«He is mine! Why is he flirting with this… He should only be with me! If only I could tie him up…!»
Where does such an attitude towards another person come from? Where does this need for affection come from? Yes, such that the Client wants to physically bind the object of his love and not let go anywhere! And:
“Even when he is next to me, he is still not enough for me!”
And this is not a small child sitting opposite me in a chair, but an adult girl!
No wonder, probably, this association with a child came to my mind. Otherwise, I would not have remembered the psychological model created by E. Berne — transactional analysis. I would not like to go deep into the theory of this model, but I consider it necessary to voice some important postulates.
So …
1. Every person in a given situation acts from one of three ego states: Adult, Child, and Parent.
2. Ego states are different
3. Being in a situation of communication (interaction) with another person, our ego states interact with the ego states of a communication partner.
And now the promised technique. We take a regular A4 sheet, divide it into 3 parts, respectively naming each: adult, child, parent. And together with the Client we fill in each part with the statements that we heard from him in the course of his story. In order to make the task easier for the Client, you can ask him an auxiliary question “What part inside of you is telling me about this now? Adult, child or parent?
We carry out the same procedure in relation to the object of attachment of the Client.
We fold the sheets in three, closing the edges. After all, individuals are still integral.
Example. How it happened for us:
Note! The Client’s own ego-state Parent is «absent»!
We ask the Client: What state of your partner do you like best? In what state would you like him to be next to you?
Answer of my Client: “Adult, of course! I have always liked such serious men!”
— And what part of your personality do you most often show to your partner?
My Client said without hesitation: «Child».
But only the Parent can be next to the Child. After all, only the Parent is important and needs to satisfy the needs of the Child! Thus, subconsciously the Client «evoked» in her partner the state of the Parent, and not the desired Adult.
“But a love relationship between a Parent and a Child is wrong!
“Of course it’s wrong!
— I realized that in order for him to be an Adult with me, I myself must become an Adult.
After such a conclusion, Klentka suddenly begins to remember that people around her so often told her that she was behaving like a child, so that she would grow up. But she took all these conversations as unauthorized interference, as an attack on her, and therefore reacted quite sharply.
What is good about transactional analysis is that it is not just behavioral analysis. This is an analysis of behavior, from which it is very easy to come to the original cause of this very behavior.
I draw the Client’s attention to the «apparently absent» ego-state «Parent» in her personality structure. For clarity, we take and cut off this state:
The personality loses its integrity. And then she begins to look for her missing part in another person, literally attaching it to herself:
And then it seems illusory to a person that he is “whole” (this is the reason and a sufficient basis for the inner confidence that this person belongs to me). But! In reality, it is only an illusion! After all, the other person feels inferior in such a relationship. He can only be a «Parent», his other states seem to be rejected, not accepted, as if they are not needed.
Suddenly, the Client picked up a set aside piece of paper with the inscription «Parent». And it was at this moment, it seems to me, that she decided to become a truly Adult.