MEETING WITH OLD AGE. RELATIONSHIP PSYCHOLOGY (beginning)

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

There comes a time when loved ones become old, sick, weak, miserable, in need of constant supervision and care. The old age of close relatives challenges the whole habitual way of life, requires changing habits, giving up ambitions and plans, reconsidering their views on life, asking questions and sometimes finding answers only when everything is over.

In the changed conditions, when older family members cease to play their former role in it, become helpless and need increased attention, the role of psychological plasticity and flexibility of all family members increases.

This time is able to crystallize all the problems and unsolved problems of the old times. In some families, this time is seen as settling accounts, paying off debts, in others it is a chance for reconciliation, for even warmer and more sincere communication.

The last years of life are experienced by people in different ways. Some old people note that the decrease in social activity helped them to understand themselves deeper and really feel the words "Christ in me." Other old people are desperately clinging to life that is slowly slipping away from them.

Of course, everyone does not age the same way. In addition, most likely, there are “female” and “male” types of aging. The gender of the parents and their children is also significant. Mother and father do not play the same role in a person's life. The sex-role component affects the nature of the interaction between the elderly and their children.

For example, men who had a lot of power, were infallible authority in the family, held a high official position, embodying the classic "patriarchy" can be more gentle towards their daughters and be more tyrannical towards their sons. In the later years of life, the need for power awakens in them with renewed vigor. Will he lose his power? Is he still the grocery owner? The son of such an old father is perceived as a rival, an invader. An old man can form a derogatory opinion of his son and convince himself that he has no worthy heir. Such men seek to control their assets even from under the gravestone.

A woman who is too attached to her body and appearance can react more sharply to the radiating beauty and sexuality of her daughter, while being more “sweet” with her son.

The nature of the relationship between your aging relatives is also essential. The relationship between your parents can be both good and bad, the question is rather what they mean to each other. If they are too involved with each other, they are not interested in you. Sometimes the children of such parents can only watch from the sidelines as their parents grow old. One of my clients said that when her parents got old, she had no place in their lives. Coming to them on weekends, she felt unnecessary. This was unusual, since she had never felt like a "third person" before.

Even under the most favorable circumstances, the aging of a loved one can unbalance. It is difficult to predict who will be more persistent. The one who always knew how to cope with adversity, or the one who wandered through life, fell, from whom, even at the age of fifty, it still “smells like a nursery”. Sometimes, facing a crisis of aging relatives can awaken the dormant forces in the weakest and drive into a dead end those who have never been in it before.

How the aging person meets the challenges of old age influences the perception of those around him. But even if the old people are relatively healthy, clear-minded and picky, it is not easy for relatives. It is not easy from the realization that a loved one, perhaps the closest person, is rapidly rushing to his last meeting - a meeting with death. It is scary to understand that no one is covering you anymore, and now it is time to prepare yourself for this inevitable meeting. It is agonizing that most often it is impossible to truly share the feelings of a loved one.

Perhaps one of the most important conditions for maintaining a strong relationship between aging parents and children is the psychological mobility of parents, who must come to understand that it is necessary to give up the feeling of omnipotence and influence on children.

This is the time when the old hierarchy in relationships is reversed: aging parents begin to depend on their children. Many old people cannot do this, they persist in defending their power and continue to demand obedience. When a person who is incapable of basic self-care seeks to teach, this is annoying. In such cases, the possibilities for maneuvering are too limited: the best thing to do is to be humorous, at worst to emotionally distance or run away altogether. In some cases, the children of such parents freeze in the state of a small child (status quo) in order to be able to continue the relationship with the parents.

In some families, children who are tied in chains of debt repay these debts. Usually in such families from the very birth the child is accustomed to the idea that he "owes" his parents, and often this debt is unpaid. The psychology of the "debtor" does not make it possible to make a free choice and, in fact, to make this choice. Everything has long been determined: "They are everything to me in childhood, and now I am to them." Otherwise, guilt will not let you live in peace.

Many of us would find it easier to live if the people who give life to a human being treated this creature as a separate, independent and free life. But many parents all their lives are trying to arrange everything so that their child at every second of his life does not feel free from the overwhelming duty to his parents. Such parents doom both themselves and their children to revolve in the atmosphere of banking relations. Parents-lenders raise children - involuntary borrowers. The fate of such a child is either to pay off debts carefully, or to carry a criminal punishment in a cage out of guilt. But the debt can be unpaid, while there is no way to hide from the feeling of guilt.

In some families, the principle of fairness is based on the fact that if parents did not care for their children (or did it carelessly), then the children are free from caring for their parents. This situation has its own variations: in one of them, all participants agree with the principle of fairness of equal contributions, in others, parents believe that their children are still obliged to them.

In some cases, children see the aging of their parents as an opportunity for revenge: "Now you will feel the hard way how it feels to be weaker."

There are families in which for many years there have been conflicts, misunderstandings, mutual grievances and innuendo between relatives. Meeting old age can both intensify a long-term conflict, bring it to a new level of intensity, and soften it and even completely eliminate it. Some children of aging parents suddenly realize the insignificance of conflicts and their grievances, are able to rise above them. Old age becomes a factor that unites the family.

In families where conflicts have always been resolved without prejudice to each of its participants, respect and care were indispensable companions of all family crises, the aging of relatives is able to unite the family even more.

Thus, we can say that the encounter with old age has several options for encountering it:

- encounter with old age and fear;

- encountering old age and paying off debts, or observing the principle of equal contributions;

- encounter with old age and love.

All this is very approximate, there are many options and their shades in life. In addition, all of this can intertwine, creating new forms of experience.

On the shoulders of relatives a heavy, for some unbearable burden falls. Old age and all its companions are not beauty, not charm, not lightness, but often horror, pain and despair. Being close to an aging relative is watching the cruel, inexorable monologue of a loved one with death, his loss of strength, his disorientation, his growing stupidity, sometimes cruelty.

Old age is often "ugly" - stupid, banal moralizing, ruthlessly categorical, selfish, arrogant. And she often "smells bad". And the worst thing is that arrogance is combined with this bad smell, and the old man does not notice it. And all this needs to be endured somehow, somehow decided, something must be undertaken.

Love is the basis for this period to be less painful. But even if love wins, drama is inevitable. So, in the film by M. Haneke with the same name "Love" it is shown what happens to a person who sees the suffering of a loved one, when "love as a feeling can be no less violence than something else."