2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
I am often asked the question: what to do when the fear of loss, the fear of loneliness overtakes? We are talking about codependency, codependent relationships and all the "pearls" associated with this problem. And then: “How to overcome this? What exactly should I do to stop suffering from panic fear of losing a loved one, fear that is experienced at the bodily level as withdrawal, panic horror, the feeling that if I don’t see the object of love again or die or a part of my body will die? " Symptoms of this state are terrible: the body shakes, it is difficult to breathe, often codependent people complain of coldness in the chest or the feeling of a "cold stone" in the heart, emptiness in the soul, it seems the soil is leaving underfoot and the person is without support. The state is experienced as the fear of impending death and from this state a person is ready to do anything to return the object of love with strong codependency - he begs not to leave it, humiliates himself, can crawl on his knees, while others, out of pride, do not do such things, but stoically endure the pain of loss, they tremble, suffer, suffer without pretending that they are unbearably painful and wait, patiently wait for him to call.. And in fact, they can wait for a call for years, although they mentally understand that everything is over long ago. Still others endure humiliation in relationships, lose their dignity, being manipulated, serving and hating at the same time, but cannot get out of toxic relationships, because the fear of losing these relationships - as a source of symbiotic nutrition - is much more terrible for them than enduring destructive relationships.
How many codependent couples came to me for family therapy on the verge of divorce. And what do you think? As soon as they say: "That's it! We need to get a divorce! It can't go on like this!" And with renewed vigor they seemed to be "glued" into each other, sticking together in fear of loss into a single organism. They say about codependent relationships: "It is impossible to live together and impossible to leave." So many couples live the rest of their days, mired in the frenzy of codependent relationships. Actually, it's like drug addiction or alcoholism, only instead of a drug or a bottle - a partner. And with the mind, a person realizes that something is wrong with him, but he cannot do anything - he remains helpless in front of the power of the horror of the loss of that other.
I saw couples in which one of the codependents made an unconscious decision to leave the relationship through a serious fatal illness, because it was scary to just leave.. Sometimes my own death in the face of the pain caused by the loss of an object turns out to be a scarlet flower.
I know this topic quite well and not only from my practice as a psychologist. I know this state of panic and fear of loss from my own personal experience, because I myself am from a codependent family, where my father was an alcoholic and my mother was a codependent psychopath. I walked my path of healing, a long, painful one, but I went forward, realizing that this is how I do not want to suffer until the end of my days from what no one needs, to be constantly abandoned, abandoned, to experience this wild fear of loss and in this fear to allow violence against oneself and to produce violence against oneself, and as a result, against others. It was necessary to quickly move from one relationship to another and in no case should there be a pause between the relationship, in which I can find myself, my loneliness and universal fear. As a matter of fact, it was all the same with whom to be, as long as not one. But fate does not allow us to get away from an unlearned lesson and again and again gives a blow to the same upper right corner. I realized that I was not holding this blow and deliberately after one terrible breakup entered the phase of loneliness in order to get to know him, master it and stop being afraid, learn to live independently. I realized that without this experience of loneliness, I can be easily controlled, manipulated on this fear. I decided to stop running and decided to live alone for a whole year and go through the heartache. For me it was like looking death in the eye.
This article is rather an attempt to share my experience of overcoming codependency. It is clear that my whole experience may not suit you, because we are all different, but if you can take at least something for yourself from this article and this something will become your find on the path to healing, I will be immensely happy with you. But about how I went step-by-step a little later.
let's let's look at this problem from the biological point of view to start. As we know in the animal kingdom, many animals immediately separate from their parents after birth and are able to live without them. Take a shark, for example. Having been born, the shark, without even looking into the eyes of its mother, immediately embarks on its free swimming. But man is the most dependent creature of all living things. He, being born, is not able to survive without a mother for a long time. Until adolescence, or even more, he is addicted. Having just been born, a child does not even understand that now he has his own body, he will discover the boundaries of his body much later. Until then, addiction. The child does not know any other love, except dependence, he is afraid to die, having lost his mother's love. And he becomes very sensitive to manipulation on this fear of loss. He experiences the first fear of death when his mother lingered for a couple of minutes in the kitchen, and he screams hungry. In these moments, when there is hunger, but the mother is not, the child experiences as a threat of death. Hunger for him is death. This is the first contact with the fear of loss. further, if the mother herself is from a codependent family, she begins to control the child with the help of manipulations. Mom knows that he will not survive, cannot cope without her, and even the simple silence of the mother (ignoring, punishment by silence) can become a signal for the child: I am deprived of love, and without mother's love I will not survive. And then the child does everything to survive, he becomes codependent. And the greater the degree of codependency, the stronger the emotional and physical violence against him by his parents. So the child loses himself and becomes a hostage of love.
Later, a person grows up and his memory is arranged in such a way that he forgets how his parents frightened him with the loss, how they reproached him, blamed him, rejected, ignored him. But then in an adult relationship with a partner, this experience of fear of loss resurrects like a terrible ghost. We seem to cease to depend on our mother, we even leave for another city or rarely communicate with her, but we stick to our partner with our codependency, and that's all that did not end then becomes a full-length problem now. And the more we stick, the more the partner moves away. In this sticking out of fear of losing, being alone, we become controlling, distrustful, anxious, we radiate this fear and the partner begins to either get angry or withdrawn. This is how we attract losses - what we are most afraid of, imperceptibly by our actions, we attract. For what? To overcome what we fear. There is a lot of energy in trauma and we ourselves form partly the events of our life in order to master the energy of our trauma.
