DEPENDENCE: FORMATION OF INFANTILE NEUROSIS And THE FATE OF "ETERNAL" LOVE IN THE FINAL HUMAN WORLD

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

Today I am starting a conversation about the laws of the existence of a couple in which both partners are dependent. Let me remind you the main thing: in “ordinary life”, addiction is a behavior that is subjectively experienced as forced: a person feels that he is not free to stop or continue to do something. Seeking help occurs when the harm of repetitive actions becomes obvious, and their "cancellation" causes a very unpleasant condition, from which it is urgent to get rid of. The person wants to get rid of "obsessive actions", ignoring (when formulating a request to the therapist) the intolerance of their "cancellation"

It turns out that addiction is a need for an external object, the presence of which allows you to return to an emotionally stable state.

Many do not realize the very fact of their dependence. They complain of fatigue from endless work, household chores, caring for a spouse or child, considering their behavior "the only possible" and their state of being "natural", and not realizing that the problem is that they simply have no choice to do it or not to do.

The one who is in the captivity of repetitive actions and anxiety is called dependent, and the one or what he needs and to whom his actions are directed and directed is called the object of dependence.

An addicted person can often clearly describe the "successive stages" of his "relationship with the addicted object": a happy merger, when there is no anxiety and complete agreement, an increase in internal discomfort and the desire to get rid of it, a state of peak tension and the desire to "merge with the addicted object" (as times the phase of repetitive actions), the moment of mastery of the object and relief, "rollback" - self-punishment for "doing it again."

Oleg tells how he started using chemicals: “Until the age of 15, I felt bad all the time, I lived in anxiety, irritation, conflicts with my parents; once they gave me a try on heroin and I realized what "good" is; my whole future life is a search for a substance, relief and fear that I could die again - and a new search so as not to feel all this.

Marina: I was alone for a long time and now I met Him, it was a moment of happiness and hope, which very quickly gave way to constant concern for our relationship; until I meet with him, I do not believe that we are together, I constantly tug at him in demands for meetings, which annoy and scare him away, and I can’t help myself, I agree to everything, just to be able to see him so often as I need.

Andrey: I realized a long time ago that the weekend is hell, I am on my own, even in my family; as if something presses and twists from the inside, if I am not in the stream of affairs; I get very tired and spend little time with my family, which causes constant conflicts, but as if this is better than pauses and what I have inside.

Obviously, all these people discover some kind of deficit within themselves, remaining without an “object of dependence,” and while this deficit persists, the need for an external object will not go anywhere, and hence the anxiety associated with the risk of losing it. This anxiety is called separation anxiety, and internal deficit is a lack of self-support, confidence that "I am good, valuable, I can be loved" and the hope that "everything will be fine." This deficit is made up through contact with a partner, who constantly from the outside by his actions, words, concessions, rewards feeds the partner's lack of self-esteem and self-acceptance.

Both chemical addiction and emotional addiction work the same way.

Further I will talk about emotional dependence, where the “object” is another person.

A mutual need may be obvious to both partners, or maybe only to one. In the first case, their relationship can be more or less harmonious, everyone cares about their safety, in the second, the balance in the pair is disturbed, one feels and behaves confidently and freely, the other is anxious and submissive, the first ascribes power over himself to the partner, and the second enjoys this power.

A partner is “good” when he successfully copes with his “function”: he gives the right amount of love and recognition, is always there, is able to inspire hope and calm anxiety, but as soon as he turns out to be unpredictable in his assessments and actions, he deviates from the “usual schemes "- immediately becomes" bad"

If a person is not currently in a partnership, this does not mean that he does not have an object of dependence. In this case, the object of dependence can be called the “set of rules” - introjects that he is used to following in life and which restrict him from the inside, prevent him from living in accordance with his needs, make him look at others all the time, be afraid of offending them, anger, cause them negative assessment and so on … While I am alone, I limit myself, by the "voice" of my aunt, for example, and when I am with someone, I "entrust" this function to my partner and I think that it is he who limits me …

The most terrible threat that almost all addicted people are aware of is the threat of losing those relationships that have developed, and no matter how they are - happy or painful. In this case, separation anxiety may have an internal meaning of the threat of physical loss of the object of attachment, loss of his love or respect. To avoid this threat, addicts have reliable ways: to fully satisfy their partner and strive for maximum intimacy with him in everything, or not to approach emotionally at all, using the partner only as an external object - sexual or "a prize for achievement", and breaking off relations with him, as soon as feelings of tenderness and affection begin to arise.

The dream of an addict is an opportunity to find a magical way to permanently eliminate separation anxiety, that is, to keep a partner in his function next to him forever.

