Emotional Addiction In Relationships

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

Now this problem is very common in modern society. In my practice, I very often have to hear the phrase “I cannot live without him” from both men and women. Strong jealousy, constant claims to a partner, the desire to be together 24 hours a day are a manifestation of emotional dependence. The flip side of addictive relationships is loneliness, when, tired of the pain, a person decides to avoid an emotionally close relationship and becomes detached. Such loneliness is painful enough and takes a lot of mental strength, as well as emotionally dependent relationships

Emotional addiction is usually formed in early childhood. The first and most significant relationship for a newborn baby is with the mother. How they stack up affects emotional well-being and the ability to build relationships in the future. If in the first years of life the mother was emotionally cold and detached in relation to the child, deficiency forms in him - an insatiable need for mother's love and acceptance. In such a situation, the child desperately tries to get an emotional response from the “inaccessible object”. Often, in response to attempts to attract the attention of the mother and arouse warmth in her soul, the child receives aggression and irritation. This strong reaction, however negative, is much better for him than indifference.

In the 50s of the 20th century, an experiment with mice was carried out in the USA. One group of mice was hand-fed and stroked, the second group was fed through an automatic machine and poked with needles, and the third group of mice was in sensory deprivation: no one approached them and there were no external stimuli around. The food was the same for all three groups of mice. So, the results of the experiment showed that the first group developed successfully, gained weight well and was benevolent. The second group, which was poked with needles, also developed and gained weight, but was extremely aggressive. The third group developed poorly, the mice did not gain weight, were in a lethargic and depressed state, and some individuals even died.

In human relationships, everything is much more complicated. If in the experiment with mice it is only about attention and care, then in human relations everything is different. Here, first of all, we are not talking about formal care and guardianship, but about the fact that the factor of unconscious attitude plays a leading role in the formation of the child's personality. For example, a mother can be very caring and provide excellent nursing care for a baby. But if she does not feel at the same time an emotional connection with him, being in postpartum depression or emotional deficiency and dependence on another object (the parental figure, the first significant relationship or her husband rejecting her), this breaks emotional contact. Unconsciously, the child reacts extremely sharply to such a situation and in every possible way tries to get for himself that warmth and emotional acceptance that he so needs. Unlike an adult, a child has no way to get away from contact with his mother and begin to receive satisfaction from another object, because he is completely dependent on her.

An adult does not have such dependence, any healthy adult can survive on its own, but the habit of enduring and feeling dependence remains. This habit is well confirmed by an experiment with rats, the essence of which is as follows: the enclosure where the rats live was divided in half by an orange stripe, through which an electric current was sent. Trying to get to the other half of the enclosure, the rats received an electric shock. After a while, they stopped approaching the border. After this strip with the current was removed, the rats still continued to walk only in their own half of the enclosure, despite the fact that there was food on the other half. In zoopsychology, this is called "learned helplessness." In the early relationship between mother and child, a pattern of behavior is formed when a person chooses the same emotionally detached and inaccessible object to satisfy his needs. And then the children's drama, in which the child feels that he will not survive without the mother's object, is repeated with the same force, but in a different setting.

As a psychologist, I am often asked this question: if we are talking about a relationship with a mother in early childhood, then why do women develop emotionally dependent relationships with men? Firstly, each of us, regardless of the brightness of the external expression of belonging to the same sex, has both male and female qualities in his psychological portrait. Perhaps some of the qualities of the object on which the woman depends has something in common with the maternal figure. But it also happens in another way, when the maternal object is shifted to the paternal figure. This may be due to the fact that the father is more emotionally gentle and responsive to the child's needs than the mother. Then the woman tries to get from the man whom she chooses as the object of dependence, what she should have received from her mother, but due to circumstances she received it from her father.

Speaking of all this, the question arises: why do people suffering from emotional addiction choose for themselves for a relationship the very partner who refuses to satisfy their needs? As a result of the work of long-term psychotherapy with emotionally dependent people, after a few months illusions disappear from them and the realization comes that if the object of their dependence were devoted to them, like a dog and would run after them, they would quickly lose all interest in him. In fact, they admit that it is the coldness and emotional unavailability of their partner that attracts them.

In addition to choosing the object of dependence, addicted people have a mechanism called projective identification. Its essence is such that a person projects certain qualities onto his communication partner and, with his expectations, makes him be so. For example, a woman calls a man indifferent and callous and reacts to any of his manifestations as if he were really indifferent and insensitive, not noticing his positive manifestations. And a man, being in such a relationship, after a while begins to really feel that way and behave accordingly. Like, that waited and get it!

The question arises: why is this happening and what to do about it? The reason for the tendency to emotional dependence is the personality structure that forms in early childhood and is a "sticky libido" and a weak "I". As for the psychotherapy of emotionally dependent individuals, rational psychotherapy aimed at understanding the causes does not give much effect.

With emotional dependence, long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy is rather indicated, the main tasks of which will be:

1) strengthening the "I", i.e. psychological maturation, strengthening through the search for internal resources the ability to cope with life's difficulties;

2) restoration of internal communication with an inaccessible parent object.

As a result of successful psychotherapy, a person begins to feel his own integrity, confidence in his abilities, the ability to cope with loneliness and the ability to build more mature relationships in which he can show and receive love.