We are used to treating love as a magical feeling that makes our life happier, gives strength and a new understanding of ourselves. All this is true, but only if we are not afraid of the pain that we can experience at the same time, our experts say. And they analyze situations when we only use a partner to try to ease fears or hide from experiences.
The one and only
“I could not live without this person, I lived in anticipation of meetings, but the love was not mutual,” recalls Alla. – He was often cold with me, we met only at a convenient time for him. It would seem that I already lived through this in my childhood, when my father, after a divorce, did not appear on the agreed days, and I was waiting for him, crying.
Then I could not control the situation, and now I created hell for myself with my own hands. When the man decided that we should leave, I fell into depression and still, even realizing that we could not have a future, I can’t imagine another next to me.
“As soon as we begin to think that our love is unique and nothing like this will ever happen to us again, with a high probability this is not about conscious interaction with a real partner, but about repeating experiences that again and again require attention,” says psychotherapist Marina Meows. – In this case, the heroine herself draws a parallel with the cold, indifferent father, whom she finds in a partner with narcissistic traits, allowing her to relive the children’s scenario.
The more a person is independent and independent, the less he looks at his mother or father when choosing a partner
Attraction to the opposite sex is formed in childhood: the mother / father, according to Freud’s theory, turns out to be the first incestuous object for the child. If this early period of life went well, the child was loved and at the same time taught to realize himself as an independent person, in the post-pubertal period he does not seek to choose people who remind him of his parents as partners.
This is a kind of test of maturity: the more a person is independent and independent, the less he looks at his mother or father when choosing a partner. He does not try to guess similar features of appearance or patterns of behavior in his beloved, and he does not win back unlived childhood scenarios in relationships.
Non-free partners
“When we met, she was married, but I could not resist the flared feeling,” says Artem. – I immediately realized that I needed only this woman, I was tormented by jealousy, I imagined how I would kill her husband. She suffered, she cried, she was torn between the obligations of a wife and mother and our love. However, when she decided to divorce and moved in with me, we were unable to maintain a relationship.”
“The choice of a non-free partner is another vivid example of feelings for a parent that were not repressed in childhood,” says psychoanalyst Olga Sosnovskaya. “If you translate what is happening into the language of psychoanalysis, then a person is trying to get into someone else’s bed and break the union, as he once wanted to separate the parental couple.”
Surrogate repetition of childhood experiences in adult relationships will not make us happy.
In childhood, we all go through a stage of unconscious hatred for our parents because they belong to each other, and we are left without a partner, alone. The experience of the Oedipus complex is an attempt to separate mother and father and symbolically appropriate one of the parents. If adults did not help the child in a supportive environment to go through the stage of separation and separate himself as a person from the parental couple, then in the future we will again be driven to choose an unfree partner by the desire to repeat and resolve the painful children’s scenario.
“It is not by chance that Artem’s story ends with the fact that life together does not work out,” explains Olga Sosnovskaya. – Even if we manage to break up someone else’s couple and the partner gets divorced, he often loses his attractiveness. Our libido is crumbling. Surrogate repetition of childhood experiences in adult relationships will not make us happy.”
Partners in the freezer
“We have been together for several years, and all this time my man maintains relationships with other girls whom he calls friends,” Anna admits. – One of them is an ex who still loves him, others are also obviously not indifferent to him. I feel that their attention flatters him. I don’t want to aggravate relations and force him to break off these ties, but what is happening to me is unpleasant. It separates us from each other.”
Spare partners are a symbolic guarantee that in the event of an unexpected separation from a permanent one, they will not let you fall into anguish and experience painful feelings that a person is afraid of and avoids. However, this “emotional freezer” must be maintained: fed with meetings, conversations, promises.
“This takes psychic energy, which makes it difficult to concentrate and build a full-fledged relationship with a loved one,” recalls Marina Myaus. – There is a splitting of consciousness, when we are afraid to trust a single partner. He feels it, and it does not allow you to achieve true intimacy.
How to interact with a partner
“The main mistake when meeting is to get a guarantee as soon as possible that the partner is ready to create a couple with us,” says Olga Sosnovskaya. “We do not give ourselves the trouble to recognize a person and approach him gradually, we strive to impose on another the role previously assigned to him.”
This is due to the fact that many of us are afraid of rejection, the likelihood that the relationship will not work out, and try to dot the “i” in advance. This is read by the other side as aggressive pressure, which immediately destroys trust and the possibility of an alliance, which, if we behave differently with a partner, could have a future.
“Often, the fear of being rejected pushes us to try to work out a set of psychological tricks on another person, designed to make our partner fall in love and submit to our will,” comments Marina Myaus. “He feels it and naturally refuses to be an obedient robot.”
To build a deep, fulfilling relationship, it is important first of all to deal with your own fears and stop expecting guarantees of your psychological well-being from the second party.