Dependent pattern formation

Each of the partners plays his usual role in the relationship, and both have the same anxiety in the event of a threat to the stability of the relationship. Why do we play them as if against our will and at the same time desperately hold on to them?

To find the answer, I will turn to the period when addiction is natural and inevitable for a person - to childhood.

At every “physically - psychological” age, a child needs a special combination of the volume and quality of frustration and support from the parent in order to master new skills in controlling his body and his psyche. If this balance is optimal, then the child learns new actions and new experiences, he develops a sense of self-confidence. If not, then the mastery of the skill is either delayed (the parent does more for the child than is required, gives him less responsibility than he could have mastered), or the skills are formed in a jerk ("you would rather have grown up already!"), Without relying on a solid foundation of repetition and training. In both cases, the child develops a lack of confidence in his abilities.

Depending on what the parent approved of - obedience, complaisance, reliance on parental support while reducing his own initiative, or vice versa - independence, initiative and emotional detachment of the child, he behaved with him and with those around him. Deviation from this style of behavior was punished by the parent by emotional alienation from the child. And for the little man, this is the worst thing, because it threatens to lose contact with the parent, the loss of his support, and he still does not feel able to survive on his own in the world. As a result, the child has never received confirmation that his needs matter and can be met by those on whom he depends because of his age.

If the child cannot get satisfaction from the parent by addressing him directly, then he begins to study how this satisfaction can be achieved differently. By “exploring” the mother, the child begins to use her own need for contact, responding to it in the way she wants - clinging to not, or keeping at a distance. As a result, it is not so much norms and rules that are introjected, but rather the entire style of behavior. This is addictive behavior, that is, depending on the approval of the parent and eliminating anxiety. This behavior can be either sticky, which is commonly called dependent, or alienated, which I will call counterdependent.

(By the way: within each tendency we can also observe two states - well-being or compensation, and not well-being, that is, frustration.

In a state of compensation, an addicted person will look warm, sociable, with varying degrees of obsession in his care and anxiously concerned about the opinion of others about himself, seeking to prevent conflict and any manifestations of aggression. In a state of decompensation, the same person can be aggressively demanding, touchy, extremely intrusive and seemingly devoid of any ideas about tact and personal boundaries. In a state of compensation, the counterdependent person will appear self-sufficient, assertive, courageous and independent. In a state of decompensation, he may find states of helplessness, paralysis of initiative, frightened, or aggressive to the point of brutality. This phenomenon is called intrapersonal splitting, I will talk about it later).

Gradually, the child learns such behavior in relation to the parent, which minimally hurts him, ensures the satisfaction of needs, prevents the threat of punishment, and improves the emotional state. He achieves his goal, replacing a direct appeal to the mother with his feelings and needs for action in her address, that is, he learns to provoke emotions in another person that push the mother to the actions necessary for the "provocateur". You can evoke in another person such emotions that he wants to prolong, but also those that he wants to get rid of. Instead of exchanging feelings, they learn to exchange actions, which are "translated" as signals of love or rejection.

Mutual regulation (recognition and consideration of each other's emotional signals to maintain a relationship) is giving way to mutual control. A system of emotional impact on each other is gradually developing, forcing partners to reciprocate as the only means to get rid of tension or prolong pleasure. A child has no alternative how to behave in order to survive, he has to obey the strong …

An addicted person learns to recognize only those feelings that have been named and helped to relate to bodily sensations. This is "fear", it means "danger", but these sensations are called "fatigue" and mean the need for rest. If he was told that being angry and offended is bad, then there is a high probability that he will not recognize these feelings in himself or will not know what to do with them. Such a person grows up with "voids" in experience, he knows only what was "possible" in his family. The more stringent the intra-family requirements were, the narrower the range of feelings and behavior of a person in the future turns out to be. In addition, the parent, demanding certain behavior from the child and punishing the “deviations”, often leaves him alone with difficult experiences that “get stuck” in him with pain, fear, and powerlessness. They do not talk about them with the child or reject his suffering as insignificant. Or instead of sympathy and attention, he receives a gift - a toy, candy, thing. As if this object, no matter how valuable it turns out to be, is able to replace living love and a response to feelings. And a person turns out to be unable to deal with their own experiences, arising from frustrations, otherwise than to avoid situations where they might arise. Or "be comforted" by a surrogate for love - a thing, food, a chemical.

And then the psyche strives to "develop", to learn what it could not, did not want, could not develop in a relationship with a parent. Our failures require a "new completion", compensation, they remain in the memory of the unconscious, keeping the tension caused by them. Those of them that were accompanied by the experience of powerlessness and helplessness are especially well remembered, and the effect of an unfinished action is “responsible” for repeated attempts to “rewrite the plot,” to eliminate the pain of defeat.

