Contents
How to live on? We too often have to make this decision in the heat of the moment. We suggest you the opposite: try to understand the situation in advance – with a cool head, until the crisis erupted. This will help us with the advice of our experts: Anna Varga, Leonid Krol, Vadim Petrovsky and Jacques Salome.
Each of us at least once had a desire to stop everyday running – and sort out our lives, understand what we have come to and where we are going … But where to start? There are a sea of questions, and the answers fluctuate between radical conclusions (“It’s already too late!”) And desperately illusory decisions (“Oh, I’ll start all over again!”). We offer you a method by which such traps can be avoided.
Four psychotherapists invite us to reflect on the main areas of our existence: love relationships and relationships with others, work and our inner life, calmly asking ourselves a few precise questions. They will help, without (excessive) emotions, to understand what is happening to us and around us, and to change what needs to be changed. Try to answer these questions honestly, listen to your deepest needs and emerging feelings – this will correct the situation and, possibly, prevent a crisis.
Love
We are especially acutely experiencing our loneliness or, on the contrary, we want to be alone, we ask ourselves whether we made the right choice or whether we made a mistake … Our love life is an endless series of questions. Do these doubts indicate that it is time to change something? Is there a chance to improve the relationship or is it better to end it?
Questions for reflection
- Do you have a loved one, are you married or single: are you satisfied with your position? Do you feel like it was a conscious choice?
- Are you listening to your partner? Does he listen to your desires?
- Would you be happy to choose again the one you live with now? Do you make joint plans?
- Do you like your couple? Do you like to go out together, do you enjoy introducing people to your partner?
- Are you satisfied with the sexual and emotional aspects of living together?
Analysis and advice
It’s about our personality
There are several sides to a love relationship: emotional, sexual and social (the way a couple behaves in society, in public). The deep needs of each of the partners are connected with each of them, and a person feels happy when most of his desires are satisfied.
Our consultants
- Anna Varga, family psychotherapist, author of several books on family therapy, scientific editor of the book Modern Child. Encyclopedia of mutual understanding” (OGI, 2006).
- Jacques Salome, French sociopsychologist, specialist in communication psychology, author of dozens of books translated into many languages of the world.
- Leonid Krol, director and lead coach of the Klass Personnel Training Center, author of several books, including Man-Orchestra. The microstructure of communication” (Together with Ekaterina Mikhailova. Klass, 2001).
- Vadim Petrovsky, transactional analyst, scientific editor of Eric Berne’s books “Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy” and “Group Psychotherapy” (Academic Project, 2001, 2004).
“When we constantly think about the relationship in our couple, about the feelings of a loved one, in fact we are interested in ourselves,” says Anna Varga. Tormenting ourselves with doubts, we really want to understand: “Who am I to him (her)? Why does he (she) love me this way and not otherwise? It is important to understand: your partner loves you the way he can, this is due to his individual characteristics. We will never find the love that we invent for ourselves, we get the one that our partner is capable of. But the style of communication in a couple is formed by two people, and how it turns out depends on both. If something in a relationship does not suit you, listen to yourself: what exactly worries you, what do you want to change. For example, it seems to you that you have ceased to exist for another person, he pays you too little attention. Decipher it: Perhaps you are missing communication because you are both too busy? Or have you stopped visiting together, making common plans?
Start discussing
Having determined what exactly the problem is, think about your personal responsibility for what is happening between you; Assess your internal capabilities needed to improve relationships. After answering these questions for yourself, discuss the problem with your partner. “The adulthood, the maturity of a person in love is determined by his ability to be open,” explains Anna Varga. – Do not hide your feelings, do not accumulate resentment in yourself. To prevent conflict, you need to discuss the situation before there are too many resentments, otherwise any little thing can be the last straw and destroy the relationship. To prevent the conversation from turning into a debriefing, don’t blame. You need to talk about problems calmly and with restraint: after listening to your partner, tell what you are ready to change in your behavior, and then invite him to think about the same.
And if there is a feeling that you love each other and do not want to leave, but you can’t agree on anything? “In this case, it’s a good idea to turn to a psychologist,” advises Anna Varga. – There is no need to be afraid of this: if two people want to be together, this means that they have a lot of reserve opportunities, resources. Psychotherapeutic help in this case can be quite small, the couple herself goes on the path she needs.
Relationships with others
We feel we are not open enough or too irritable. There are plenty of opportunities to prove yourself in communication, but there are not enough abilities and strengths. The role we once chose prevents us from finding new acquaintances and building relationships with people around us. We want to understand others better, we want them to love and respect us, but how can we change ourselves?
Questions for reflection
- How close were your relationships with your parents as a child? Have you ever discussed this topic with them? What about a psychologist?
- How do other people usually describe you? Do you describe yourself in the same way or in a different way?
- What kind of relationships do you have with other people? Are you prone to slander? Judging others? Don’t trust people? Or, conversely, do you listen to others and trust them?
- When you express your opinion, how do others react to it? Is he not considered, is he recognized as banal? Or do you easily find like-minded people?
