Y

Those inlove lover's loving arms wrapped around your waist. That is what all adults, crazy adults, long for.

Your daughter is ugly.
She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly.
 
As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.
She was splintered wood and sea water.
They said she reminded them of the war.
  
On her fifteenth birthday you taught her
how to tie her hair like rope 
and smoke it over burning frankincense.
 
You made her gargle rosewater
and while she coughed, said
macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell
of lonely or empty.
 
You are her mother.
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?
 
What man wants to lay down 
and watch the world burn 
in his bedroom? 
 
Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things
 
but God, 
doesn’t she wear
the world well.

Imago twins

I've been doing my research and I found something called rejection sensitivity, which is linked with frantic attempts to avoid abandonment.

When someone with abandonment issues percieves rejection they demonise the "abandoner" completely and feel they are at their mercy.

I feel victimised by your abandonment and go into a rage at your perceived crime (abandoning/rejecting) and you end up feeling victimised.

My aunt, who is a counsellor but also is the person who knows most about our relationship, says we remind her of a seminar she went to about "Imago twins".

Apparently the theory was that we all have an injury to the self during childhood and we learn to deal with that with a different defence.

My defence for example would be that I will do anything to avoid being abandoned.

Yours would be that you'll do anything to avoid being engulfed and suffocated by intimacy.

The idea is that these two defences are reactions to the SAME childhood injury; we would have suffered the same injury and learnt the OPPOSITE defence.

We are drawn to those with the opposite defence as it's a way of healing that original injury.

I think you were on the right track when you said I need drama in my life and you need peace.

But the more accurate problem is; I need closeness and you need space.

We each do have the others needs but deny them to ourselves;

You need closeness as well, but wouldn't ask for it.

And I can't ask for space because I feel like doing so is a bad, rejecting, abandoning behaviour.

Anyway..... because I feel abandoning is such a crime, when I feel it's happening to me, the abandoner (you) becomes evil, and I can only see all the bad things you've ever done to me and I feel hurt and victimised and launch an attack.

The attacks are really an abusive and unhealthy response to your rejection of me.

Your behaviour towards me has been confusing from the start, like you care about me so much but you aren't bothered if I'm in your life. We are close but I feel like a fringe member of your world and even during the most intimate times I have felt disposable.
I need to feel safe and secure to flourish. I can't help it. Instability in my relationships breeds instability in my mind,  if I was truly unimportant to you that would be one thing but it's really not that simple.
Flowchart

You need space > I perceive abandonment > I feel victimised > attack > you feel victimised > you need space > I percieve abandonment > I feel victimised > attack

And so on and so on....