"Where Are You?" Instead Of "hello"

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

An excerpt from the book "Falling in Love, Love, Addiction", written by two Christian psychologists - priest Andrei Lorgus and his colleague Olga Krasnikova.

ADDICTION

"Where are you?" instead of "hello"; "what's happened?" instead of “how are you doing?”; “I feel bad without you” instead of “I feel good with you”; “You ruined my whole life” instead of “I really need your support”; "I want to make you happy" instead of "I'm so happy next to you" …

The addiction is audible. Although few people pay attention to the meaning of what was said and notice a fine line between words of love and words-symptoms of addictive relationships. You don't have to be a specialist to learn to discern when it comes to control and wanting to have another.

A mother who “put her whole life on her son”; a wife who constantly “keeps her finger on the pulse” of her husband; a man who, after the death of his wife, condemns: “I have no reason to live any longer” …

One of the goals of this book is to show that addiction is often disguised as love. Why is it confused with love, why is addiction preferred over love?

Addiction is defined by many psychologists as an obsessive state of irresistible attraction to something or someone. This attraction is virtually uncontrollable.

An attempt to abandon the subject of attraction leads to difficult, painful emotional, and sometimes physical experiences. But if you do not take any measures to reduce addiction, it will progress and, in the end, can completely take over and subjugate a person's life. At the same time, a person is, as it were, in an altered state of consciousness, which allows him to get away from those problems of real life that seem intolerable to him.

This benefit, most often hidden from consciousness, makes it difficult to abandon addiction, despite the fact that the cost of maintaining and aggravating addiction can be the loss of relationships, health and even life.

Addiction is a personality disorder, a personality problem and, according to some experts, can be considered a disease. Often in the research of physicians and psychologists, the emphasis is placed on the latter definition: addiction is understood as a disease, and its origin is seen in heredity, biochemistry, enzymes, hormones, etc.

And yet there are areas in psychology that treat this problem differently. In the book "Liberation from Codependency" (Moscow: Klass, 2006) Berry and Janey Winehold write: "The conventional medical model claims that codependency is a hereditary disease … and is incurable." "We believe that codependency is an acquired disorder resulting from developmental arrest (delay) …"

We can also cite as an example the opinion of the Russian doctor-narcologist, Professor Valentina Dmitrievna Moskalenko, whose books "Addiction: a family disease" (M.: Per Se, 2006) and "When there is too much love" (M.: Psychotherapy, 2007) they also open not a medical, but a psychological model, despite the fact that the author is a narcologist.

VD Moskalenko proposes to understand codependency in this way: "A codependent person is one who is completely absorbed in controlling the behavior of another person and does not at all care about satisfying his own vital needs."

Two models - medical and psychological - have different understanding of the origin of addiction and related codependency.… At the center of the medical model is biochemistry and genes, at the center of the other is personality problems.

We will not address the issue of correlating the two models. Let's just say that both are right in something. The medical model is necessary for understanding the clinical aspect of addiction as a state of the organism. A psychological model is necessary to understand how and where codependent relationships arise, how dependent personalities are formed in them, what psychotherapeutic strategies can be built.

These two models can be viewed as complementary, not mutually exclusive, opposite

Magical explanations of the origin of emotional dependence, such as the evil eye, damage, love spell, karmic connections, etc., which at one time were so fashionable to get involved in, we will ignore, as contrary to our scientific, value and religious beliefs.

So we see that addiction is defined in many different ways - as a disease, with the concept of symptoms and syndromes; as a special condition, into which a person fell as a result of psychological trauma or with a deficiency of some kind of relationship in the family. But it seems to us not so important to define the concept of dependence as to understand the following:

First: a dependent person is one who, completely or for most of his life, is focused on himself not directly, but indirectly - through another; oriented - that is, it depends on someone else's opinion, behavior, attitude, mood, etc.

And second: an addict is one who does not care about his true needs (physical and psychological), and therefore experiences constant stress due to the dissatisfaction of his own needs (this state in psychology is called frustration). Such a person does not know what he wants, does not try to realize his own responsibility for satisfying his needs and lives, as it were, in spite of himself, for his own evil, if I may say so, expecting or demanding care from others.

The word "addiction" (addiction, addictive behavior) is now used in a variety of combinations: chemical addiction (alcoholism, drug addiction), drug addiction, shopaholism, food addiction (eating disorders), adrenaline addiction (addiction to thrills), addiction to work (workaholism), games (gambling addiction) or a computer, etc.

