About Merging And The Boundaries Of Your Inner World. Can I Be Happy If Grief Is Near?

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

Author: Irina Dybova

I stand on one leg, outside the window there is a smell of spring, I paint my eyes, we are going to leave with my daughter, we have big plans..

A friend is calling. Her son vomits, he has a fever and a stomach ache. My confidence in my boundless happiness was shaken. My daughter tensely watches my expression. Should she wear shoes or not? Is it March 8 after all or not?

I was about 14. A young woman is carrying her three-year-old daughter into the hospital ward. Her face is tense, her lips are tightly compressed.

- What did the doctor say? What did the survey give?

I am lying on the next bed. Next to me is a crib with white shabby twigs. A woman puts a child in it. A plump face, framed with dark curls, looks with doll eyes through the lattice of the bed into the wall of the stop. The girl sees very badly, practically nothing. A young mother came with her from some farm to the regional hospital for examination.

“She can never see.

How? Why? Can not be! In the face of such deafening grief, I don't know what to do. I burrow into pillows with my head and start crying out loud.

- What are you, do not cry. This is our grief, not yours.

Not yours…

Where is this border - mine is not mine?

2004 year. New Year. Snowing. Peeling walls of the infectious diseases hospital, barred windows. One “our” nanny on duty celebrates the New Year with abandoned children in the ward. Kids are sleeping. Someone is coughing. Someone woke up, she's changing the sliders. She is glad to see us. My husband and I, and my six-year-old son came to support her. There is a suffocating smell, stale air, the smell of medicines and wet diapers, other people's fates, other people's children. Why am I here? There is grief, I know about it. This means that I cannot be happy and live my life.

I have to share.

Many years later, working as a coach and gestalt therapist, I met with the despair of women who could not live and sleep peacefully, because “there is war”, “there is grief,” “there people are killing each other.”

What happens to our personal space when we join the space of another person, to his grief, his disorder, to his life tragedy?

It changes

How bright yellow paint instantly changes its shade, if dark blue is splashed into it.

Contact with the world and man begins with opening your own boundaries. From the moment when I let your story into mine and share my life with you. Without this, empathy, attachment, and living feeling are impossible. But if at this moment we forget ourselves, then we merge with the other. (“Fusion” is a gestalt term)

I begin to live with your feelings, I become infected with your condition, I stop relying on myself, on my feelings, my experience, my vision of reality. I become like you. I'm mimicking you. As I am no more.

At the moment of merging with another or others (crowd, social group), the personality dissolves and ceases to exist as a separate unit with its own plans, vision, with its own life.

In the socialist past, during my pioneering childhood and that of my parents, fusion was the leading way society offered to interact. A person should not have any interests other than public ones. “I” is the last letter in the alphabet”- remember? Shame and contempt awaited “individualists” who thought differently and did not march in step in the general formation, and during childhood my parents, funnels, and remember what their names were.

It was not customary to think with your own head.

Now, when we physically become farther and farther from each other, when more and more people work from home, when we rarely live under the same roof with our parents, and our better friends live in different cities, the boundaries of our psychic reality have not become stronger. If earlier the humanity was plagued by the plague, now they are jamming information wars. Whether it is at least the popularization of the flu, at least interethnic strife. Information waves will easily absorb anyone in their abyss - "a comet is coming," "the end of the era of Aquarius," "a worldwide conspiracy," "the invasion of a deadly virus," "a war between us and them." While the waves are carried across the endless expanses of the Internet and TV, you can not think about your own life; worrying about them, relieve tension and not do something important.

Living someone else's life very well protects from your own.

But not only.

To rely on yourself in interaction with others or others, you also need to know what to rely on. You must be ready to outline the boundaries of your psychic reality and know what is included in it. What I want, what I live, what I love, where I am, where are my plans, desires, tastes, preferences, what are my needs and where I am going right now and in the future.

You need to have the courage to admit your feelings to yourself. In its irritation or indifference, in pity, compassion or disgust or even rage - in what has risen now inside in response to what someone else has brought to the border of my world.

And then you can say: “I feel this”, “I feel this” - this is mine. “In my experience it was so”, “I am convinced of this”. "I want this." "And I decide to do it."

It happens that someone else's lifts something of their own, pulls up their own experiences like a hook from the depths of the soul, personal experience, their own life story responds. And if here you do not give yourself an account of the fact that I cannot have "exactly the same", I still have a different way, simply because we are two different people, then you can merge with the other, without understanding where mine, and where exactly is not mine.

It is useful to ask yourself the following questions: “Why am I suffering? What are my worries related to? How do I feel about what the person says? What have I found in common? And what echoed in me from my story?"

Another person can be a breath of fresh air. inspiring wind in your soul. But they still won't be able to breathe. You will have to breathe your own and yourself

How not to take the landscape with you from the train window, not to grab and hold the sea wave, the dried flowers between the book pages are no longer the same as on the top of the mountain.

Meeting with another changes us, but every time we return home, to ourselves.

Updated, slightly changed, somewhere even different, but their own.

With our feelings, thoughts, sensations, with our vision of the world, new experience, with our personal world, which we will share with others on occasion.)