When we look at relationships where one controls the other, makes prohibitions and prohibitions, and the other goes into it like butter, we wonder why someone lets himself be treated like this?
The text comes from the magazine Newsweek Psychologia
A good relationship is based on a sense of security, i.e. the certainty that I will not be rejected and judged as I am, that we will face the hardships of living together. In successful relationships, we trust each other, we support each other, we give space for our passions, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we count on our needs, we are not stiff in thinking.
We forgive, enjoy our successes, and provide emotional support for ourselves. We argue, but we also reconcile. We like and we are friends. We are faithful to each other, but we also have friends, separate exits, work. In addition to the common world, there is also a separate one. It’s not about secrets, but about something that is only mine or only yours – your own space.
Mine is your salsa lessons, your basketball, or vice versa. Having your own world is as important as doing certain things together. We are together, at the same time we perceive and feel as separate people who do not have to be together. But they really want to. They survive without each other, but prefer by their side.
With fears
So much for the wish list. In fact, it can be difficult. There is a struggle for power and a fear of loneliness. Sometimes the one in front of closeness is even greater, which, paradoxically, is easily accomplished in a pair by creating a relationship through being in constant conflict or through an emotional distance. Or both alternately. There is a fear of abandonment that is sometimes associated with death. There are betrayals, both physical and mental, bitterness, a sense of rejection. Anger, anger and even hatred. Jealousy, possessiveness, appropriation, ridicule, depreciation, denouncing wrongs that have not been forgiven. Instead of closeness – sparring.
When we look at relationships where one controls the other, makes prohibitions and prohibitions, and the other goes into it like butter, we wonder why she / he allows himself to be treated like this? One takes on the role of a helpless child for whom you have to take responsibility, the other a parent. Or, as in Danny De Vito’s film “Rose’s War” there are two children who share hatred and the need to fight.
Controlling, accounting, appropriation, jealousy – these are constant elements of partnership relations. Those that last for years in this state, although none of them are happy in them. One seems to be an executioner, the other a victim. But the reality is more complicated.
The model that happens in such situations on the candlestick, due to its popularity, comes from the so-called traditional family. He has the money and the power, and she has the role of the lady of the house. He works hard for his family, he is away from home for hours, and when he is there, he doesn’t look after the children, doesn’t talk to his wife – he is tired. She, dissatisfied, lonely and emotionally abandoned, although sometimes she will cry out to her friends, she will comfort him, considering him wiser and more resourceful, cultivating the belief that only with him she can cope with this world. Without him, he is nobody and means nothing. She does not see herself as an independent person, she only sees herself as mother and wife. Girlfriends are amazed why such a woman does not have her life and has reduced herself to roles. Why did she quit her PhD, her blog and study languages since she met this “tyrant”. They judge him more severely than her, seeing the woman as a victim.
They place the responsibility for the relationship on men, “because it is he who has the power,” they exclude it from responsibility for themselves, reinforcing it with compassion in the role of the aggrieved party. And the facts are that this subordinate wife is the second adult, and like her partner, she has made a choice. The problem is, she doesn’t think that about herself.
Years ago, the American psychiatrist, the creator of transactional analysis, Eric Berne, studied similar models of relations. He said that unconsciously or partially consciously we enter together in various types of games that take place from the level of the I, which is in the roles: I – Parent, I – Child, I – Adult. Me – implements scripts, i.e. patterns of behavior that Berne talked about: games. He described it in the famous book “What People Play”. Transactional analysis was revisited after half a century by trainers of this approach, Ian Stewart and Vann Joines, in the book Transactional Analysis Today.
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From a man’s perspective, about a similar example of a belief level relationship, they write: “The only way to cope is to manage and closely control everyone, including yourself.” On the part of a woman, the conviction is: “My vocation in life is to please others, especially men and not to think about other matters.” Behind these attitudes are their life stories, in which both of them were deprived of the possibility of experiencing difficult feelings, and moreover – of taking responsibility for their parents’ emotions.
In symbiosis
We prepare for a good relationship, just like death, from the first breath, the first hug, and the first step. Initially, the mother and child have a symbiotic relationship with each other. They don’t know where one ends and the other begins. And this is how it should be for the first six months after birth. Thanks to this, the little person feels taken care of, learns that the world is safe, which in the future we will call a safe model of attachment.
