Contents
We need each other from birth, and in adult life one of our main hopes is mutual help, understanding, support. However, in everyday life the principle “every man for himself” often wins. Yes, fraternal feelings have their limits – and this is normal, our experts say.
Throughout life, we are accompanied by two opposite desires: the desire to establish new relationships, meet new people, expand the circle of friends … and the desire to get rid of unnecessary connections, distant friends and relatives or neighbors imposed by fate. Both are rooted, deep and inherent in each of us. Thus, the desire to establish connections is born practically from the moment we are born. From birth, it is vital for every child to feel someone’s support, said pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (Donald Winnicott)*. If the mother feels the child well, she understands that the most important thing for him is an experience based on contact without action, when two separate beings can feel as one. This experience gives the child the opportunity to be, and thanks to this, then he is able to meet the world.
Contact for survival
The need for affection is an innate biological property that helps the cub survive and the mother to raise it. “American researcher Harry Harlow conducted an experiment in which newborn baby monkeys were taken away from their real mothers and offered two artificial ones instead: warm and soft (made of cloth) and cold and hard (made of wire), says the client-centered psychotherapist Marina Khazanova. – Little monkeys preferred the rag “mother”, although the milk bottle was attached to the wire one. From which it was concluded that warm, tactile, emotional contact is no less important than food, and absolutely necessary for survival.
Elena Shevchenko
With family and without family
“It is only through other people and close relationships with them that a child discovers himself and the world around him, so our first connections are of particular importance,” explains psychoanalyst Lola Komarova. – These early contacts with others are assimilated by the child and then create his inner world. They become for us a support, a standard of human relations. All new real relationships that then arise on our life path, we build and evaluate in accordance with this standard.
Unlike animals, which can do without a mother very early, we have been dependent on our parents for almost two decades. Animals breed, and we create families, kinship relationships, symbolic ties that allow everyone to find their place in a series of generations, to define themselves through belonging to a clan, country, religion, language. A special kind of connection is the family. Most of us maintain family relationships all our lives, perceive ourselves primarily as a daughter / sister / wife or son / brother. “In modern Russia, a person is very attached to the inner circle,” says sociologist Natalia Zorkaya. – It is in the family that we feel responsible, able to influence its well-being, and most importantly, we can be ourselves. This is how 57% of Russians assess their feeling of the family. For comparison, only 7% are ready to be fully or largely responsible for what is happening in the country”**. But excessive attachment to the family creates difficulties for us, because in order to realize ourselves, to reflect and understand life, a person needs a wider circle of friends and acquaintances. And isolation on the family, where relationships are largely set by family roles and scenarios, may not bring satisfaction.
About it
“Communication Genius” Steve Nakamoto
A practical book on how to establish and, most importantly, maintain connections with different people, inspire respect and sympathy, overcome your own shyness and help others communicate more relaxedly and effectively (Peter, 2011).
Destruction of ties
Sometimes we are seized by a desire to be alone, to reject the connections that prevent us from being ourselves: “Oh, how many nervous and sick, unnecessary connections, unnecessary friendships!” *** Very early, each of us learns that relationships with other people are not only are a source of joy, pleasure and brotherly feelings, but sometimes cause severe pain. We experience this for the first time in the relationship with the mother, when the baby feels that she does not belong to him entirely, that she has other interests and attachments. “The closer the other is to us, the stronger the fear of losing him, of being disappointed, of being betrayed. Therefore, today the hedonistic and narcissistic desire to avoid pain at all costs forces many of us to establish numerous, but superficial connections, ”explains Lola Komarova. Fear of rejection, having arisen in childhood, accompanies us all our lives and prevents us from establishing close relationships with people we like. Even on social networks, we often painfully perceive the rejection of friendship, although if we look at the situation soberly, this rejection does not infringe on us and does not threaten us with anything significant.
Maintain relationships with loved ones, meet new people, expand communication … but not superficial.
Aggression and attraction to each other
Maintain relationships with loved ones, meet new people, expand communication … but not superficial.
At the same time, social networks today contribute to the expansion of connections and forms of our communication. “They revived a broad discussion of books and films, events in society, problems that concern many people or a narrow circle,” says Natalia Zorkaya. – Communication in networks returns the ability (and need) to think, analyze what is happening, develops our social imagination. So we are moving towards tolerance, towards the acceptance of “others”, towards a decrease in the level of aggression.” This task is very relevant: 33% of Russians name rudeness, rudeness and aggressiveness as the main characteristics of people’s behavior towards each other****. It is enough to be in the subway to see how much we interfere with each other: the desire of one passenger to shout to his interlocutor on a mobile phone is incompatible with the desire of his neighbor to read a book, especially since decibels of youth hits are heard from the headphones of a teenager standing nearby. It turns out that thanks to those we love, we can feel “normal”, valuable, accomplished, and strangers cause only hostility and aggression. “Any person experiences two attractions – to death and to life. So aggression can be a natural manifestation of the attraction to death, destruction, destruction, primarily to the destruction of ties between people, ”says Lola Komarova. And the attraction to life, on the contrary, brings us closer.