Analysis and advice
What’s stopping us
It is easier to see shortcomings in others, but you need to start analyzing your problems in communication with yourself. “It is impossible to understand why we behave with others the way we do, and not otherwise, until we analyze how other people treated us when we were children,” says Jacques Salome. It was in childhood that an attitude could have formed that makes us now perceive ourselves exclusively through the eyes of others (“I am a reliable worker”) or constantly compare ourselves with them (“I am the complete opposite of my mother”).
If it turns out that acquaintances and colleagues perceive us not at all as we really are, we need to figure it out. Perhaps we ourselves incorrectly evaluate ourselves (our self-esteem is underestimated or, conversely, overestimated). But the reason may be that we are too reserved in communication. It is important to learn to express ourselves and do it without fear of being judged.
Change the way you communicate
“Communication must be dynamic,” advises Jacques Salome. “Don’t distance yourself from people, don’t look down on them, but listen to what they have to say and respect them for who they are.” How to achieve this? Recognize that all people are different, and do not judge a person only by his words. It’s time to let go of the useless relationship pattern in which we either blame others (“I wish I could treat them well, but they won’t let me”) or ourselves (“I’m too timid”). And think about personal responsibility for what happens to us: we can not always influence events, but how we will react to them depends only on us.
Work
Suddenly, the routine becomes unbearable, and we are seized by an uncontrollable desire for change. We want more free time, more independence, or, on the contrary, we dream of working in a team … But what if the work itself is no longer suitable for us? Should I change my profession or just start treating it differently?
Questions for reflection
- How much time per week do you devote to work, family, social life, and to yourself? If you could change this distribution of time, what proportions would you set?
- Which of these values were the most important for you at the beginning of your career: power; success; search for meaning; play and creativity; personal life; the ability to listen; active participation in what is happening? And now?
- What was the most interesting thing about your work in your entire career? Why? By what criteria do you judge? And vice versa, what did you find the most uninteresting? Why?
- What interests you in what you do?
Analysis and advice
Not only work
By evaluating the ratio between work and personal time, we can determine our motivation and deep desires. If there is a noticeable difference between the answers to these questions in the past and today, as well as the idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbhow things should ideally be, then this relationship needs to be reconsidered. “We can formally be at work, but at the same time mentally be in a completely different place,” clarifies Leonid Krol. “This time should also be considered personal.” The work routine can make us dislike our work, and then the additional “bonuses” that everyone can derive from their professional activities will help. “A person, for example, has learned to do something twice as fast as before, or to communicate more constructively with superiors,” continues Leonid Krol. “Thinking about it brings satisfaction, and additional motivation can return interest in bored work.”
Manage your world
“A person can change something at his job (even if he makes a small rearrangement on his desk) – and this symbolic action will support his feeling: “I rule the world, not the world me,” advises Leonid Krol. Other symbolic actions will help to realize oneself not as a “slave of work”, but as a person who can impartially assess the situation. For those of us who think and talk only about work, while feeling that our own life has become too “one-sided”, it will be useful in the morning, before leaving for the service, to carefully examine ourselves in the mirror from several angles, while feeling our own ” voluminousness”.
Personal and inner life
Between daily work and difficult family life, many of us dedicate too little time to ourselves. How do we know if we are making good use of these rare moments and are satisfying our deepest needs?
Questions for reflection
- When you are alone with yourself, what do you think about and what do you prefer to forget?
- Do you think about yourself and your “I”, do you try to comprehend yourself?
- Do you have times when you don’t care? What is it connected with?
- Do you have a favorite pastime, hobby; How often do you walk, do you go out of town?
- Do you like your body, do you like to take care of it? Do you enjoy physical exercise?
Analysis and advice
Take back your freedom
The opportunity to be alone with yourself is a good reason to think about what we are. “In youth, we are obsessed with the passion of self-knowledge,” says Vadim Petrovsky. – And then adult life begins: everyday problems appear, work, personal and family relationships take more and more time, and we stop asking ourselves: “Who am I and how do I differ from other people? Am I free to choose or forced to play other people’s roles? We block our need for self-knowledge, but it is no less important to fulfill it than, say, a sexual need.
It is easy to express your emotions, to be free and spontaneous – such desires arise in everyone, and they should be heeded. “Each of us has an inner child, and he dreams of the same thing that all children dream about,” says Vadim Petrovsky. – So why don’t we let him play, run on the grass, talk nonsense and nonsense? Think about how full your emotional life is. And do you love yourself? Finally, to re-establish contact with ourselves, first try to re-establish contact with our body and our feelings: by criticizing our body or seeing it only in an applied perspective, we stop feeling it. When a person accepts and loves his body, he takes care of it, listens to the sensations that it gives him.
To change or not to change
How is your inner life different today from the day before yesterday? By answering this question, you can understand what changes you need. “Formulate what you want to change, but do not use the “not” particle, advises Vadim Petrovsky. “Only positive statements are valid.” It may even be worth writing down your ideas on paper. Put the paper aside for a while, and then, returning to it, determine your priorities. It is possible that you will understand: by and large, you do not need to change anything.
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