In time, he will be able to safely distance himself from his mother, in the language of psychology – to separate and become autonomous. See the differences between yourself and others. Accept them and find a place in life. First, she will notice that she is no longer a mother, that she may want something other than her. He will tie his own laces and go to school. The problem is that parents must give the right to this autonomy. Parents who are children themselves will not be able to cope with adult parenthood. They will want to entangle children, leave them in a position that depends on them. To keep in the role of children so as not to lose the sense of meaning when confronted with the inner emptiness.
There is a lack of healthy autonomy and good dependence in symbiotic relationships. Partners don’t know what it means to be themselves. They take part in a game where the roles are predetermined. It will last until one of the two wants to get out of the role played by him and takes the trouble to work on himself.
A mature parent, embedded in the role of an adult, will allow the child to move away, supporting his need for independence. When it screams “me”, it will allow you to be self-reliant with a patient eye. Parents at different stages of a child’s life are needed differently, because they are to respond to his developmental needs. However, when mindfulness and healthy boundaries are lacking, the little person develops insecure models of relationships: avoidant, anxious – ambivalent, disorganized – the latter is created with enormous neglect resulting also from violence. The first one will create a relationship in which he will isolate himself, fearing closeness, explaining, for example, that he has to earn a house. The second is people who are terrified of being alone and afraid of abandonment, who feel underappreciated in the relationship. Third, they will be prone to control and extreme feelings. By desiring closeness, they will discourage it at the same time. They will create violent relationships.
People entering adult life are often like warriors after the war. Tired and full of fear of closeness. They will recreate what they know. The deficits of those times are traumas for life. Their cognitive consequences are the following beliefs: “I don’t deserve love”, “I’m worth nothing”, “I can’t do it on my own”, “if she finds out who I really am, she will abandon me”, “closeness is threatening”. These beliefs about oneself and the world translate into the quality of the relationship.
With anger
And what are the roles when a woman becomes a parent and a man becomes her protégé? This is as common a model today as the patriarchal one. He chooses a safe partner, a bit lost, awkward in the changing dynamic world. Without your place and belonging in it. She – resourceful, embracing work, home and children. Well organized, well-groomed, with a career and social life. Attractive for many men, but under these appearances there is an insecure child who had to take too much responsibility too early, for example for himself and the abandoned mother. She has heard how hopeless men are and how they cannot be trusted to choose those who will not leave her in their adulthood.
She has the wheel in hand and is the command center. He earns money, pays bills, keeps the home budget in the hope that he will somehow contribute. When the rent is not available, he borrows or stays after working hours. When he delegates an assignment, he will fail. They will forget the hour when signing up the children to the dentist, they will not get to the meeting room because they will be stuck in a traffic jam, and there will be three key products missing from the shopping list. Furious, he will not be scared of the words that he is a “gon”, he does not make himself “and his ass, not a peasant”. When he has made an appointment with his friends in the city, will not fall asleep and will not let him order a taxi, she will come to pick him up at the club herself. When he loses his job, he will launch a network of his friends to find her without asking if he’s interested. She’ll have the feeling that whatever, but hers. Own property. That he wouldn’t exist without her. It allows him to act like a child because he has control over him.
He knows this model because he had a mother who humiliated him and depreciated him because he was “like a father”, but at the same time she did everything by giving the message “you can’t do without me”. They both feel safe in control and psychological violence. He has romances, because only in them he feels his own agency, but he will not leave, because the safest thing for him is with “mum in the role of wife”. When she finds out about it, she does not throw him out of the house, but begs him to part with his rival.
And so, in symbiotic, complementary roles, they script their pasts. Such relationships lack healthy autonomy and good dependence. There is control and fear. Being yourself doesn’t know what it means, and loneliness equals death. There remains a game in which the roles are predetermined. It will take until one of the two wants to get out of the relationship, but the role they play, and takes the trouble to work on themselves. He will see the diagram and himself in it. A child who does not have to be one anymore because he has the emotional resources to spend his life as an adult taking responsibility.
Joanna Drosio-Czaplińska – psychologist, integrative psychotherapist, EMDR therapist, journalist. He belongs to the Polish Society of EMDR Therapy. Co-founder of the Masculinum Psychotherapy Institute. He conducts workshops and psychoeducational lectures. Author of the book “I’m a Dad!” – interviews with 12 men about how they experience their fatherhood and the co-author (with Jacek Masłowski) of a book about femininity – “Sometimes a saint, sometimes a harlot”.