STAGES OF DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN

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

Relationship Is almost always difficult. One way or another, we have to deal with our childhood traumas, unmet needs, early decisions, illusions, family scenarios and other undercurrents that affect us today.

On the one hand, this is a painful process full of tears, resentments and disappointments, on the other hand, it is a natural and accessible way of personal development and the opportunity to live a full, rich life.

Fortunately, the very process of relationships between partners is well studied. It is divided into several stages or stages that each pair goes through. The following stages are distinguished: search, recognition, satisfaction of needs, exchange and return.

Relying on the well-known position of Jung about the duality of the human psyche, which manifests itself in the fact that the man's psyche includes not only the masculine, but also the feminine principle (anima), and the woman's psyche includes not only the feminine, but also the masculine principle (animus), it can be assumed that that the masculine and feminine in the inner space are not only in the active process of being, but also more or less successfully interact with each other.

The relationship between masculine and feminine principles in the inner world is mirrored in the stages of development of relationships between a real man and a woman

SEARCH

The initial stage in the development of relationships is the search stage. It consists in the process of searching for reflections of their inner masculine and feminine parts in real people - representatives of the opposite sex.

In fairy tales, the search for male heroes is their famous quest for happiness, the search for adventure. For the heroines, these are the choices of suitors, classically arranged by the kings for their daughters. These plots reflect the healthy canons of search activity: men win their own happiness, this happens in competitions, struggle, overcoming themselves and various obstacles. Women, on the other hand, receive a groom who won the competition arranged by her father, that is, a groom approved by the father, which speaks of the most important moment of transferring paternal responsibility to the daughter's chosen one. Thus, fairy tales teach that a woman's search experience should be carried out under the wing of the paternal protective function, the patronage of a strong man, and those who are testing a woman's future chosen one should be, first of all, her father.

Since today many women are formed in the absence of full-fledged paternal protection, the patronizing paternal function may well be performed by a woman's healthy male principle, initiated (developed) to a well-functioning internal paternal protective principle.

The decline in the paternal function in modern Western society has led to the fact that today the stage of a conscious search for a partner is preceded by a more unconscious type of search activity. It can be distinguished as the zero stage of the search. We called it corporal. We are talking about a deliberately impersonal process of people meeting their sexual needs, although these relations never achieve complete impersonalization. Any, even the most fleeting contacts between a man and a woman have infinite depth. Denial of this depth serves the immature person only as an attempt to protect himself from the fear of rejection and from a vague sense of his incompetence in the field of relationships.

A high level of such competence is characteristic only of a mature person. The maturity of the male phenomenon (both internal and external) is especially important here. When the masculine reaches maturity, it ascends to the stage of fatherhood, which is a reflection of the divine paternal principle. Therefore, the connection is obvious: to the extent that real fathers emotionally ignore their children, their growing children are equally deprived of the spiritual experience of relationships.

The bodily stage is dictated by instinctive motives, which, in the absence of paternal protection, act as a naked archaic mechanism of procreation. The instinctive nature of the zero search stage also contains a very definite spiritual goal: to find your true half through some kind of "sexual testing". The bodily stage of search is widespread not only among young people, but also among people of other age groups, when they are directly or implicitly engaged in the search for a “life partner”.

Everyone who has experienced a breakdown in relationships returns to the search stage, as well as married men and married women who are experiencing family, age and other personal crises. Unpaired men and women live in a state of search, not always fully realizing it. Obsessive search for a partner is a sign of a certain immaturity of the personality. This statement suggests a simple conclusion: the initiation of personality maturation brings relief from the compulsive search.

During the search phase, marriages are often contracted and children are born. However, search motives alone are not enough to achieve harmonious relationships. In the process of searching, its participants strive primarily for such an important emotional component of relationships as recognition. As soon as recognition is carried out, the relationship moves to the next, higher stage of development.

RECOGNITION

The essence of relations at the stage of recognition is that a man and a woman, as it were, recognize in each other their inner man and woman.

Meeting with a person who adequately reflects certain features of the internal male and female aspects of our personality brings a state of special delight. This is a well-known period of falling in love, which, in an analytical sense, can be viewed as the moment of a successful "throwing of projections".