The fact that all these addictions are of great interest to specialists, are studied and described in detail, is explained simply - any kind of addiction has a huge impact both on the life of a person who suffers from it, and on the life of those who are in his environment.

In the psychological literature there is a special term "codependency", which describes dependence not on alcohol, drugs, etc., but on the most dependent loved one. In this case, "the codependent's own personality - his" I "- is replaced by the personality and problems of the person on whom he depends."

Not only scientists are engaged in the problem of preventing and overcoming addiction - recently, self-help groups of alcoholics anonymous, drug addicts, gambling addicts, codependents have been increasing (for example, there are groups "Adult children of alcoholics", ALANON for relatives of drug addicts, etc.).

Not a single social stratum, not a single culture can boast of the absence of manifestations in one form or another of various addictions. So, few people know that in some dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church, groups of alcoholics anonymous are being created for clergy, because this problem has long ceased to be "personal", "private" - it concerns everyone.

There is another important aspect that must be taken into account when discussing addiction tendencies - this is the influence of social stereotypes that support and justify addictive behavior.

For example, respect for workaholism: “What a worthy person! Burned out at work!”; justification of alcoholism: “He has such a hard life / difficult job / bad wife - how can he not drink!”; admiration for sex addiction: "A real man, macho, alpha male!" and alcoholism: “The man is strong! How much can he drink! "; glorifying codependent relationships: “I am you, you are me, and we don’t need anyone” (popular song), etc.

It is difficult for an immature (infantile) person to resist such a "hypnosis of the generally accepted", it is easier to go with the flow, to be "in trend." In our counseling practice, we have to constantly deal directly or indirectly with the topic of addiction and codependency.

Analyzing the experience accumulated by us and other psychologists, I would like to understand how, when and under what conditions a personality's tendency to addiction is formed and developed. In this book, we will limit ourselves to describing emotional dependence on another person and try to outline areas of research that will provide food for further thought.

CONDITIONS FOR FORMING DEPENDENCE

What factors contribute to the emergence of codependent behavior and the formation of a dependent personality?

There are many such factors and they can all be divided into several categories: historical - concern everyone; social factors - concern some strata of society; family-clan - relate to the history and life of my family; and personal - concern only my experience.

We have not seen any serious scientific research on the genetic predestination, “innateness” of codependent behavior - scientists pay more attention to chemical addictions than to emotional ones.

We assume that we can rather say that the predisposition to emotional dependence is absorbed by the child "with mother's milk", that is, it is transmitted not at the genetic level, but through behavior, emotional reactions and ways of building relationships in the family, where the child grows up and learns the world. Therefore, we do not consider the genetic factor here.

Historical factors in different peoples, these factors can take different forms and have different reasons, but their essence will be similar.

The formation of codependent behavior is led by the distortion of the child's childhood, which always occurs if society as a whole comprehend some kind of tragedy. These are wars and revolutions, tragedies of a spontaneous order (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, etc.), epidemics, social changes and economic crises, and, of course, such shocks and tragedies that took place in the fate of our Fatherland - persecution, persecution, genocide, repression, etc.

There is hardly a family in our country whose members can say that no one in the family was repressed, dispossessed, was not under suspicion or under investigation. In some families, up to 90 percent of not only men, but also women were repressed. And in such a family, in such a family, several generations bear the consequences of the terrible events experienced. There is hardly a family in Russia that did not suffer the tragedy of losing a man in the Great Patriotic War, and now the Afghan, Chechen and other wars have been added to this. These are the historical factors that, to one degree or another, are present in the life of any nation.

In difficult, tragic periods of history, peoples and families rally to survive, and begin to very much depend on each other. It is difficult for people who are accustomed from childhood to the strategy of survival to reorganize to a "peaceful" life. Many continue to fight or be afraid, hide, defend themselves, look for enemies where they do not exist, sometimes even among their relatives. When trust in the world is undermined, people also find it difficult to trust. But loneliness is like death (in hard times one cannot survive).

The survival strategy dictates its own laws, one of them is “codependent relationships are beneficial”. So it turns out: it’s bad with you and bad without you. In fairness, it should be noted that the family's reaction to stressful situations depends not only on the type and strength of stress, but also on the relationship that has developed in the family.

There are healthy families with sufficient psychological and spiritual resources to help them survive almost any crisis. And the childhood of a child in such a family can be quite happy, despite all the difficulties experienced (of course, except for situations of mortal danger, as well as the loss of one or both parents).

