What in our world can serve as a source of discontent? Yes, whatever. Starting with the fact that the weather is vile and you have nothing to wear for the season, and ending with the fact that the child does not study, and the husband drinks. There can be a lot of sources of experiences — tens and even hundreds of thousands of different circumstances.
When does a person have even the slightest dissatisfaction? When he knows in advance what the world around him should be like, what his own life should be like, and the reality does not meet expectations. The world is not the way we want it to be.
Further, everything is very simple. A person is in a state of discontent and thus comes into conflict with the outside world. The surrounding world reacts to this by worsening the situation or making it impossible to change something. That is, a person sends mental discontent into the world around him, and from there, in response, an aggravation of already unpleasant circumstances flies like a boomerang. That’s when the «fun life» begins.
This interaction of man with life can be depicted in the form of a simple diagram:
- There are significant ideas about how the world should be arranged —
- Real life does not correspond to our ideas about it —
- There is dissatisfaction with the world or its individual elements —
- Accumulating negative feelings
- Problems are on the rise
CONCLUSION: long-term dissatisfaction (negative) is a trigger mechanism for aggravating a problem or inability to resolve it.
What to do?
In order not to come into conflict with the world, a person must first allow it to be multifaceted, diverse, constantly changing and … imperfect. After all, the imperfection of the world and its individual elements (people, events, etc.) is only our set of ideas and nothing more. The world is real and does not depend on our judgments about it. Therefore, the main condition that a person must comply with is to accept the world around him as he is. Today. Now.
Of course, it is very difficult to take such a position in our world, which is divided into rich and poor, healthy and sick, beautiful and not so, believers and atheists.
Today the world’s population is six billion people. Each of these people has their own ideas about how this world should be arranged correctly. However, the world will never be able to accommodate the demands of six billion people, if only because these demands are often mutually exclusive. Even in the same family, views on life (for example, on how to raise children) are often diametrically opposed. Therefore, it is completely useless to try to “squeeze” life into the framework of your ideas about it. In this world, little will change with the arrival of one particular person, little will change with his departure. A person comes to a world that existed millions of years before him, and will exist for a very long time after his departure. And we must understand that we have little chance to change this objective reality that exists apart from our desires and ambitions. But there are many chances to make your own life successful and joyful.
That is life. And you still need to live it. If possible, with pleasure.
Idealization: look at it from different angles
We have already found out that at the heart of any discontent lies our ideas, ideas about:
How should your life develop (the life of your loved ones),
how (when) a certain event should occur,
how a particular person or people in general should behave,
What (what) should you be yourself, etc.
You have this expectation pattern in your mind. When reality begins to differ from the image you created, you experience a diverse range of not very pleasant feelings. Here we come close to the phenomenon of idealization, which is basic, central in the entire first section.
IDEALIZATION is an idea that is significant for a person, a model of the structure of life, in case of violation of which he has long-term negative experiences. This is an idea that is often unconsciously overvalued for you, and if it is violated, long-term dissatisfaction arises.
You can consider the same phenomenon from the other side and give a different definition.
IDEALIZATION is the experience of negative emotions for quite a long time, resulting from the discrepancy between the ideal image created by a person and reality.
You could say this:
IDEALIZATION is a complex of negative experiences that arise in a person as a result of a discrepancy between the mental image created by him and reality.
Idealization can always be identified by two signs — negative emotions and a mental image, an ideal model that exists in the human mind. We compare life with an ideal model and say: something doesn’t fit, it doesn’t work. Something in this life is not going the way I see fit. And we begin to experience negative feelings — fear, envy, anger, resentment, etc.
We try to replace life itself, its versatility and constant change with our ideas about it, our ideas about what it should be, what standards it should meet.
In nothing a man is so persistent as in his convictions. Life is multifaceted, it cannot be delayed, stopped and driven into the framework of one’s own ideas. And we want to see only one facet of it that suits us. The surrounding world and individual people will not be able to match our ideals, because everything in this world changes and nothing is permanent. And our ideas exist only in our mind, and nowhere else. They are either taken from our past, which is already gone, or borrowed from other people (our relatives, acquaintances, etc.).
We want to see the correspondence between our ideal model and the life around. If we do not see this correspondence, we are immersed in experiences: why is everything so wrong, bad and unfair. It should not be!
It’s easy to make yourself miserable
Indeed, it is very easy to make yourself unhappy. To do this, you need to have as many ideas as possible about how the world around should be arranged. And expect (or demand) that everything be so, and not otherwise.
Suppose you have an expectation of how a person you know (husband, wife, parent, child, boss, friend, lover) should behave. You know how he should behave. And he behaves a little (or not at all) like that. That is, it does not correspond to the ideal that exists in your mind.
Your actions? You boil like a kettle, and with your boiling you try to make it do as you see fit. Or you fall into sadness because he is behaving incorrectly. Melancholy appears on your face and this person understands that he is the culprit of your condition.
In both cases, you do not accept this person (and through him the whole world) as he is, because he does not correspond to the ideal that exists in your mind.
It is possible to idealize not only individual people, but also situations of the surrounding world as a whole. For example, the Government is mismanaging the country. The youth are behaving badly. Science has declined. Too much violence is shown on television. Etc.