At this stage, partners for the first time really find and recognize the male and female parts of their soul in each other. A man finds in his beloved the traits of his inner woman that are significant for him, and a woman finds in her chosen one the aspect of her inner man that is especially relevant for the development of her femininity.

It is noteworthy that at first the ideal aspects of male and female projections are “thrown” onto the partners. But as the relationship develops further, more and more traumatized fragments of the anima (feminine in man) and animus (masculine in woman) are thrown away, those that require healing in the first place.

Fortunately, partners with cosmic precision contain in the inner world a sufficient number of both ideal and damaged fractals of the male and female that match each other. It follows that any final separation indicates that the personal "mirroring" of partners ceases to occur to the extent necessary to maintain their union. In other words, they cease to be reflections for each other due to the fact that the structure of the personality of one of them changes at a rate different from the rate of change of the other.

In fairy tales, recognition (falling in love) corresponds to that moment in the plot when the meeting of beautiful heroes takes place. Falling in love, which is usually symbolized by the magical, wonderful acquaintance of the heroes, is only the initial, starting point of the relationship. In the language of fairy tales and myths, the experience of collective consciousness tells us that the moment when a man and a woman meet is not enough to conclude a harmonious union. Therefore, the separating forces soon invade the pair space of the heroes in love, and the blessing characters sooner or later show them the way to overcome obstacles.

So, lovers always face a number of tests, which means the need to go through a number of stages in the development of relationships. Climbing the "ladder of relationships" is an inevitable work, and only by climbing these sacred steps, a man and a woman achieve joint happiness.

MEETING YOUR NEEDS

The stage (stage) of recognition is replaced by the stage of satisfaction of unmet needs. This is a period of healing internal traumas, living of those "missed" stages of personal development, where the children's needs of partners were not met or were not satisfied enough, and in this regard, certain psychological deficits and "holes in the I" were formed (G. Ammon). These include the early childhood desire for unconditional love (love me as I am), when the baby needs full and absolute acceptance, understanding and timely care and participation.

Self deficiency can relate to the sphere of bodily, creative and other needs. At the stage of satisfying needs, a man and a woman involuntarily and passionately expect from a partner in their address those actions, actions and feelings that they did not wait for or did not receive enough from their own parents in childhood.

The “mirroring” of the reflections of a man and a woman in each other is also explained by the fact that each of the partners actually contains in the structures of his personality a rich potential to satisfy (or pseudo-satisfaction) the unmet needs of the other.

Often the unconscious principle of "satisfaction from the opposite" is used here. For example, if a woman was rejected by her father or mother as a child, she finds a man who will reject her. In the course of such relationships, a woman finally gets the opportunity, which was not realized in childhood, to throw all her strength into being recognized "at all costs!"

In this case, a woman manifests a hypertrophied childish need to recognize not only the importance of her personality, but also to recognize her femininity. If there is no satisfaction or not enough satisfaction, the relationship between a man and a woman can get stuck at this stage. A simple example of such stuckness is the vicious circle of parting-reconciliation in relationships with addicted (alcoholism, drug addiction) partners.

A man who has not been able to psychologically separate from his mother and does not have a healthy male model in the person of his father seeks a relationship with an authoritarian woman. His main unconscious motive is the desire to defeat her and free himself from her controlling influence. The illusion of victory and liberation is given not only by alcoholism and drug addiction, but also by workaholism, as well as by other infantile forms of behavior, which are based on avoiding responsibility for relationships: spiritual, material, sexual and others.

On the other hand, partners at the same time expect and demand from each other the absolute love and unconditional acceptance that they have lacked since childhood. Since the stage of satisfying needs is in the nature of mutual dependence, and the latter, as a form of captivity, always evokes a desire to free itself, such relationships hide large reserves of repressed aggression, which from time to time breaks out.

Thus, at the stage of satisfying needs, a man and a woman, like babies, strive for "absorption." They want to receive, absorb, absorb the missing love and acceptance not only from each other, but also from parental families and even ancestral branches of each other. They are governed by an acute desire to saturate their I as much as possible, to fill its emptiness, that is, to receive everything that is possible from some large, poorly differentiated object of the “parental world” (“primary group”), the relationship with which once led to a feeling of an equally acute deficit in the area of the forming I. This "large feeding object" the unconscious greedily "discovers" in the partner.

