The illusion of love. Relationships leading nowhere
“A very small degree of hope is enough to bring about love in life. In two or three days, hope may disappear, however, love has already been born.” Stendhal
Why do some men and women reject good partners and constantly become attracted to bad ones? Why do they push away people who offer them love for the sake of those who reject, abuse and ignore them? What to do when it’s bad together, but even worse apart? Why do negative relationships with partners repeat, no matter how much you change them?
All this is the result of a long chain of interactions with rejecting parents, or with one of them, from early childhood. Let's try to figure this out.
Children are absolutely and totally dependent on those who care for them. The strongest trauma for a child is the mother’s dislike, lack of her attention, warmth, sympathy, approval and support. The child focuses on one parent, who is the source of all love and care for him.
The paradox is that the worse the mother treats the child, rejects him, punishes him unfairly, the more strongly the child becomes attached to his offending parent. This increase in child attachment is caused by the fact that his/her needs are ignored, but these are needs that only the parent can satisfy. Such children prefer to live with their parents as adults, despite their cold, critical, devaluing, cruel treatment, or they choose exactly the same life partners and transfer their unfulfilled childhood expectations to them.
In order for a person to become full and mature, to be in a state of happiness and not suffering, it is necessary to go through certain stages of its development:
- Awareness of oneself as a separate and independent person in the world around us. Such people know how to respect their own point of view and that of others, accept the right to a different worldview, different from theirs, without trying to convince others, imposing their opinion and without experiencing a feeling of betrayal when other people do not share their interests and views on life. This is a necessary condition for harmonious relationships in a couple in family life, built on mutual understanding and compassion. The child must also learn to distinguish the shades of his internal sensations, to feel well what is happening, without replacing some feelings with others and without suppressing them. Children deprived of the attention of their parents remain in a symbiotic relationship with them because they cannot separate from their parents for fear of being left without any hope of love and support, which they so need and continue to remain so unseparated even in adulthood, finding comfort in the feeling of the constant presence of one’s offending objects next to oneself or within oneself. This is how low self-esteem, constant self-flagellation, psychosomatic diseases, and love addictions are formed. A “good enough” mother helps a child deal with her feelings if she is able to accurately understand the child’s needs and help him adequately recognize internal sensations, naming them correctly. She does not forbid the child to cry, be offended, express his righteous anger, be sad in accordance with his natural reaction to the situation; she reflects his feelings, trying to support and comfort him in difficult times, and most importantly, she herself is natural in her manifestations in relationships with other people.
- In the process of absorbing events involving the mother and relationships with her, cells with good or bad memories are formed in the subconscious. If there were more good memories than bad, the child forever has an internal resource that he can always rely on in a stressful situation on his own, when he is alone, and restore peace of mind and self-confidence. That is why it is so important for every couple to fall in love, share pleasant events that will form the basis of their future relationships, necessary to overcome emerging difficulties in life together, being an irreplaceable resource during periods of natural crises. Negative memories have the opposite effect, damaging a child's self-esteem and making him more susceptible to stress and minor stimuli. Such a child does not have the strength to withstand the usual pressure of life circumstances on his own. This forces him in adulthood to look for support in the outside world for distraction, consolation and pain relief, which forms different types of addiction: workaholism, food, gaming, emotional addiction, alcoholism, smoking, drug addiction, extreme sports, addiction to treatment with pills, sports, dangerous for life activities, unbridled spending of money, aggressive and cruel behavior. An unhappy child (and subsequently an adult), burdened with such a burden of negative memories of his objects, may develop defense mechanisms that allow him to forget about the insults received from his parents. However, these grievances do not disappear anywhere, but continue to slowly but surely ruin a person’s life, playing out the same repeating scenarios in relationships with other people (bosses, colleagues, spouses and lovers, friends...).
- Integration of bad and good images of the same person, as well as of oneself. Only mature people are able to see the weak sides of their personality in their partner and not be disappointed in him, not stop loving him, but accept him as part of his holistic image, consisting of both advantages and disadvantages. To achieve this important stage of integration, it is necessary that positive memories of communication with parents greatly outweigh the negative ones. When painful memories outweigh pleasant ones, integration will not occur. Therefore, when such partners quarrel in a couple, their revenge and insults know no bounds, since at this moment they think only about the bad in their partner, forgetting the good. If such a child still manages to integrate a huge baggage of negativity with less positivity, he will have to face a frightening reality. Therefore, such people prefer to close their eyes to the truth, remaining in an illusory reality, distorting the reality of what is happening.
