Break Up To Live

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The article is based on the lecture given together with Natalia Olifirovich on the last day of the intensive "The Art of Being with the Other". In it, I share my thoughts on the essence of the phenomenon of separation in life and therapy. The topic of parting is not easy for me and needs further reflection. This article is only the first attempt to capture the essence of this phenomenon in the form of some theses.

All our meetings

Parting, alas, is destined …

It is customary to write a lot about a meeting in psychotherapy, recognizing the importance of this phenomenon in a person's life. Parting is paid much less attention. However, it should be noted for fairness that parting, like meeting, is a natural and necessary component of life.

Birth and death, day and night, sunrise and sunset - everything in this life is subject to cyclicality and equivalence. It is difficult to imagine that something would break in this cyclicality, say a person was born and did not die, the day would last forever and the sunset would never come …

We can observe the same phenomena (meeting and parting) in human relations. And here, unfortunately, not always everything is so natural and harmoniously arranged: close people cannot meet, strangers cannot part. This kind of "breakdowns" in the "parting - meeting" mechanism will be discussed in my article.

TYPES OF PARTITIONS

In my opinion, the following types of parting can be distinguished:

1. Parting as a natural process of continuing life, as an integral and necessary element of it. An example of this kind of separation is when a child grows up. A child, in order to live his life, needs to part with his parents.

2. Parting as a forced, violent process of interrupting life. An example of this type of separation is loss.

Despite the different nature of the described types of separation (natural and violent), there is no doubt that they have something in common. Namely, breaking up is a process. And it is very important not to interrupt this process.

If this process is interrupted, parting is impossible, and therefore new meetings are also impossible. So, without parting with a loved one, it is impossible to meet a new love: the gestalt turns out to be incomplete, and the “heart is not free”.

There are two opposite, unproductive separation strategies - "leave in English" and stick in a relationship. Despite their polarity and seeming opposite, the common thing for these strategies is that in both cases it turns out to be impossible to part, since the separation process is interrupted.

MECHANISMS FOR INTERRUPTING THE PARTITION PROCESS

It is impossible to part if there was no meeting, which implies a moment of intimacy. In my article "The Path to the Other or about intimacy" I described in detail the mechanisms for avoiding intimacy considered in the Gestalt approach.

The most typical mechanisms for interrupting the separation process are as follows: projection, deflection, egotism, retroflection.

So, for example, one of the forms of deflection in a relationship is flirting. Flirting is a manipulative method of contact in which the other person is viewed as a means to satisfy the needs of the manipulator. It is not surprising that the meeting does not take place.

Another form of "non-meeting" with the Other is organized by means of the projection mechanism. In this case, the meeting does not take place, since the contact is not made with a real person, but in his projective way: "I blinded you out of what was."

One of the forms of the mechanism of projection in relationships is idealization. You can endlessly be in a relationship with the ideal image of a person, so you never really meet with him. Don Quixote, who passionately and ardently loved the image of Dulcinea invented by him, is a classic literary example of this. It is impossible to meet or part with an ideal image.

Retroflection as a mechanism for interrupting contact involves excessive and obsessive control, restraining oneself in a relationship, which does not allow a person to surrender to the contact process, and thereby freezes him.

Similar processes occur in egotism - ego hypertrophy, when my boundaries are locked and completely dissolve, I cannot plunge into what is happening with my head. A textbook example of a person gripped by egotism is a Chekhovian man in a case, a man buttoned up with all the buttons in the psychological sense.

WHEN IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SEPARE? PARTITION AND FEELINGS

The only possible way to leave is not to interrupt this process, but to immerse yourself in it as much as possible, to meet all the feelings and live them.

It turns out to be impossible to part when:

Feelings for an object of only one modality (positive or negative)

Feelings for the object are closely intertwined (love and hate, love and fear)

There are no feelings where they should be (first of all, to close people - mother, father)

Let's consider the highlighted theses in more detail.

1. Feelings for the object of only one modality

On one feeling, you can leave, but not part. You can take offense and not contact the Other. You can get angry and leave the Other. One can feel guilt or shame and avoid meeting the Other. One can hate the Other all his life, one can despise him, etc.

It is paradoxical that with all the options for leaving, parting with the Other does not occur. Any strong negative feeling - anger, hatred, resentment, etc., firmly holds people together. Holds not physically, but psychologically.

You can get angry - and leave, you can be offended - and leave. You can leave - no parting!

Likewise, it is impossible to part with just positive feelings. Parting with a loved one who is idealized is impossible. The psychotherapist in this kind of case tries to look for other feelings for the object.

There are many feelings in parting - anger, resentment, sadness, gratitude … Anger that they leave you, resentment for some unpleasant words, actions of another, sadness that this will not happen again, gratitude for everything that was good … feelings to live. Then you can leave with a sense of integrity, that there are no holes left in your soul.

2. Feelings for the object are closely intertwined

Sometimes feelings of different modality - love and hate (sado-maso), love and fear (co-dependent relationships) can be present simultaneously to one object. This situation usually occurs as a result of injury.

Then parting is also impossible: the victim cannot part with the rapist, co-dependent with the addict. An example of a victim-rapist relationship is Pontius Pilate and Yeshua from The Master and Margarita. They have been together for several centuries:

“Once one, then immediately another.

They will remember me - they will remember you right now!"

Paradoxically, the victim has the key to freedom!

The same dynamic can be observed in co-dependent relationships, in which it is impossible to leave or meet.

Intertwined couples can neither part nor establish a truly harmonious relationship.

3. Feelings are not where they should be

In the case when a person does not have feelings for people to whom they should be, (first of all, this applies to the people closest to him), we can assume that initially these feelings were too intense and painful and, therefore, turned out to be protective frozen so as not to face pain.

In the described situation, a person can consciously ignore the importance of a close friend for him (“he is not my father”, “she is not my mother”), but unconsciously show loyalty to him and “follow” this person. This kind of interweaving is fairly talked about in systemic family constellations.

SPARE TO LIVE

Psychotherapy teaches separation. Parting with the past, man, former self. Parting with illusions.

A person who cannot part cannot meet. To meet with another person, with another self. He is bogged down in the past and closed to the future. He chooses the past all the time …

This is what my next book "Parting with a Fairy Tale" is about, which I accompany with the following words:

For me, psychotherapy is, first of all, a project on growing up, parting with the world of childhood, parting with illusions, with a childish fairy-tale faith in magic, faith in omnipotent parents, in a kind, fair world, a world in which you just need to wait and believe, and they will certainly give you everything.

It’s sad that once you have to part with this fairy tale.

But this sadness is replaced by the joy of meeting an adult world, a world where you yourself can create this magic - the magic of your life, choose and build your fairy-tale world.