2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
The family cycle begins when a man and a woman meet. It is a meeting of two individuals who seek to satisfy personal needs at the expense of the other. We enter into relationships overly dependent. We strive in a partner to get everything that we lack, thus losing the ability to stand on our own two feet. We are unconsciously looking for that half for ourselves, which is most suitable for personal frustrated and unconscious needs.
Not all couples converge on each other in the same way. Some are attracted by someone's thoughts, they seem exciting, interesting and so understandable for us. Other couples may find that in the early stages of dating, they felt a connection on a spiritual level and there was an ease and ease in communication, warm affection and love feelings. Most begin with an explicit physical attraction that captures them with all their passion.
At this stage, it is still difficult for us to imagine that there are many lessons ahead of us that can only be learned through experience. Love is a very difficult feeling, because it carries the load of hopes from previous love experiences, including childhood. In men, this may be an attitude towards the mother, who could not fully cope with her maternal functions. In women, these are associations with a father who was kind or evil, attentive or detached. We may feel strong attraction to someone who has a similar life experience or trauma. And indeed it is. One of my clients tried to build a relationship with a man who, in all its parameters, fell short of the picture of an ideal family man, but they had the same disease that brought them together. Unconscious motives prevailed over obvious flaws. If our unconscious insists that we are doing the right thing, then consciousness can only rationalize the choice made. Our relationships reflect all the unfinished processes within ourselves.
In the light of romantic love, the flaws of the other look vague or insignificant. The power of love is not equal to its depth. We can fall passionately in love with the image of a person, although in reality the person and the image are very different. The whole trouble lies in our being blinded by our own projections; we rarely see another as he is, appreciating his depth and nobility.
It's like merging our partner's figure with the background of our crush on him. But gradually the boundaries of the other person become clearer, and rose-colored glasses begin to break glass inward. At first it seems to us that the partner is still good, but…. If you remove it a little there, and add a little bit elsewhere, then nothing will come out. For the ideal will come down.
But as soon as we start to change something in a relationship, conflicts are inevitable. Relationships with partners are a chance to rewrite your relationship scenarios and discover your ability to love. The stage comes when you need to give up the usual attitude to each other, views, rules, projections and get to know each other again.
Love is the meeting of "I" and "You". If a couple continues to try to preserve the previous format of relations, to return "vivid feelings" - its development stops. The couple either declares a truce, comforting themselves with the thought that a bad peace is better than war. You can convince yourself that, in general, the relationship is fine, but in particular, they are simply unbearable. Or they fight to the death, taking out of the battle a lot of grievances, claims and misunderstandings. In fact, this is a struggle for integrity, which, as it seems to us, was taken away from us by a partner. That the first, that the second option does not save the day. Attempts to “preserve relationships” lead to the accumulation of mistakes that hinder the development of relationships and lead to stagnation and degradation. This state of affairs can last for years, and family life seems like a suitcase without a handle. Or leads to a rupture, which is more common. The constant search for love and the pursuit of it alienates us from it.
"The ability to love and forgive is not a function of the object of love, but a function of love itself"
E. Fromm
The onset of the next stage in the evolution of a relationship becomes a traumatic experience. We begin to move away from each other and realize the presence of distance, we feel disunity and complications in relationships. Isolation and loneliness occurs. The enthusiastic and bright is replaced by the mundane and everyday. The relationship turns into a sad drama.
It is during this period that it seems to us that love has died. There is no more admiration, we cease to see the divine principle in the other. There is no sense of novelty and magic, there is no former spontaneity. The state of light intoxication was replaced by a hangover syndrome.
At first glance, this looks like a painful experience, but in fact it is about the expansion of consciousness. The cost is high: loss of the ideal, suffering and frustration, emotional disconnection. It seems that the energy to maintain a relationship is no longer there. There is no past spark, something that would help revive feelings, return sexual attraction and those people in love that we once were. It's time to rewind and see what tasks we entered into a relationship with, what led us to such a result, and whether a partner can combine the functions that we want to assign to him.
Man's worst enemies would not wish him the troubles that his own thoughts can bring him.
