Love to die for — wasted years of life

Sacrificial love is a symbolic suicide

Chris Armstrong, coach

Anna has known this man for three and a half years and has been in love with him for the same amount of time. Although this feeling sometimes gives her moments of euphoric experiences, she spends most of the time in a state of apathy and melancholy. What she calls love has paralyzed her entire life. Anna wrote to me asking for help, confessing that she had little hope of changing the situation.

I confess that I believe in hope if it does not distort the real state of things, leading into the world of magical fantasies. There is absolutely nothing magical about the fact that Anna’s lover allows himself to drive a car in a drunken state when she is sitting next to him. And that he was talking nasty things about her to friends when he found out that he was worried about his problems with alcohol.

There are many such examples in the history of Anna. Because of the experiences, she lost a lot of weight, chronic diseases worsened, and depression developed. The person to whom she gives so much vitality lives in another city. And for all this time, he only once flew to her to meet. Anna flies to him herself and at her own expense. At work, not only did she not get a promotion, but she is close to being fired due to the fact that she almost lost interest in everything.

Anna has two sons of school age, and it is obvious that a partner who has problems with alcohol is not the best example for them. She understands that this painful relationship is destroying her life and affecting the lives of her children, but interrupting them is beyond her powers. We all know the famous Beatles song: «All you need is love.» I would rephrase it: all we need is healthy love. Otherwise, we sink into a quagmire of senseless torment that takes years of our lives.

I think the key to Anna’s situation lies in one sentence of her letter. She admits that she always dreamed of finding love for which one could die. It sounds romantic, and we all want to rise above everyday life, but the love that is worth dying for usually leads to the fact that without physically taking our own life, we commit symbolic suicide. We lose energy, desires and plans, we devalue our best years.

Is love worth the sacrifice? Perhaps only an honest answer to this question can change the situation.

“Only self-understanding can protect us”

Lev Khegai, Jungian analyst

Why do we get into overly romanticized destructive relationships? There can be many reasons.

These may be inborn depressive traits that push us to self-punishment, and an alliance with a partner that devalues ​​us helps in this. Perhaps these are attempts to reconstruct childhood, when relationships with a father or mother were charged with violence, indifference, insecurity.

In such cases, we unconsciously try to repeat them, in the secret hope of fixing everything. The heroine is looking for a relationship for which, according to her, it is not a pity to die. This search may hide the dream of the symbolic death of one’s former personality and rebirth in a new capacity.

Great love, the ecstasy of intimacy, sensual self-disclosure can be unconsciously laid by a person in the foundation of a new identity, for the realization of which new relationships are also needed.

We want to become different, and the wedge is literally knocked out by a wedge. We will not part with the old «I» if we do not fall into the storm of an identity crisis. Therefore, a new love, called to make a revolution in our lives, can be so crazy and destructive.

Only a good understanding of ourselves and our unconscious tendencies can protect us from self-destruction.