If there was anything left in me that believes when we grow older, our maturity and ability to manage life in healthy ways grows as well, I’m damned if can find it.

There are some well-entrenched behavior patterns in this human family of ours and those resulting from some history’s wounds make healthy intimacy impossible. Dishonesty is rampant. Without honesty, there is no trust. The absence of trust eliminates any chance of healthy intimacy.

No doubt people have had to develop methods of managing life on the fly that, while perhaps needed to survive at one time in your life – your childhood, for example – they now endanger and damage you, rather than protect you. Protecting the life you are living, not just the life that means, you’re alive.

Tragically, and I do not use this word lightly, many lives are still controlled by wounded self-images, robbing them of a healthy understanding of self, and others for that matter.

A brilliant human being and a former therapist of mine once said, “Therapy is basically a matter of getting free of your history.” Free if those “voices” is in your history that, often unknowingly, have you the message you were one messed-up being.

I am not dancing on the rest of high hopes that I will have a healthy intimate relationship with a woman. As I said, honesty is in short supply, and some women I’ve met have had experiences that the distance-making patterns they have, while making a relationship impossible, made all the sense in the world given the reality of their life experience.

I also had an encounter with one so saturated in narcissism, she made Narcissus himself look like the poster boy for humility.