So your partner has already "evaporated" and you sit at home and wring your hands or monitor his appearance on social networks, conduct your own investigation of what is wrong with you and who he exchanged you for. You have a feeling of bottomless emptiness, a funnel, a hole that has formed inside you after the loss. And it's good if you don't chase the fugitive but go to a psychologist to figure it out. And he is hearty and says to you: "take care of yourself, love yourself, pay attention to yourself" … You get furious: "Tell me how to pay attention to yourself, love yourself? What exactly needs to be done? Where are the instructions? In what books are written, how to get rid of this codependent withdrawal? " The therapist is silent! There are no such books! There are no such instructions. You're furious with the therapist and all this psychotherapy. You cannot know how to love yourself if you did not get the experience of high-quality motherly love in your early childhood. You continue to break, your legs are taken away when you think that you will come home and there is empty and empty in your soul. And in fact, you want to howl, and not take care of yourself.
The fact is that all these interventions: "take responsibility for your life", "take care of yourself", "love yourself" - they do not work with such a person, since they are addressed to his adult part of the personality, which is currently "turned off" for the reason that childhood trauma became actual. Before you now is a small child who was lost without a mother in a big city and his lips are trembling, tears are flowing and his knees give way from fear that he will never see his mother (partner) anymore. And you tell him: "pull yourself together", take care of yourself ", appeal to reason, logic, responsibility … And he may pretend that he heard you, will come home and again horror - horror, panic, trembling in the body and the feeling of an abyss in soul.
If you find yourself next to such a person, then in this situation, suspend him so that he does not run away from his pain into a new relationship, but enters it, honestly and boldly. Give him your hand and say: "I am near, I am with you, you are not alone (alone)." Hug him, pat him on the head, let him cry on your shoulder.. In such a state of withdrawal, he is not able to take the support that appeals to adulthood and responsibility. He cries, he is in despair, he mourns the loss, grieves and you, together with him, allow him to survive this loss and find that in the end he himself did not die, but could, coped, did not run away from fear of loss, but lived it.
Now let's move on to the steps that I had to go through, overcoming the states of withdrawal, panic, horror, healing from codependency and creating in my life a new space filled with peace, tranquility, trust in the world and a sense of the joy of being …
1. I stopped myself from running away and decided to live out my fear and be alone for a year. I deliberately did not seek meetings with anyone, and did not even let men into my life.
2. I allowed myself to fall into the deepest depression, sink to the bottom and survive it. True, at that time several reliable friends turned out to be next to me, who called, came, held my hand, listened to my roar and my therapist, who on the phone worked with me three times a week for 30 minutes. It gave the feeling that he was the only stable island in my life, albeit a distant island (from another country). In between, I scribbled to him, expensive at that time, sms to my mobile phone and cried for days. And he answered briefly in the evening. It calmed me down.
3. From time to time, the pain of loss helped me to survive an exercise that I had invented for myself: I downloaded the howling of a lonely she-wolf from the Internet and tried to howl with her to help myself go through this suffering of loneliness and psychological death. Then one thing throbbed in the brain: "One, one, one …!"
4. After a few months of depression, a friend threatened me with a psychiatrist and it worked: I began to understand that I didn't need a second bottom and began to move a little, especially since the first wave of pain of loss had already been mastered. I walked on. I realized that I was in the past experiencing a break, then in the future, which I saw as black without a man. I began to search. Something had to be in between the past and the future. And I found: I began to weave beads with my own hands, roll wool and create flowers, necklaces, earrings.. There were nights all night long I strung multicolored beads on the fishing line, not noticing that these beads could already braid my whole apartment, but at this moment weaving here and now I began to feel amazing peace. When I was weaving the beads, I was not thinking about anything.
5. I understood: here it is the key to peace: "here and now" and I focused on it. I literally watched myself: if I ate, then I just ate and was busy with color, taste, temperature … and so on.my food, if I was lying in bed, then I either listened to my breathing, or concentrated on that sensation of the blanket touching the skin, if I walked, I directed my attention to my feet, if I took the bathroom, then I thought only about the contact of water with skin. Speaking of the bathroom, at the first stage, when body contact was needed, but it was not, lying in the bathroom for several hours helped me very well, like in the womb in the placenta. Not really new, but it worked.
6. As I began to go out into the street, I fixed my attention on the touch of the wind to my face, in the sun, the songs of birds and.. the most amazing people, their smiles.. It was such a happiness for me to chat with Natasha's coffee pot, to have a couple phrases with the concierge, to notice how the passer-by smiled and in response to smile … all these little things were very important then..
7. I bought myself food in the store for a long time, choosing the most delicious and delicious.. so I learned to be my own mother.
8. My most important secret: Of course, all this time I was writing poetry, they also helped me to live through the pain, but in this state I also began to write a book about a little girl who did not receive love from her mother in childhood and she had to go a long way, to get out of the grip of codependency. Actually, during these 5 years, while I was writing, I experienced a lot and gradually healed. Now I understood how to pay attention to myself, take care of myself, fill the void with myself. In my life now, instead of a huge hole, into which I constantly fell from fear of loneliness and loss, there is a huge amazing space of my creativity, helping people and homeless animals …
I would be glad if this article is useful to you.
