The root of my problems...

It's going to take a long while for me to finish this one. I'm not going to try and do it all at one sitting.
Anyway after my drunken dialing, J and I ended up having this long conversation about relationships. That is, after I stopped whining and crying about what a loser I was being. I started talking about the role of fathers in all this, mothers too. But at the heart of it was me wondering if we can repair old wounds without going to the source. We all have painful childhood memories, some deeper wounds than others. It seems unfair and unreasonable to me that whenever I make some measure of progress, when I stumble I realize there's mor ework to be done. Are my edges ragged because I try to fix my shit myself? Maybe my problem is that I don't go to the source. I was saying to J that while I have been saying I don't want to pick at old wounds with my parents, maybe the truth is just that I am deeply ashamed. Ashamed of the topics, ashamed that I need help, just plain ashamed. And perhaps the shame is keeping me from growing into my own light and possibility. That instead of finding resolution with tropes from the past, we find ourselves replaying them over and over with new players because we simply haven't gone to the source. Or at the very least our parents are two people who are biologically driven to support and protect us. Yet we stop--I stopped--asking for their perspective their aid. Which takes me back to fathers, why don't ask my dad for relationship advice? He's undeniably a man. And he probably could have talked me out of the drink and dial. Which, was mostly jokey and in a perverse way, highly revelatory! But maybe daddy could enlighten me about why I seem to oscillate between the unacceptable and the unavailable. Really. No offense guys. Really. None at all. But I have undertaken dalliances with people who for either of two reasons were at the outset slated for sayonara. Why? That is what I need to figure out. Why do I waste my time this way?
I am also coming to believe that there is a significant tie-in with my professional choices as well. At the very least I am at the helm of all these decisions. Perhaps I am utilizing the same funky logic box. What are the core beliefs, fears, expectations that are driving my decision process?
I read and re-read Nelson Mandela's inauguration speech where he opines that our greatest fear is that we are brilliant.
Could it be that I am afraid of heights?
Metaphorically and literally. I wonder if my fear, no hysteric aversion, to swimming is really some inability to let go, relax and relinquish control to something larger than myself. That at my core, I feel insecure. In the strictest sense of the word. Untethered to anything solid or true.
When babies learn to crawl they venture out further and further from their parents, always returning to their central position until they are brave enough to go out sight with firm belief that their parents are where they remembered, wholly unnecessary.
If I were that infant, I would not be able to crawl away. Or at least my circles are ineffectively small. And when I return, I'm not learning the lesson that things are OK so that I can go further out.
And maybe it's because I don't ask my parents. I always hear about people who have to make peace with a distant parent or a dead one. I don't, thankfully, have that problem. I can talk to either of my parents whenever. Yet I don't. In fact, I have erected many walls between myself and them. Topics I do not broach, emotions I don't show, characteristics I don't display...