Taste Familiar From Childhood

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

Taste familiar from childhood

The relationship of such people is "tied" to the poles -

either they are passionate and unbearable, either boring and unbearable.

The metaphor of complementary relationships …

I have already written more than once that the child's greatest need is the need for parental love, and the price that the child is willing to pay for this love. (Frozen Life, Curve Love, Snowflake: Essays on Self-Love, etc.)

Parents are not always able to "give out" love to their children in its purest form. Due to their personality traits and injuries parental love can be with all sorts of "additives".

The above can be represented as a metaphor: parental love is like milk. But milk, for some reason, is not pure, but with an admixture.

The need for milk in a small child is vital. Without it, he simply will not survive. And he doesn't have to choose here - he drinks what they give. Only this is milk with an admixture. Such "additions" can be control, violence, incest, rejection, devaluation, criticism, etc.

A child, not being able to receive "pure" milk, eventually gets used to such milk with additives. He had never tasted anything else in his life. He actually does not know that there could be something else. Even if he manages to accidentally taste normal milk, it will seem tasteless and insipid to him.

He is used to his milk. This is "a taste familiar from childhood!" And this taste will remain with him for life.

Having matured, such a child will look for a partner, whose love will remind him of love (in our metaphor milk), familiar from childhood. He will look for a partner whose love tastes like the love of his parents. I wrote about this kind of relationship a lot earlier on this site (Complementary marriage, Broken trough of complementary marriage, etc.)

And as a result, build a variety of abusive relationship (psychological, physical, financial, sexual), in which violence, cruelty, manipulation, insults, humiliation, total control, accusations, intimidation, criticism can be present as an "addition" … toxic "impurities" you can go on.

In my therapeutic practice, these kinds of stories are often encountered:

Client K., a 40-year-old woman, in the course of therapy comes to the realization that all the relationships that she builds with men have similar features. She comes across men who are emotionally unbalanced, prone to violence. Having fallen in love with a man and emotionally close to him, she endures outbursts of his aggression, justifying this by the fact that at other times he can be gentle and caring. During therapy, she discovers the similarities between her partners and her father, a man of mood who loved her, but could at any moment burst into rage.

Client N., male, 45 years old, problematic relationship with his spouse. In contact, he lacks attentiveness, respectful attitude. The wife behaves harshly, often gives out emotional outbursts, as a result of which he moves away for a while, but later again begins to approach. And so on until the next emotional explosion. The three previous women were similar in contact with the current spouse. The client describes his mother in relation to him as rather tough, authoritarian and unstable, with constant expectation of aggressive attacks from her and the inability to "find" a safe distance.

Client S., a 50-year-old man, is deeply depressed after parting with his wife. In a relationship with his ex-wife, he devoted himself entirely to her. He lived for his wife, forgetting about himself, trying to do everything for her in the hope of getting recognition from her and experiencing the feeling of being needed by her. He remembers his mother as a distant, non-included, whose attention could only be obtained by performing some heroic deeds for her.

There are many such customer stories to list.

People with such problems choose a partner for a reason. They unknowingly "choose" him for intimate relationships. The right partner is caught by some kind of invisible, inexplicable locator. And here sometimes you don't even need words. Attraction occurs at a non-verbal level: intonation, facial expressions, gaze, posture. And sympathy flares up. Here it is - Mine!

A distinctive feature of such a relationship is their dependence and reproducibility (repeatability). Despite all the toughness of what is happening in them, it is not easy to get out of there. If this succeeds, then the newly created relationship with a high degree of probability will be repeated with another partner.

Another feature of such a relationship is their passion. They have a lot of emotional energy, contradictions, strong feelings. Passions differ in polarity - I love and hate, I cannot live without him and is ready to kill … There is no place here for "quiet" warm feelings. Feelings are intense and intense.

The habit of these kinds of intense feelings leads to the fact that the feelings of the middle spectrum are not captured. Such a person who finds himself in a relationship with a partner functioning in the zone of "average feelings" does not feel life. She is boring for him, empty and not interesting.

The relationship of such people is "tied" to the poles - they are either passionate and unbearable, or boring and unbearable.

The person appears to be doomed: he is not able to be happy in close relationships.

In the course of therapy, it becomes possible to become aware of one's early deficit patterns of expectations in relation to loved ones, to discover them in real relationships and to form a new experience of intimate relationships, free of "additives" and "impurities" that poison intimacy.

Many thanks to all my grateful readers!