Complementary Marriage: A Psychological Portrait Of Partners

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

Complementary marriage: a psychological portrait of partners

In partnerships, we often want to achieve

that we failed in love for our parents.

But this will not happen if at first it does not flow

flow of love for parents.

B. Hellinger

In a previous article, I described the features of complementary marriages. The purpose of this article is to draw a psychological portrait of the partners who form such marriages. Since it is common for partners in complementary marriages to create codependent relationships, in this article I will call them codependent. Consider what psychological characteristics are characteristic of partners in complementary marriages?

Dominant needs

In all descriptions of clients from complementary marriages, a common thread runs the need for acceptance and unconditional love from a partner. These are the needs of the child for his parent. If the parent is able to satisfy them, then the child develops a reliable attachment and, as a consequence, the need to explore the world around him. Otherwise, secure attachment is not formed, and the child's need for acceptance and unconditional love is not satisfied. In subsequent life, such a person will try to satisfy these needs in contact with his partner, "clinging" to him and presenting to him unbearable requirements for him in the performance of non-specific functions for him. An image of an ideal partner with corresponding expectations from him will be projected onto the relationship partner. In the partner they will see not actually a partner, but a parent and present parental functions to him. The partner's failure to fulfill parental functions will give rise to claims, resentment.

Example. Client S., at my request, describes the image of an ideal partner: "Strong, courageous, reliable, caring, accepting, forgiving her shortcomings, indulging her weaknesses." I notice that she is not drawing an image of a partner, but rather an image of a father. It is the father for his daughter who can be both strong and accepting of her unconditionally, or, in any case, much allowing and forgiving her. Adult partnerships, on the other hand, presuppose “conditional love” with a “take-give” balance.

The foregoing does not mean at all that there is no place for the aforementioned needs in partnerships. Of course they are. Another thing is that they will not be the main ones here. The leading needs in partnerships will be the needs for intimacy and love between a man and a woman. For complementary marriages, intimacy serves as one of the ways to satisfy the need for unconditional love. The partner is forced to agree to such an "adult" form of love in the hope through this to "feed" in children's love.

Idealization

Due to various life circumstances, the codependent partner did not receive the experience of disappointment in reality, the so-called "reality vaccination". The reasons for this may be different. In the example already cited, client S.'s father tragically died at the age of 5 years. The image of a father and, consequently, a man (and a father is the first man for a daughter) for her remained ideal, “preserved”. Had this tragedy not happened, the client would have been forced (and more than once) in subsequent relationships with her father to be disappointed in him, to overthrow him from the pedestal (adolescence alone provides rich opportunities for this). The image of a father would eventually lose its idealization and become more mundane, real, adequate. The girl would have a chance to de-idealize her father, to meet a real father - a living earthly person with his weaknesses, experiences, fears, disappointments - which would open up for her the possibility of a real meeting with other men. In this case, the ideal image of the father remains an unattainable peak for her potential partners - the image is always more colorful than reality!

One of the forms of idealization is romanticism inherent in codependent partners. Since in real life it is almost impossible to meet a partner who matches the ideal image, such an image is found in films, books, or invented. Sometimes this image is collective - not all movie characters are capable of embodying all the required imaginary qualities!

Example: Client E. describes the desired relationship with her partner as follows: “This will be a strong, confident, reliable, caring man. I want him to admire me like a flower, take care of me, look after me. And I will delight him with my presence, let him admire himself."

Infantilism

In the perception of the therapist, regardless of the passport age of the codependent client, the impression is that he is facing a little girl / boy. The manner of speaking, gestures, facial expressions, looks, demands - all these components of the quality of contact create certain parental countertransference reactions to the client.

Infantilism (from Lat. Infantilis - children's) is defined as immaturity in development, the preservation in the physical appearance or behavior of features inherent in the previous age stages.

Mental infantilism is the psychological immaturity of a person, expressed in a delay in the formation of a personality, in which a person's behavior does not correspond to the age requirements imposed on him. Lagging is manifested mainly in the development of the emotional-volitional sphere and the preservation of children's personality traits.

