placed on my by a multi-generational misunderstanding.  I finally knew at my core that I didn’t suck, I was worthy of love.

 

Of course feeling worthy of love makes for much more successful relationships then the opposite but there was more work to be done.  One day I saw a short newspaper article about a local author, Dr. Robert Glover, who wrote a book called, “No More Mr. Nice Guy”.  The article essentially said this about the ‘Nice Guy’:

 

“Nice Guys are concerned about looking good and doing it ‘right.’ They are happiest when they are making others happy. Nice guys avoid conflict like the plague and will go to great lengths to avoid upsetting anyone. In general, Nice Guys are peaceful and generous. Nice Guys are especially concerned about pleasing women and being different from other men. In a nutshell, Nice Guys believe that if they are good, giving, and caring, they will in return be happy, loved, and fulfilled.

Sound too good to be true?

 

It is.”

 

~”No More Mr. Nice Guy”, Robert Glover

 

This short article discussed how in the modern world a lot of men had become ‘Nice Guys’, and how it left them resentful and unfulfilled.  I got the book and read it that night.  It was as if Dr. Glover had followed me around with a clipboard for the last five years.  He had me pegged, I was a nice guy, he had exposed my inner wuss.  The book talked about solutions to this dilemma.  I dove in and tried to rewire my interpersonal programming.

 

One of the best ways to sum up what the book talks about is this, ‘Women cannot help but to test the men they are with, if he will stand up TO her then she knows that, when the time comes, he will stand up For her’.  

 

What does this mean?  Pretend I am standing directly in front of my female partner.  She says something challenging (if you have ever been in a male/female relationship for an extended period then you know what I mean by this).  Let’s say, for this example, that I cave in.  I apologize and I appease her; she pushes me back.  In that moment she may feel good that she has won the argument but on a deeper level she will feel as if her man is not solid and she will feel anxiety.  This anxiety will cause her to test again.  Again I give in and I back up.  The process starts over, and she feels more anxiety until I’m backed into a wall.  In reality it is not just me who has lost the interaction she has lost as well.  Her sense of security that comes from being with a strong man will have vanished and she will lose attraction as a result.  She will have lost the knowledge that her man is ‘Solid’.

 

Let’s look at this scenario again, but this time I don’t ‘fail’ the test.  When she comes up to me and says something challenging I stand there, I don’t acquiesce.  In that short moment she will most likely get more agitated.  I stand my ground, keeping an attitude similar to that I may have toward my bratty little sister, one of love and not taking this particular outburst too seriously.  Again she challenges and again I hold my ground.  She begins to relax.  She knows I am solid and she feels secure.  This leads to an increase in attraction and affection.  This time we have both won.  ***

 

This was another big piece of the puzzle.  I knew that I must stand up for myself and get my needs met.  When doing this I discovered that the women I interacted with responded better.  Just about everything I had learned about interacting with other people, especially women, had been wrong. 

 

These social learning’s along with the naturopathic/homeopathic treatments starting to work set the stage for me to have the first truly adult relationship of my life.  I met my present girlfriend.

 

***This scenario is not the way to deal with all situations.  Sometimes I have been a real A$#hole (all too often after a bad MCS attack) and I do need to apologies for my actions.  When this does happen, I take care of things with sincerity and a desire to set my actions right.  I do not grovel or become obsequious.