In a repetitive pattern, we reproduce our experience of powerlessness in the hope of a “new solution,” a “restoration of justice,” entrenched in our relationship with the parents of our childhood. The structure of relations is repeated, with their expectations and frustrations, the ways of behavior formed by the child, based on the conclusions (traumatic decisions) that the child's thinking came to, with its visual-effective and illogical properties. The traumatic experience is intimidating and stops the possibility of experimenting with it, hence the rigidity of childhood patterns in the interior of an adult. Growing up, we repeat these schemes with other people and in relationships of a completely different type - love, friendship. With them, we unconsciously revive our hopes (these people, by association, with their behavior and mannerisms remind us of the “main frustrators” of childhood), and our attempts to keep them in the function in which we needed them then, and the methods of influence with which we used in childhood. However, the techniques that allowed us in childhood to "get" love or avoid punishment in relationships with adults can now turn out to be very unsuccessful in relationships with equal partners who either do not give in to our manipulations, or know how to manipulate even more exquisitely, and all the time we are "overplayed", depriving us of the necessary "volume" of love and recognition. What in childhood was the only successful behavior in a relationship with a parent becomes a mistake in adulthood.

But the traumatic experience is stubborn: it "worked" then, which means it may work again. You just have to try hard, look for someone more suitable, easily responsive, that is, who grew up in similar conditions and amenable to the same manipulations. This is a “good partner” for an addict.

This is how the behavior based on the fear of loss and the experience of a lack of one's own resources is repeated. This is the "matrix" of attachment relationships from our past.

Conditions for new development

Change is possible if a relationship with a person develops, free from those frustrations that have suspended the development of our reliance on ourselves. For this, it is necessary that a person can fulfill the role of a symbolic parent: to give up his own satisfaction in contact for the sake of the needs of the dependent person and the development of his ability to take care of himself. The younger the trauma, the more self-denial will be required. Quite a difficult task for a relationship.

In ordinary life, the addict finds an “approximate” solution - he chooses the same traumatized person who will fulfill this role for the sake of “not parting”. But here he will be very disappointed: the other, although he admitted that the main value is to stay together, but also wants to fill his deficits in the field of self-support and some guarantees for "eternity of communication" are not enough for him. It is difficult for a dependent person to be a “resource of love and respect” for a partner because of his own need. That is why the relationship of two dependent people is always conflicting, despite the "common interest" in the main thing - to be together forever. They cannot part, but they also cannot be happy, because their ability to perform parenting for each other is limited by their good condition, and in their decompensation, in "difficult times", each of them can only take care of themselves. The partner experiences this as - “he leaves me”. “Difficult moment” is a situation where the interests of both clashed, and separation anxiety was actualized for each. Since it is impossible to avoid a clash of interests in life together, then for everyone situations of separation anxiety are regularly repeated, periods of hope when the partner is “functioning correctly” are replaced by periods of disappointment and despair when the partner “abandons” (the eternity of “merging” is constantly exposed to new threats of rupture, that is, both are retraumatized). These cycles are endless and painful because it is impossible to give up hope, and it is impossible to maintain it all the time.

Why is “it” not “cured” by life?

Development occurs through repetition and pain, the transition to a new age is not only the acquisition of new resources, greater responsibility, but also the loss of the old childhood privileges. Normal development is accompanied by the sadness of the loss of childhood privileges”and the anxiety of a new responsibility. If we are talking about neurotic development, then we are talking about the recognition of the impossibility of the former closeness with the parent, the past security, the recognition that something in life has not happened and will never happen, and that you were deprived of something, unlike others. At first, the confrontation with these facts is experienced as violence against oneself, causing despair and rage, denial of loss and attempts to find a compromise solution (which becomes a dependent relationship with their "eternity" and merging).

Of course, this is not easy, together with the loss of hope of finding an “ideal parent”, a person loses much more - the dream of the miracle of “eternal childhood” with its “impunity” pleasures and gifts … living feelings that have been avoided as a result of the formation of neurotic schemes. Grieving is the natural process of coming to terms with the impossible and accepting the limitations of life. In this function, it becomes available only in adolescence, when the personality is already strong enough to rely on internal resources that support its psychological existence, and the loss of the object of childhood love or the dream of acquiring it can be comprehended and accepted as a part inevitable for all people. life.

A partner who will take care of the addict, giving up his own direct satisfaction, may be someone who is able to provide himself with a "container" for anxiety, that is, functionally not needing something else. At the same time, so that he does not deplete, keeping his boundaries from "manipulative intrusions" and maintains disposition to the addict, he must have some kind of compensation. The most suitable for this role turns out to be … a psychotherapist: a person external to the usual life of an addict, and, due to his professional knowledge, who knows how to “take care of the right way”.