1 D. Winnicott “Little children and their mothers” (Klass, 2011).
2 Survey data from June 2011. Yuri Levada Analytical Center, levada.ru
3 E. Evtushenko Selected works in 2 volumes. Volume 1 (Fiction, 1980).
4 Data from a survey conducted in November 2012 by Yuri Levada’s Analytical Center, levada.ru
4 ways to team up
Slow down. Stop rushing and exchanging for trifles, feel the time in which you live now, do not forget about the past and dream about the future. Ilona Bonivell’s book Keys to Well-Being (Vremya, 2009) will help you.
Invite friends. Have a bigger table at home, invite the people you love over, remind them to come with their partners. Arrange a meeting of neighbors – they can be found on the website MirTesen.ru
Collaborate. At work, try to overcome the spirit of competition with goodwill. Move from “I” to “we”, create conditions for joint creativity, support the ideas of colleagues. Jim Howden’s book The Art of Engagement is about this. How to maximize the potential of your employees” (Eksmo, 2011).
Turn on. Communicate more actively in social networks, participate in groups and associations that are close to you, draw the attention of virtual friends to issues that concern you, organize communities of interest on the Internet resources Facebook, VKontakte, My World, Ya. ru”, Twitter. For more information, see Mike Dalworth’s book “Social Networks: Operations Manual” (Kind Book, 2010).
Vladimir Lyubarov, 68 years old, artist
“Loneliness is healing when friends can break it”
Everything I know about happiness, I draw in my pictures. It seems to me that my characters are mostly happy – in any case, they are self-sufficient and equal to themselves, and this, in my opinion, is a feeling that is close to happiness. And not many people manage to experience it not for one moment, but for quite a long time. This is a kind of gift and it is peculiar to people who are not too far removed from Nature. First of all, to people in the countryside, among the city people I practically did not meet such people.
As for me, as an urban man with a rural leaning, I am only able to experience, perhaps, only periods of short-term happiness. But since I consider myself generally a happy person, there were apparently quite a few such short-term outbreaks in my life – and the “aftertaste” from each of them became a bridge to the other. So I was able to survive.
The first moment of acute happiness, as I remember, was experienced by me in childhood – when I found out that I had passed the competition at the Moscow Art School, an art school, where I enrolled myself after hearing an announcement on the recruitment of schoolchildren on the radio. And although before that I had only drawn war – running men and burning tanks, thickly shaded on top with a simple pencil (so that nothing could be seen), I was allowed to take exams. I tensed up and drew Sadko, also a militant comrade, but it “rolled”. And it was a moment of happiness from discovering your own path.
The second moment of happiness, I remember, befell me at the motor depot, where after the army I worked as a painter. I wrote a poster in giant letters: NO SMOKING ON THE TERRITORY OF THE MOTOR DEPARTMENT! – and everyone was amazed. “At last they sent us a real artist!” the director said. Here for the first time I experienced the happiness of popular recognition, and since then I know that a true artist cannot be happy without his audience.
I experienced the third sharp moment of happiness when I got married for the third time – most likely because I realized that I would not marry again. The first two times I was probably also happy, but it was erased from my memory, but I remember my last marriage for almost 35 years. Although I missed some details, and my wife periodically nags me because I categorically do not remember what dress she was in.
The fourth sharp moment of happiness happened to me when I left my quite successful city life and moved for several years to live in the semi-abandoned village of Peremilovo. I was happy, because for the first time in my life I experienced the very loneliness that an artist needs in order for him to draw, and not talk about his creative plans. And I also realized that loneliness for an artist, or rather, for me personally, can be healing and fruitful only when I am firmly convinced that there is a family, there are friends who love me, wait, forgive me all my tricks and can come to my village at any moment to break this loneliness of mine …
Well, I experienced the fifth moment of happiness when I first grew a zucchini – from a seed to that huge overgrown dunduk into which it turned, hiding from me under squash leaves. Nobody wanted to eat this zucchini, but I was proud of it and was happy, because it was then that I realized that I was able to create something real in life.
Recorded by Elizaveta Zamyslova