Love And Hate In Depressed Individuals

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

To be a depressively accentuated person means to be in a deep experience of the loss of security associated with the loss of the integrity and unity of one's personality. A passionate desire to love and be loved, together with inseparable pessimism regarding the end of close relationships with other people, generate an unprecedented tension within the personality, pushing it, on the one hand, to humility, and, on the other hand, opposing latent hatred to the object of one's desire.

The attitude to love in depressively accentuated personalities (hereinafter referred to as depressed people) is dictated by their deep dissatisfaction with the connection with their adored object number one in life immediately after birth, with their mother.

Our attitude towards ourselves is determined by how we perceive the image of our mother, and what our experience of communication with her is in our view. Depressive individuals had a hostile mother who constantly refused the child to meet his needs or, on the contrary, was overprotective and overly demanding.

And in that, and in another manifestation of the mother, there is one common feature - the lack of love with her child. The inevitable hatred of such a mother is accompanied by such an intolerable feeling of guilt that it is easier for a depressed person to direct this guilt on himself. This connection of hate, guilt, and negative self-attitudes forms the basis of depression. The suicidal tendency in depressed individuals is the transfer onto oneself of the desire to kill this bad mother and at the same time punishing oneself for this hatred of the mother.

Bottom line.

Coming out of childhood with such a baggage of an unformed personality, unprepared for social interaction, with an extremely low self-esteem and with a childish belief in justice, this depressed person begins to look for an ersatz, a substitute, for the very maternal love that he did not receive. As a result, these individuals are prone to sacrificial relationships, to relationships in which the main thing is to be, to relationships in which "I love because he is there." The partner is idealized and everything is forgiven him, because the fear of being deprived of love (in this case, it is more about attachment on the part of a depressed person's partner) is much stronger than the fear of being humiliated in a relationship. To be good for everyone, to be what they want me to be, is the main goal with which a depressed person lives in a relationship. And this is what gives rise to a split in the consciousness of the individual, because nature demands punishment for the non-manifestation of love, for the fact that she was forced to suffer then, in childhood, and they are to blame for all this, all those with whom a depressed person is now. Naturally, this hatred and this aggression do not have their natural outlet, because the image of a "good man" will be irretrievably lost. This deviation from individuality is costly. Depressive individuals cannot decide on everything that makes up their essence of life - on desires, motives, affects and instincts.

The depressive cycle consists of holding back, followed by frustration and then depression.

But back to love.

Love is the main aspiration in the life of depressed individuals. In this striving, they reach the point of blurring the border between I and YOU, and the whole being of a depressed person strives for the object of his love, completely depriving himself of his I and his own desires and aspirations. This is expressed in a great and sincere desire to love, in a readiness for self-giving and sacrifice. That is, a personality merges with another personality. Marriage is just a subconscious reflection of a child's desire to be in touch with their parents.

What does such a rejection of one's essence in complete merging with another personality lead to? This leads to what the depressed person is trying to escape from, to herself. This meeting becomes unbearable, and as a result, depression develops. This happens at the moment of breaking up with a partner, at the moment of any other rejection or devaluation of the depressed person.

From love to hate one step.

Perhaps this saying is largely suitable for depressed individuals and in many ways contradicts them. Hate is basic for depressed individuals, and love is what they want to drown their hatred in. But the love they receive (if they receive it at all because of their hatred) is not enough to drain the ocean of hatred.

What saves depressed individuals from aggression? Most often, the role of sublimation of the manifestation of hatred is going to endless work and adherence to a religious movement, in which restraint, tolerance, modesty and self-sacrifice are encouraged. This can somehow justify their suffering in social terms.

Exit?

Suffering, sooner or later, leads a depressed person to its origins, to deprive her in childhood of that most valuable thing that she is so zealously trying to deserve her whole life. And this deprivation of love gives rise to a lot of side problems in the form of psychosomatics, troubles in society, problems with a partner, etc., that is, thanks to the problems of the "second plan" these individuals seek help.

It hurts to live without love. Living without a part of yourself is unbearable.

You can and should fight for yourself and your life.