People of Like Minds Find Each Other

Many years ago I sat in a pew listening to the preacher’s sermon, “People of like minds find each other.” Although I enjoy the story telling part of church, I don’t believe everything I hear. His comment intrigued me. People of like minds finding each other. My parents found each other. They were of like minds. This made sense to me. We don’t hang out with people we feel superior to and we don’t like feeling inferior being with people who have it more together than we do, so we fall into comfortable relationships with people who are just like us.
This can be a good thing if you are at the top of the totem pole. You surround yourself with caring, compassionate mortals who are self confident and do well in life and in relationships. They make good sons and daughters and they are strong, loving supportive parents. They continue to grow in strength by surrounding themselves with people who are just like them.
This can be a bad thing if you are at the bottom of the totem pole and surround yourself with people who think the same as you. Your low self-esteem continues to plummet as you feed each other with negative reinforcements. We fail at taking care of ourselves and haven’t a clue how to support each other. We look for Mr. or Mrs. Right never to be found because we find people just like us instead.
I married many times trying to find my happy marriage. The problem was I married men who were wounded just like me. The only guarantee for our relationship, we will not find love and will constantly let each other down, being a disappointment fortifies our low self-esteem.
I write for those who are living sad, damaged lives, who suffer from depression, rage and low self-esteem. I write for those merely surviving, those who are doing the best they can to live each day. Those wrestling with the question, why?
In the second chapter of my book Fugue (soon to be published), I wrote about my love affair with the ocean. My literary mentor who was helping me prepare that book for publication was adamant that I change the wording. “A six year old does not know about love affairs.” I could not agree with her on that one and kept the wording. I have no memory of not being sexual. Whether or not I understood what I was doing, I was sexual. I was sexual with my father before the memories of my life were formed and I was sexual with his friends. I learned how to lie down with a man as easy as another five year old learns how to tie her shoes which was something else I learned to do at that age.
It was so deeply engrained in me that the reason for my being here was to please men sexually until the repressed memories surfaced and I saw my childhood clearly through adult eyes.
I have empathy for that child who was sexually abused and I feel empathy for the child molester. I loved my father, but he was sick, confused and narcissistic. A person that sexually abuses another whether it’s a child, adult or spouse is mentally ill. My father was five years old when his father died from falling out of a second story bedroom window in the middle of the night. How many people do you know died from falling out of a bedroom window in the middle of the night? It’s easy for me to believe his parents were fighting after his mother found her husband in their son’s bedroom and during the fight he accidentally fell out of the window.
My mother experienced violence in her home with death as the outcome also. She was 13 when her 17-year-old brother died from falling down a flight of stairs. He was fighting with their father throwing punches at each other when he lost his balance and fell to his death.
Both my parents grew up with family secrets, married each other and started their own family secrets. People of like minds finding each other.