In order not to face their painful memories and maintain relationships with their offenders and tyrants, children come up with defense mechanisms to justify neglect or insults, constant discontent that befalls them from their parents, and in adulthood from their spouses, bosses, colleagues and friends. In order to gain a sense of security, a child (and then an adult) justifies a cruel or indifferent attitude with his “moral” shortcomings, for example, sloppiness or laziness, which became the cause of parental (marital) dislike or insult. It is unbearable for children who are dependent and in need of love to admit that they live in an unpredictable world, where no one loves them, where they are offended and humiliated because they are unlucky with their parents. It is better to see in this attitude towards yourself the reason for your own mistake, which you can correct yourself. If you see the reason in the parents themselves, whom the child cannot change, then this dooms him to a life of horror, hostility, and insecurity. In a relationship between a man and a woman, the victim will always find excuses for the cold, humiliating, rejecting, selfish behavior of his partner and, blaming himself for everything, thinking through a plan to correct his “imperfection.” They feel guilty about everything, live by satisfying other people's desires and do not know their own needs.
Another defense mechanism divides a person into two separate selves, replacing each other. The first wounded self stores memories of childhood insults and neglect from parents. A person tries to avoid confrontation with this part of his personality, because in the close embrace of the wounded Self he is tormented by shame, a feeling of his own inferiority and humiliation. The second self-hoper feeds on illusions, seeing in desired objects only the promise of love and hope for the satisfaction of its desires. When the Hoping Self is “in control,” all past troubles associated with the object of desire are repressed in the subconscious. In such a distorted perception, negative signals and memories of past offenses are ignored, while for a normal person they would serve as a reason to stay away from such a dangerous object that causes so much suffering. It is the hopeful Self that makes it possible for the victim to return to his tormentor no matter what, forgetting the humiliation and hiding the stifling pain away in the Wounded Self. The victim’s close people are especially often angered by such strange behavior, when the futility of such a relationship is obvious to everyone, to everyone except the victim herself .
For some, their wounded self likes the repulsive and cruel characteristics of their partner, reminiscent of their parent, whom they can fight and re-educate, creating the appearance of control of the situation. They may even become depressed due to the loss of their bad object, as their wounded self is left without an enemy and without the ability to change the situation. As children, their lives revolved around confronting and disobeying their parents and their absurd demands. Having matured, these people find their calling as journalists working in hot spots, or other types of activities that require fighting and defending their rights and interests. In marital relationships for such people there is always war, conflict relationships, quarrels, disputes that repeat the relationship with their parents, maintaining a connection with them in their minds. Without a stormy showdown, they become bored and pointless. When they get tired of exhausting conflicts, they reach a dead end. They feel bad together, and even worse without each other. But war is much better for them than facing inner emptiness and wound.
What motivates a person to subconsciously choose a spouse, friends or lovers who treat him with the same disdain as his parents did in childhood? Why do they persist in returning to painful situations that did not contain the slightest hint of pleasure?
A child's attachment to a primary object is the main formative factor in the formation of personality, his relationship to himself, to other people, to the World.
Problems in the primary relationship between parent and child are repeated in adulthood, each time recreating the style of relationship familiar from childhood. The subconscious goal of such obsessive repetitions is to return to the “bad” but familiar object to recreate the emotional atmosphere of pain, which is the breeding ground for it necessary for survival. “Love” for a deprived child is a complex combination of contradictory feelings, a toxic mixture of negative feelings and an insignificant amount of love, and not at all the feeling that a loving person accepts and appreciates you. On the contrary, love received “free of charge and unconditionally” from a normal developed personality is not perceived; it seems to be something alien, having nothing in common with what “love” means in his mind.
The inability of such people to experience love can be compared to the inability of the human ear to perceive high-frequency sound waves. They exist, but it is impossible to distinguish them. Even if such people meet love, they miss their chances or reject this gift of fate. True love is alien to them, incomprehensible, it causes fear, while loneliness, rejection, criticism, neglect, use are accepted and felt as something close and real.
Those adults who have lost the “bad objects” in the person of their parents retain symbolic and emotional attachments, recreating this type of relationship with new “bad” objects. True love for them is rejection, self-hatred, flashes of short-term hope, moments of passion, irresistible attraction, despair, extreme and total intimacy, frequent departures... Some adults try to replace the lost love of their parents, their support, care with substitute gifts and money from their lovers . Love is measured by the amount of money spent on them and the high cost of gifts, and there is no end to it.