Social factors: social environment, social stereotypes and attitudes, norms and rules, the system of values adopted in society - all these factors can contribute or, on the contrary, hinder the formation and development of the individual.

Here is an example - in Russia for a long time it was accepted that both parents should work, and children were brought up in kindergartens from a very early age. The norm of early socialization of children was morally justified: "Collectivism is more important than individual development of the individual." In Soviet society, such qualities as obedience, obedience, lack of initiative were encouraged, it was calmer "to be like everyone else and not stick out." A carefree, carefree childhood was not welcomed, as many thought that the earlier a child is taught to take responsibility and the sooner he learns the hardships of life, the easier it will be for him to adapt to the complexities of an adult (joyless, exhausting) existence. Modern psychologists say the opposite: it is very difficult for a person who is deprived of a joyful, carefree childhood to grow up.

Another example: in Soviet times, it was believed that it was enough to have one child to provide him with all the “best” (usually material), which parents were deprived of in their childhood. Families were child-centered: "All the best for children!" Many children were condemned: “Why breed poverty ?!”, abortions were justified, although later the government began to encourage the birth of children: benefits for large families, the title “Mother Heroine”, etc.

Children in such social conditions, as a rule, grew up infantile and selfish, with inadequate (hyper- or hypo-) responsibility, which, in turn, was the “foundation” for the development of various kinds of addictions and codependent relationships. Today social conditions and moral guidelines are changing, becoming, perhaps, more diverse, even polar. But it must be borne in mind that social factors, unlike historical ones, do not affect all families.

There are many different social strata and groups in society, which in the same historical period may be in different social and economic circumstances, follow different norms and rules. War, epidemic, natural disasters do not spare anyone, and the rules adopted in a particular society do not apply to everyone.

The third group of factors is family and generic. The historical era and the social structure of society have a great influence on the life of the clan and family. Under the influence of external conditions, family scenarios and rules are formed, which in turn are reflected in the development of a particular personality, first of all, on the psychological health of childhood.

We use the concept of "childhood" in the broad sense of the word - not as an example of one child or one family, but as a whole. Family factors affecting childhood are well understood. If in a child's life his mother and father are happy with each other (just in the human sense), and nothing plunges them into depression, or fear and anxiety for their home, for the future of their child, for their parents, if in one or to a different degree, a married couple feels stability, the joy of their being, the joy of their marriage and parenthood, then the child has conditions for the dynamic and healthy development of his personality.

On the contrary, as soon as anxiety, apprehension and fear spread in society, then it can hardly be said that any family that will belong to this community can have a happy (from a psychological point of view) childhood. Few can, after analyzing their childhood, say that there were no such events in it. Social cataclysms lead to an increased level of anxiety in women, to tension, which results in inadequate aggressiveness or, on the contrary, complete passivity in men.

The child sees a frustrated, constantly alarmed mother, a father, venting anger on family members or going into a binge from his own impotence and inability to change something. Looking at such a bleak picture, it is difficult for children to remain carefree and cheerful. There is a feeling of guilt for an incomprehensible reason, a desire to save mom and dad and a ban on your own happiness - you cannot afford to be happy when there were no happy people in your family.

A poor social environment gives rise to fear in many. And this fear is passed on to children. We can see from our children how they are afraid of the same thing as we are, although there are no longer any objective reasons for their fear. And this is anxiety that is passed down from generation to generation - we infect our children with it.

But, as we wrote above, not everyone responds in the same way to the same events and conditions. Of course, we have different families, different tribal systems, which have their own unique experience of living certain events - happy or tragic. Families differ in many criteria and parameters: in composition, number of children, in health, in belonging to a social stratum and professional community, in moral and value guidelines, etc., etc.

The fate of each family member in some way affects the life of the entire family and individuals. Early deaths, captivity, deportation, executions, suicides, abortions, abandoned children, rape, divorce, betrayal, criminal offenses (theft, murder, etc.), imprisonment, alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness - all this imposes a serious imprint for many generations.

The most difficult thing for descendants is to accept in their hearts without condemnation and curses all members of their kind and to thank them for their life, which has come at a very high price. The works of Anne Schutzenberger, Bert Hellinger, Ekaterina Mikhailova, Lyudmila Petranovskaya and many other psychologists show what the most complex interweaving in the fate of a person can affect such facts of ancestral life.

But there is also a joyful inheritance: lasting happy marriages, love for children, vitality and optimism, exploits, strong faith, virtuous life, priestly ministry, the good fame of one or more family members. Such an inheritance not only allows you to be proud of your own belonging to your family, but also gives strength, inspires.