Eastern proverb
The best thing to do in this situation is to stay calm. Return from unconscious motives to awareness. Accept what is happening as a fact and take the path of personal growth through responsibility. Being responsible does not mean being owed, it means being able to take responsibility for yourself. You will have to re-learn how to experience your feelings and express them in a healthy way. Without trying to replace your real "I" with a false one and see the same in the other. It is important to accept that you will not be able to return to the start, and you will not enter the same river twice. The task of this stage is to transform the pain and suffering from the past falling in love into an opportunity for personal growth.
Do not suffer, watching the fading of the divine appearance of your chosen one, falling into a banal routine and a state of hopelessness. Or even completely abandon the objectionable "God".
The more important relationships become, the less free manifestations in them. A standard situation when a couple creates the appearance of love for others, and inside the couple there is a scorched field of mutual grievances. Over the years, we cease to see a unique person in a partner, with his personal history and only his inherent qualities. We see in front of us the mask of a "spouse" in relation to whom we have accumulated a mass of beliefs, expectations and requirements. We completely forget about the person with whom we once fell in love, we do not see the person. The feeling of novelty and lightness vanished, leaving the stamps “husband” and “wife”, with a huge list of functions and responsibilities. “You don’t love me”, “you don’t care about my feelings”, “you only think about yourself” - people write such inscriptions on their partner's masks and read the same messages every day, making them even more convinced that they are right. They do not see the slightest manifestations of tenderness and care at close range, but what they receive is taken for granted.
It is important to learn to look behind the mask and notice a stranger there: a unique person, with a colossal inner world, with his childhood memories, dreams and secrets, beliefs and traumas. A person who was once small, unspoiled, who looked at the world trustingly and, speaking about whom with friends, you would call him by name, and not “husband”, as you are used to over the years. Realize that there is no such second person, there has not been and will never be again.
It's time to get to know each other again.
An immature person falls in love, mature people create love. Love is a flame that man has learned to kindle. The flame sparks, dies down, and reignites as we learn to care for it. Our efforts return tenfold. Falling in love begins as euphoria, and her life is short. The enduring presence of love is a great achievement and the result of mutual efforts.
Every day we are faced with a choice: reject a partner or choose him again. Love can be expressed in words, but love is not words.
Mature love in the little things. It manifests itself in care and anxiety for the health of a loved one, in a cup of warm tea, brought to a loved one at a time of fatigue. It is invisible to others, but it is felt on the skin. It manifests itself in the brought products and instructions to put on a hat in windy weather. And even if it is devoid of the former madness, it gives a feeling of security and comfort. There is a place for care and assistance in living with mental wounds. Love manifests itself in every event of daily life, it does not need a superhuman scale.
Love is not a state, but a process and implies constant work. Maintaining the process nature of love gives a relationship a challenge and an opportunity to improve, improve itself. This process can last infinitely long. Meet with a person every day, giving up the sense of obligation. This understanding makes the relationship alive and long.
To love means to go from beginning to end the entire experience of connecting with another person. This means seeing a real person in a loved one and appreciating him for his ordinariness, flaws, and originality. If we can wade through the fog of projections in which we spend most of our lives, then we begin to perceive the ordinary as exceptional. Such love lasts a long time and exists along with the ordinary and everyday life.
Relationships become happy not because people get along so well with each other, but because they stubbornly overcome those moments where they don't get along. This is the ability to put the important in brackets, and to take out everything secondary and not focus.
Relationships start with falling in love, but they don't always end in love. This is the story of the collision of the divine and the earthly. These are not opposite, but two sides of human nature. Transition from one state to another. Painful lesson. If at first glance it seems to us that we have been deprived of something important, then over time it may turn out that we have also gained a lot. We will never be the same. But we can re-create the relationship. This is the natural cycle of life: day and night, life and death, falling in love - love. There is no life from scratch. A blank slate is a choice of how to continue the recording made yesterday. It will start with resentment and accusations, or with a decision to postpone conclusions and start looking for opportunities to develop relationships. It's up to us to decide.
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