Significant Other As An Echo Of Distant Childhood

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

Reflecting on the importance of an object as a defining and structuring basis of the psyche, I understand that the search for a meaningful other is an echo of distant childhood. To one degree or another, a similar problem is inherent in the majority. When it did not happen, when the child was unlucky to be next to a kind, wise, understanding adult. And the potential of a child's attachment to an adult is inherent in nature and has tremendous power.

It is instinctively designed to ensure survival, it cannot be canceled. It cannot be canceled in childhood; the evolution of the species is built on it. This is the ancient structure of the psyche given to us from the very moment we appeared on this earth. It is needed by the species as a whole and every individual needs it to survive. The structure does not have emotions, it has something similar to a quantitative measurement of the intensity of experiences that the psyche allows. It can somehow determine the maximum limit, after which the "off" button is triggered.

It is she who turns off sensitivity and cancels emotions. It works at the moment of danger, in the case when the degree of experience of emotions threatens the destruction of the psyche and the entire body. This is the point of canceling yourself. And this process takes place in one's own psyche. Yes, under the influence of insurmountable external conditions, but in their own psyche. The process is designed to keep the individual alive and nothing more. It has no other function.

Once triggered, it has no retroactive effect. It is difficult for him to find the "off" button - to re-launch feelings and emotions, allow himself to be, become a support for himself, recognize his victories and his dignity, live based on his feelings, live his life. This process turns on automatically, and the reverse action requires large conscious costs and is rarely carried out by a person in the course of his life. More often, there is an adaptation of a truncated version of oneself, an ideal image and compensation at the expense of others, to a greater extent at the expense of one's own children, the so-called translation of parental attitudes from generation to generation.

This mechanism is difficult to reverse in adulthood if it has not been fully worked out in childhood. What do you mean "worked out to the end"? The state of childhood attachment is a reciprocal process: the child is completely dependent at the moment of birth and is attached to his significant other, his task is to perceive, and the adult is obliged to fill this child's attachment with what will provide the basis for the further independent life of a person - support, recognition, confidence in safety peace, clear boundaries that ensure security. Only then, having matured, a person painlessly separates from his significant adult and goes on a free journey through life, only then can he become a full-fledged significant adult to his children.

If on the part of the adult there was no investment in this process, then the process of fusion works like a flywheel detached from the rest of the mechanism. He twists and turns without taking into account the time and conditions, he stays with a person for many years or always. And here the independent work of an adult is already needed to find his own freedom within his psyche, a process that has worried psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, psychotherapists for many years. I am sure that in adulthood this process is more conscious and richer in insights, and therefore, richer in freedom at a new level.