In addition to the life history of the genus, family scenarios belong to the group of family-generic factors.that contain established traditions and expectations for each family member and are passed down from generation to generation, as well as anti-scenarios - attempts (usually unsuccessful) to avoid a scenario set by previous generations.

For example, a typical female scenario for our society: “to marry without love - out of pity (or fear of loneliness) for the first one who“turned up”, paid attention, and put his life on the salvation and admonition of an unlucky husband, constantly sacrificing his needs and the well-being of children.

In this case, for example, the daughter of such a woman will try to implement one of the anti-scenarios: not to get married; get divorced as soon as something starts to displease in the relationship; to marry a man who himself will begin to re-educate and remake her to fit his ideal, etc., in any case - to end his life alone with a grudge against fate.

The form in the anti-scenario changes, but the essence remains - disrespect for the individual (one's own and the partner), inability to love, unwillingness to take on adequate responsibility - all this leads to codependent relationships.

As Ann Schutzenberger wrote: “We continue the chain of generations and pay off the debts of the past, and so on until the 'slate board' is clean."Invisible loyalty" regardless of our desire, regardless of our awareness pushes us to repeat a pleasant experience or traumatic events, or an unfair and even tragic death, or its echoes."

But we will not be so categorical - it is really useless to fight family scenarios, but you can analyze them, take the best (and there is something valuable in each scenario) and at least slightly change the essence inherent in them.

Family rules can also be attributed to family-generic factors. - vowels and unspoken, known to all, given by culture, as well as unique for each individual family, known only to members of this family.

Family rules, as well as stereotypes of interaction and family myths, are beautifully described in Anna Varga's book about family systemic psychotherapy: “Rules are how the family decided to relax and manage their household, how they will spend their money, and who exactly can to do it in the family, and who does not; who buys, who does the laundry, who cooks, who praises, and who mostly scolds; who forbids and who allows. In a word, this is the distribution of family roles and functions, certain places in the family hierarchy, what is generally allowed and what is not, what is good and what is bad … The law of homeostasis requires the preservation of family rules in a constant form. Changing family rules is a painful process for family members. Breaking the rules is a dangerous thing, very dramatic."

There are many examples of family rules: “There were no lazy people in our family, you CANNOT have a rest, or you can only when everything is done (that is, never)”; “Young people MUST obey, ALWAYS do everything, as the elders say, DO NOT argue with them”; "Men SHOULD NOT show their feelings, they SHOULD NOT be afraid, cry, be weak (that is, alive)"; "Others' interests are ALWAYS more important than your own - die, but help your comrade."

The violator will face "punitive sanctions", up to and including excommunication from the family. This makes changing family rules very difficult, although possible. Any rule contains a grain of truth, so you should not abandon it altogether. The trouble is that rules, taken literally, taken without awareness, and used without reason, can do more harm than good, and sometimes make life unbearable.

It is important to be aware of family rules and attitudes, treat them with healthy criticism and use them adequately. Otherwise, blindly following the family rules, you can imperceptibly find yourself in a dependent relationship.

We all belong to our family (even those who do not know their own parents), we are all somehow connected by invisible threads, blood ties with our ancestors, near and far. And we cannot deny that being included in the generic system is a very important factor that certainly influences the formation of a dependent personality.

The fourth group of factors is the personal experience of a particular person, so unique, sometimes whimsical. Not only the conditions in which the personality develops are unique, but the subjective perception of reality is completely unpredictable by anyone and in no way. Different people perceive the same events in a special way, interpreting them in their own way and correlating them with the same unique personal experience already acquired at the time of the event.

Moreover, one and the same person can react to the same situation in different ways, depending on his health, mood and other things. He can forever remember what happened as a misfortune that broke his whole life, or as a not very pleasant episode from childhood.

It is impossible to predict how a person will react to this or that event, and what consequences it will have in his future life. And we can only after the fact assume that this influenced me in this way, and analyze how this affected the formation of my personality. About another person, our guesses will also remain only guesses, because the search for rigid cause-and-effect relationships is an attempt to simplify life in order to take control of it.

Therefore, when we describe any psychological patterns, it would be good to remember that life is much more complicated than we would like to see it. And do not forget about the miracle. It is important to leave room for God in your ideas about the logic of the flow of life.

In the endless search for the guilty "why am I like this?" we must be aware that the formation of us as dependent individuals is not only our or someone's (parents, school, society) fault, but also our misfortune.