On the one hand, the therapist is stably present, on the other hand, he is not always in contact with the addict, but at a strictly allotted time, and the money he receives for his work is the necessary compensation for his efforts in relation to a stranger for him. Money is an intermediary between the client and the therapist, giving the latter the possibility of satisfaction in any form suitable for him, without using emotional contact with the client to satisfy his needs for love and respect. And this means that the personal interest of the therapist will be the development of the client's personality, and not keeping him in a certain "role" next to himself.

In regular therapy, due to a stable setting, it is possible to reproduce the situation of the development of an attachment relationship, in which there is also support (reliable presence and empathic understanding of the state of the addict and his conflicts, which allows the therapist to maintain an accepting position in the face of aggression and in the face of the client's love, while maintaining from involvement in the life and experiences of the addict, which protects the therapist from intrusions into the client's ordinary life and preserves the boundaries of the relationship), and frustration for the addict (limited time of the therapist's presence, keeping a distance in the relationship). This gives him the opportunity to re-actualize, experience and complete those traumatic feelings associated with the impermanent presence of the object and its imperfection, which is the essence of childhood frustrations in the field of attachment. Unlike a real partner who will not be able to provide the necessary conditions for development, no matter how “good” he may be, due to his personal interest in meeting his needs precisely in contact with the addict.

We become human because we are loved, that is, we are provided with the necessary emotional attention. An emotional connection is a thread that connects us to the world of other people. And it grows inside a person only in response to the same need for affection that exists nearby. If it turned out to be torn off or not strong enough to give a feeling of belonging to other people, then it can be restored only through a new appeal to emotional contact.

If a person grows up with a "love deficit", that is, with the experience of inattention to his emotional life, this leads to the formation of clinging or alienated behavior to one degree or another. Some try to fill this deficit in any more or less suitable other relationship, while others completely abandon emotionally close relationships. And in both cases, people are very sensitive to the threat of new inattention, that is, they remain addicted. What is born, exists and is “damaged” in contact can be formed and restored only in contact, that is, in a situation of emotional responsiveness of one person to another. And this response has to correspond to the “needs of the age of injury”. This is "developmental trauma" - damage to the emotional connection with the person on whom the child's survival depended.

To diagnose it and use it in the process of establishing new emotional connections, special knowledge and skills are required. Developmental trauma cannot be "cured" by internal self-manipulation or only by manipulation of internal objects under someone's guidance, and even more so by technologies that change the parameters of perception. You can try to deceive the unconscious, often it is “happy to be deceived” because it “wants” a harmonious life. But it is not so “stupid” or “manic” - joyful so as not to recognize that changing the parameters of perception and “recoding signals” is not love or care.

Developmental trauma, feelings accompanying it, increased sensitivity to trauma factors can be desensitized, the intensity of its experience can be reduced, but it is impossible to eliminate the experience of a lack of love and recognition, a sense of one's own vulnerability without restoring a strong and safe emotional connection with another person. (And in this sense, developmental trauma is fundamentally different from PTSD as from the trauma of an adult personality, which initially has the necessary potential for life and development).

An adult becomes a prisoner of childhood wounds and restrictions, which have become self-restraints, so natural that another life is simply not conceived, but the ways of their "healing" or avoidance turn out to be rigid and uncomfortable … receiving development in adulthood, is called infantile neurosis. And this "wound" is not healed with life.

Infantile neurosis can soften its forms due to the acquisition of a person's experience and an increase in wisdom (if the latter occurs). But in the lives of those people who have had a lot of violence in the past, especially physical violence, it cannot even soften. An addicted person sees his “happiness” as the restoration of “good fusion” with a “good object” that makes up for all his deficiencies and compensates for all the damage done. And this dream has its roots in very early childhood, when the mother was still so powerful that she could “cover up” all the child's frustrations. But the older he got, the more difficult it was for one mother to satisfy all his needs, and even in such a way as to avoid frustration.

Disappointment in the power of the mother and taking on the functions of caring more and more is a natural process of human development.

If it happened that the child recognized the severity of frustration and the pain of loneliness ahead of time, than was emotionally ready to cope with them, this damage is irreparable. No one will “cover” all the “failures” in the life of an adult. And "treatment" is not about reproducing the primary symbiosis, but about experiencing its loss.

Unfortunately, life is arranged in such a way that it does not dose the load, and the injured adult receives new injuries in it. Therapy becomes a resource for "recovery" in the sense that within the therapeutic relationship, just "dosed" disappointment is possible, such that a person can "digest" without compromising his self-esteem and sense of security and gradually build up internal stability.