One of the most important factors in the development of mental infantilism is a person's parents who are overprotective, protect the child, and, as a result, do not allow him to meet with reality, prolonging his childhood.

An example. Client S. After her father's death, she was brought up by her mother. The mother, according to her, gave up her personal life and devoted herself entirely to her daughter - she did not refuse her anything, protected her from all the hardships of life. As a result, S. has pronounced infantile personality traits - not accepting responsibility, not accepting the role and function of an adult, excessive expectations from a partner.

The main criterion of infantilism can be called the inability and unwillingness to take responsibility for their lives, not to mention the lives of loved ones. Infantile people choose partners to take care of them.

In contact with such a person, the feeling is created that you cannot rely on him at a critical moment! In marriages, such people create families, give birth to children and shift responsibility to their partners.

Egocentrism

Egocentrism (from Lat. Ego - "I", centrum - "center of the circle") - the inability or inability of the individual to stand on someone else's point of view, the perception of his point of view as the only existing one. The term was introduced into psychology by Jean Piaget to describe the features of thinking characteristic of children under the age of 8 - 10 years. Normally, egocentrism is characteristic of children, who, as they develop, acquire the ability to "decentrate", to perceive the world from other points of view. For various reasons, this peculiarity of thinking, in varying degrees of severity, can persist even at a more mature age.

Egocentrism (I-centrism) in relationships is manifested in the individual's focus on himself and relative insensitivity to others, absorption in himself, evaluating everything through the prism of his personality.

With an egocentric perception of the world, the individual considers himself to be the center of everything and is unable to see what is happening and himself through the eyes of other people, from some other position. A person with such a focus may have difficulty in not understanding the experiences of other people, lack of emotional responsiveness, in the inability to take into account the points of view of other people. Such a person often perceives other people functionally (people-functions).

Example. Client S. decides whether or not to part with the young man? Weighing the pros and cons, she does not speak about him as a person, about her feelings for him, but describes her partner as a set of functions, lists his “technical” characteristics - educated, status, promising, intelligent - and comes to the conclusion that such a man will not "stale" in the market, any girl will not refuse such a thing. Remember the cartoon about how a man sold his cow: "I won't sell my cow to anyone - you need such a cattle yourself!"

Installation take

Partners in complementary marriages have a pronounced "oral attitude". Chronically not satisfying the basic needs for unconditional love and acceptance in contact with parental figures, they hope to receive them in a new relationship, to "suck" from their partners.

The partner is seen by them as an object that must give. The take-give balance in such relationships is objectively severely violated. Although subjectively, because of childish insatiability in love, the codependent is always not enough of it. He expects his partner to perform parenting functions for himself with full dedication.

Example. Client D., a man of 30 years old, came to therapy with the problem of difficulties in entering into a relationship with the opposite sex. Does not feel like a man, complains of insecurity, low self-esteem. He still lives in his parental family. With his father (alcoholic), the relationship is distant, cold. At this stage, the relationship with the mother is counter-dependent. The father, according to his descriptions, is weak-willed, in relation to him the client feels contempt, disgust. The mother is controlling, emotionally cold, but obsessive, violating his boundaries. The main feeling for the mother is anger, but there is a lot of fear in the background. Recently, the client has felt the need for marriage more and more sharply, wants to create his own family. When discussing his relationship with potential candidates for marriage, I draw attention to the words he threw in relation to such girls: "They want only one thing from me - to get married and have a child." What does the client dislike about such completely natural intentions? He is afraid that not he, but a possible child will occupy his potential spouse. Here you can notice the client's desire to be a child for a partner, to receive unconditional love from him and the rejection of male partner functions - to provide financially for the family, to be strong, reliable.

In the end, I want to say that despite the resulting not very nice portrait of a codependent partner, one should not approach such people from evaluative, moralistic positions, and accuse them of infantile, egocentric behavior. Their personality traits were formed through no fault of their own, they themselves are victims of certain life circumstances and relationships and behave in this way, since they do not know how to do it differently, and besides, they often do not realize it.

As for the therapeutic strategies with this kind of clients, they are described in the previous