This, one might say, is our destiny, in which there is both the providence of God and our own choice. And this choice sometimes looks not at all as a choice, but as an inevitable necessity that happens to us.

We can be very bitterly disappointed when we come to this conclusion: everything led to the fact that I became this (or I became such). At this moment, instead of the begging question "why do I need this?", You can try to ask yourself "why do I need this?" What is important and valuable in my unique experience? How can I use my life's experiences to benefit myself and others?

It is a mature approach to the creative challenge called "me and my life." How joyful it can be to communicate with a person who, for example, gave up alcohol addiction for many years, and now talks about a solid experience of sobriety and how he leads a self-help group for Alcoholics Anonymous, helping others to get out of the bondage.

As noted by the famous psychologist James Hollis, “early childhood experiences, and later - the influence of culture led us to inner disconnection from our Self. from who we have become, from an actual but false sense of Self … Without significant effort to perform the painful act of awareness, the person still identifies with their trauma."

« I am not what happened to me; this is who i want to become - this phrase, according to J. Hollis, should constantly sound in the head of everyone who does not want to remain a prisoner of their fate.

Priests and psychologists often have to deal with rehabilitation, so to speak. And in confession, and in private conversation, and in psychological counseling, you have to rehabilitate himself and his own past before a person, which he is ready to curse, is ready to hate his childhood, his family, his parents. And our task here is not to say “white” to “black”, to say “white” to bad, that it was good, joyful, or to justify any crime.

Our task is probably to help the person gain the strength and courage to acknowledge and accept everything that has happened to him, including his own actions, steps and choices. Perhaps the most difficult thing for a person is to recognize his freedom, although, perhaps, he did not then think that this was his freedom.

To avoid responsibility, we sometimes refuse to see our free choice, justifying ourselves by the fact that we were forced, “life forced”, “events were stronger”, “it was impossible to do otherwise”.

But there remains a question to oneself, to which it is sometimes scary to give an honest answer: “I really had no other way out, or did I not want to see another way out? Or maybe there was another way out, but it seemed to me more dangerous, difficult, unpredictable? Maybe there was some, albeit unconscious, benefit in the way out that I chose?"

Recognizing and accepting yourself and your life is sometimes very difficult. We cannot rewrite the history of our lives, but as adults, we are able to change our attitude towards what happened to us.

From a spiritual point of view, accepting my fate is a courageous step of liberation, because following acceptance, I discover freedom for myself … After all, as soon as I agree with something in life, I accept it as a fact of my life, I become the “owner” of this event, which means that I can endure lessons and make some changes - at least in the emotional attitude to my own memories.

It happens that a person wants to erase some pages of his life, forget some traumatic or dramatic events like a bad dream. But by denying our past, we get rid not only of pain and trauma, but also of the strength that we acquired when we lived through difficult life situations, got out of the crisis, from the strength thanks to which we survived.

And also, along the way, we devalue our experience, which we got at the cost of tears, suffering, mistakes, disappointments. After all any test is a chance to understand something in life, learn something new about yourself, grow up … How a person uses this chance is his personal choice and responsibility. Someone may break down, become embittered by the whole world, while someone will become kinder, more attentive, more tolerant.

Looking back on your life path, it is important to be able to admit: “No, this is not only what happened to me; this is what I partly became now and the reason, having reconsidered the price and value of this experience for me and changed my attitude to these events, finding a new meaning in them."

When I accept my destiny, I free myself from what seemed to me before as captivity and unfreedom. That is why we need such an analysis - we need an idea of what the most diverse factors determine the conditions for the formation of dependent or free behavior in us.

But since, nevertheless, we are talking about love as that way of life, about that way of being, which gives a person a different path, free from dependence, a different opportunity, we must say that no matter how "badly" fate has treated a person, with From the Christian point of view, man is always a living soul. And therefore there is always love in him.

He can find this love in himself, join it, he can start living by it at any moment of his life. Remember the examples of meeting with love that Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy gives in describing the death of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and in the discovery of Pierre Bezukhov in captivity. And a wonderful example of Goncharov: Oblomov, who spent most of his life senselessly on the sofa in a dirty dressing gown, suddenly talks about the light that is hidden in the soul!

Many people talk about this light - this indicates that a person has love, and it always is, only some have it hidden, buried very deep in the depths of the soul. But there is no such person whom God would not have endowed with love at birth. And this means that a person has another path - not the path of building codependent relationships, which he accepts as a kind of surrogate, but the path of love, in which boundless generosity (his own generosity) and freedom opens up to him.