The symbolism of fairy tales contains an indication of a direct exit from the "imprisonment in the dungeon" of unmet needs. This is the symbolism of battles with villains - internal trauma, split off aggression, and so on. This is a period of struggle with the dark aspects of the personality for the release of the miracle of female nature, full of healing powers. In other words, in order to free the fairytale beauty - the treasure of the highest femininity - it is necessary to overcome the entire complex of internal imperfections contained in the damaged areas of the male and female principles.

With a lack of resources in the field of the protective function of the male and the regenerative forces of the female, partners during this period may experience depression, psychosomatic disorders and painful breakdowns in relationships.

If a man and a woman overcome the stage of satisfying needs, having managed to saturate the deficiencies in the I (having received the necessary recognition from the partner and his family, as well as - due to their social success or - directly working on changes in personality, etc.), the relationship rises to the next stage - the stage of exchange.

EXCHANGE

At the stage of exchange, there is sufficient release from projections. Partners gain the opportunity to see each other as real people, and not fragments of their inner merits, imperfections, or fragments of family figures from childhood. Relatively autonomous and holistic, mostly freed from dependence, partners now naturally complement each other, each feeling his own value for himself and for the other.

At this stage, partings are not too painful, and joint creation becomes more productive than ever before. A man and a woman exchange their specific qualities and properties: he gives her his strength and protection, she gives him healing support and care. They are already able to easily perceive each other as they are, they can already admire ("oh, how wonderful you are!"), And not be proud ("look what (what) value I have!") each other, as in the previous step. Each is able to recognize and appreciate the reality of the other, different from his own, and its inevitable changes.

The internal union between the male and female parts of the personality at this stage of the relationship has already been concluded and bears fruit. The sacred masculine and feminine forces of any of the partners, having united sufficiently, as a universal generator, now “generate” in the inner world all the energies necessary for happiness and personality development. This is the secret of healthy spiritual independence for mature partners.

In fairy tales, this corresponds to the final conjugal union of many experienced heroes. The outside world no longer conceals serious threats to their relationship; such an alliance is peculiar, as a certain whole, to enter into bold contacts with society.

Relationships here are distinguished by the presence of healthy boundaries between the couple and the outside world, an accurate perception of physical time, the real responsibility of partners to each other and in relation to external phenomena. Here the ability to build your life and life around yourself in accordance with your plans and dreams is most fully manifested, to be the cause of what is happening, to be yourself.

GIVING

Relationships of exchange at subsequent stages lead to the accumulation of enormous internal resources and the emergence of the need to give their strength and experience, to give love and an excess of vital energy not only to each other, but also to the world. Therefore, this stage of the relationship was called the stage of giving.

Such a high stage in the development of relationships is not necessarily achieved in the final period of the life of a man and a woman, although it represents a significant spiritual peak. If a mature man and woman enter into a new relationship, they may immediately find themselves at the stage of giving.

Getting into the emotional atmosphere of a couple who has reached this stage, people feel "at home", more clearly feel their own value in their presence and invariably receive an impetus for further development from communication with such a couple. Moreover, this happens regardless of how much the participants in the interaction are aware of these processes. Relationships at the stage of giving are distinguished by the ability of a mature couple to automatically harmonize the world around, change it in a creative direction, create a new one and broadcast it outside.

The stage of giving can be symbolically described not only as a married couple happily nurturing numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but also as a couple who own an ever-bearing garden. Figuratively speaking, the canning of vegetables and fruits has already reached such a scale that, because of the cans filling the house, there is nowhere to put your foot. In this situation, distributing supplies to others is a natural urgent need, the only way out, the only way to maintain order and comfort in the house.

In symbolic language, this corresponds to the moment of the fairytale plot, when the heroes united in a happy union reach the royal position at the end of the narrative: by entering into a conjugal union, the fabulous bride and groom become Tsar and Queen.

Considering the stages of development of relationships, it is easy to see how great is the healing power of the very process of relationships for the spiritual development of both a man and a woman, and their offspring.

It is important to note that relationships in married couples often have characteristics of several stages at once. The conditional division of the process of evolution of relations into stages is a convenient way of analyzing and understanding this process, but in life it proceeds in the same way as the flowering of plants: some are already fading, others are just beginning to bloom, but at certain periods we can see flowers of both other plants at the same time.