What is the solution? The solution, first of all, is to heal your wounded Self , because it is this traumatized and emotionally charged part that gives rise to all the others. You need to go through a sea of pain, mourn the wounds received. It is better to cry them out with tears than to cry blood afterwards (men often develop sinusitis, nosebleeds, and women have uterine bleeding).
It is also necessary to recognize the hopelessness of receiving love from those who were not initially capable of it (starting with their parents) due to their immaturity, that love either exists or it does not exist and it is impossible to earn it, even at the cost of one’s own life. This requires courage, because recognizing this truth is that you will never receive from your closest and loved ones what you need so much, that nothing depends on you, that you cannot control everything and everyone, that it is impossible to control anyone force yourself to love, not for any money, not for any feats, illnesses or self-sacrifice.
Only after this final surrender, recognition of one’s loss in this useless struggle, will attention be directed to those people who are truly capable of love, help and sincere interest. Then you will have sensitive partners, an understanding and approving boss at work, warm, attentive friends and colleagues. And most importantly, the exhausting, stupid “Sisyphean labor” will end and strength will appear for personal happiness and self-realization, revealing one’s true abilities and talents.
This is no one's fault. Our parents were also children who were not loved enough. Recognizing such a painful truth directs our attention from ourselves to other equally wounded people, since there are practically no ideal parents. Such understanding makes us compassionate and when a loved one hurts us, we need to ask ourselves the question: “How can I help him?”, since happy people do not sting. If we don’t have the resources for such understanding at all, it’s better to get out of the relationship without torturing either ourselves or the other.
There is no point in hiding the “negative” from awareness. It still exists, whether we want it or not, just as night and day, joy and sadness, warmth and cold exist, regardless of our preferences...
We need to learn to fearlessly notice this “bad”, see, realize, accept, and then after some time “it” itself ceases to bring us suffering, nevertheless remaining itself. When we consider something “bad”, it means that we have not yet understood what it is for. Understanding that everything is needed for something helps transform any injustice into a necessary life lesson, gives birth to true wisdom and maturity, makes our life fulfilling, joyful, and makes us whole and harmonious.
There is no pain that we cannot endure; There are no personality traits that do not deserve our recognition as part of a whole, perfect in all its diversity.
By turning a blind eye to all the negative aspects of life, dreaming of eternal “paradise,” we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to gain the necessary experience and continue to make the same mistakes. The main thing is that it is a “fly in the ointment”, and not vice versa. It is important to understand that the source of love is within ourselves. Love is inside. This is the spring that feeds us constantly, regardless of external circumstances and vicissitudes of fate.
The article uses research materials from W. R. D. Fairbairn, a Scottish psychoanalyst who made a huge contribution to the theory of object relations, which refuted certain Freudian views on issues of personality formation.
How to get rid of love addiction?
1) Try to switch from caring about the “object of addiction” and relationships with him to caring about yourself. By all means, put yourself first.
2) Determine what needs you are trying to satisfy in your relationship with the object of addiction. And what needs did this person satisfy at the beginning of the relationship, when you felt happy?
Somehow he hinted to you at the beginning of the relationship that your significant needs would be met. So – we need to identify what these needs are? What did he give you at the beginning of the relationship and then stopped giving you?
3) Try to separate these needs from the “object of dependence”. Accept the idea that other people, including yourself, can do this for you. Learn to satisfy these needs, accept from others and yourself, and internalize when they give it to you.
4) Think about what a relationship with this person really gives you? Not what do you hope to get from it, but what do you actually get? For example, the feeling that I am special, that I can be loved, the opportunity to take care of someone, etc.
Find another way to get it. That is, without this person.
5) Write a list of everything that does not suit you about the object of dependence and in your relationship with him. Write as much “bad” as possible that is why you decided to leave the relationship with him.
6) Stop “using” your drug. That is, completely stop all contact with the person on whom you are dependent.
Including views of his pages on social networks, correspondence, conversations and thoughts about him, meetings for sex, etc. Get rid of all the things that strongly remind you of “him.” Block him wherever possible so that he cannot “show up” and give you hope again.
In the event of a “withdrawal”, when it seems to you that there is still a chance for your relationship, or when you feel physically ill without him, or if you meet him by chance, or if he writes to you or in a dream, re-read the list of those “bad” things, why did you decide to end your relationship with him?
