A Ghostly Lover. Psychotherapist Notes

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

I haven't seen your face for a hundred years

did not hug you

was not reflected in your eyes,

did not ask questions to the whiteness of the mind,

did not touch the warmth of your knees …

A woman has been waiting for me for a hundred years

we crowded together like two apples

on an apple branch,

and then

fell from the tree and rolled …

And between us

time is one hundred years,

the road is a hundred years old,

and in the semi-darkness I

that woman

looking everywhere for a trace

I've been looking for a hundred years

I've been running after her for a hundred years …

Nazim Hikmet

Honestly, if we lived in an ideal world, I would immediately start with a second relationship, bypassing first love with all its torments, ridiculous choices and simmering in a muddy broth of passions. I would take and open the book from the second chapter. Why? Because very often it is from the first love that an indelible mark remains in our soul, a ghost that holds us, preventing us from starting a new relationship, or taking air and energy from these relationships.

Not always and not for everyone, of course, past relationships leave behind ghosts. And love may not necessarily be the first. But it was definitely a whirlwind romance with a hurricane of emotions, both unbearably sweet and painful. And this connection did not end, did not die out naturally. It was torn apart - you were abandoned, the person died, you were torn apart by force majeure circumstances. There was no separation process, or it was short and painful. The wire burst in the middle, and instead of crazy tension, there were sadly hanging shaggy scraps. And the more sudden and incomprehensible the gap, the more chances you have of getting a ghost that will dwell in your soul, jealously guarding its territory.

We fall in love and it seems to us - here it is, our half, our twin cousin lost in childhood, all the pieces of the puzzle have finally coincided. It is as if we are faced with someone whom we have known for a long time, with someone very close, although in reality the point is different. We are simply projecting a part of ourselves there, into another. And note, far from the worst part. We unconsciously endow a person with the features of our own ideals, our inner Woman or inner Man.

When a break occurs, a fragment of me remains there, in the other. A very precious shard. Sometimes the key piece of the puzzle. It hurts very much. And since all this is completely unconscious, I do not understand what is happening. And I can't just take and return back a part of myself that I put into another. The connection remains, because the longing for the beautiful that I left in another remains, and our restless ex or ex appears.

Love usually begins in the Garden of Eden. With the idealization of the object. Falling in love, we find ourselves in an ideal relationship, long created by our imagination. With a healthy development of the situation, life slips us a tree of knowledge, and we begin to see a real person in our beloved, to hear and feel him. This is how our relationship develops and love grows out of it. Well, or it doesn't grow. For example, because without the rose-colored glasses of the hormonal explosion, this particular character is not suitable for us.

And if the break occurs at the stage of falling in love? Yes, and at the height of passion? The image of the beloved remains fantastically beautiful and does not develop into the image of a real person of flesh and blood. We feed this ghost with our ideals and over the years he becomes smart like Stephen Hawking, handsome like Johnny Depp, gentle, touching and caring like Leonard Hofstadter. It doesn't matter at all that the character was actually a little bald neurasthenic with an IQ fit only for a middle manager. He is the IMPOSSIBLE. Like a child who was never born, and therefore could be any talented, beautiful, affectionate, etc.

This ghost can draw on strength, time and energy for many years. Sometimes he can hinder the development of new attachments, and sometimes he gets underfoot in today's real relationships. Because we are trying our best to make our new love "coincide" with what is already living in our head. We are trying to shove a living warm person and real circumstances into the place of a cold ghost. As a rule, real people do not want to go there, they are uncomfortable there. And we continue to compare the present with the past, and the living present all the time turns out to be paler for us, more anemic than the ghostly past. It is amazing, but the fact is, it is not easy to compare with the splint that we painted for many years, not sparing ourselves.

How can you free yourself from this prison, from this pain that accompanies us every day, or sits somewhere in the depths, jumping out like a devil from a snuffbox at the most inopportune moment? This is not the easiest process. We'll have to answer a bunch of questions. What kind of life was this man for us? What needs did he meet? What part of ourselves were we trying to embody through him?

Gradually, you can re-acquaint yourself with the parts of the soul that we left in the paradise of lovers. And then pick them up again. In the same way, we cultivate in ourselves any new qualities - from the ability to say "no" to the ability to swim on the back. Realizing on our own what has always been inextricably linked with the Ex-Ghost, we somehow imperceptibly become even more whole than we were before that era. And finally, we turn those MOST unsuccessful relationships into something completely different. In what any relationship becomes for us in an amicable way - an experience that changes and develops us.