The second module in Dialectic Behavior Therapy is Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills. The first time through I blocked it like a champ. My life taught me from an early age that letting people too close is to invite destruction. Just the word “interpersonal” sent me reeling backwards.

I want good relationships. I want friendships. I want my knee-jerk reaction to the word “family” to be “yes” instead of “hell no, are you nuts.” I have always harbored a small hope but never actually believed it could be a reality. Every attempt to be family or friend left me more devastated and alone than before. For one thing, I had so many defenses against people. I could keep them at arms length with a cold gaze. I had thick armor, perhaps it looked like a lack of empathy, cold, unfeeling, hateful, but it was sheer coping skills. My main goal was survival and if that meant blockading all the entry points to my heart, so be it.

Where did it begin? I would guess very early. Repeated abandonment by brothers who “loved” me and left me. All my sister-mamas leaving me by the age of five. A mother cold and distant, a dad who rejected me forcefully after a fight with Mother and much later a husband who abandoned me and our children repeatedly over ten years because he could not bear the responsibility. The list could go on, but I won’t because what is important here is relating to the emotions and moving on.

I can tell long stories about my disastrous experiences with all kinds of relationships from work to family to friendship. I will relate one to you. Keep in mind there is no “blame” as such, not even of me, because after all, survival is not always pretty.

Soon after my husband acquired a girlfriend, I acquired a friend. It was about 1980-81. I was needy of course, four small children, struggling to figure out how to relate to the world and work to feed my children, like a babe lost in the woods. I had no work skills, no people skills and a deficit in every other skills. My only asset was my children. They kept me going, trying, working, and loving as best I could.

So I had this neighbor who helped me so much in so many ways. She was older, wiser, loving, kind, hopeful. How hard is it to be friends with that?

One day, please, this is absolutely true, I realized I loved this person. Now I had no actual knowledge of love except that of my children. At an early age I had interchanged “love” and “sex.” And then I spent ten years with a man who probably did the same thing. So when I felt this overwhelming emotion for this woman, I did not understand.

I wondered if my inexplicable, to me, “love” meant I was gay. yes folks, I was that confused. The only other woman I had to that point felt love for was my friend Margie Hunt when I was sixteen, and she too left me, she died.

Suffice it to say I was a mass of confusion, depression, anxiety, and fear. The friendship had to end. I could not take a chance. Under no circumstance could I continue feeling such incredible vulnerability.

I cut off contact. I severed the cord. I treated her very badly. I will always regret it but even now I can forgive myself. I know, you see, what happened that made me shut down to survive. No person can take that from me.

A friendship brought me to the door of DBT in the fall of 2017. A last straw, the end of the line, my dysfunctional self was on the edge of losing a very important friend. Maria is my friend and the other grandma to 3 of my grandchildren. I was about to lose her because of my own screwed up thinking.

So interpersonal effectiveness. Part of me dreads it. Part of me will automatically put up barriers to it. The larger part will embrace it with all my ability.

Sometimes I feel sorry for myself because I must keep on repairing the damage done to me so long ago. Then I remember how lucky I am to be given the opportunity.