Move Back To Get Closer

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

Once again, at a drawing lesson, my teacher tells me - "Get away from the easel, look from afar at what you want to draw, take your time, see the big picture, mood, impression, feel …"

Sometimes I get angry, not understanding why this is necessary. Obviously, I need to peer into the details, into every line, bend, shade … How else to get a good drawing ?!

But for some reason, the picture eventually turns out to be lifeless, does not cling to. You look separately at some pieces - it's very good, but in general, nothing.

No wonder, I'm trying to sketch! Repeat exactly what I see, without letting it pass through myself, without feeling how this still life, landscape, portrait responds in me … For I am so close that I see only some parts, scraps, but not something integral, unified. And I'm not alive in this. There is only a hand and a hand, with certain skills. I do not enter into a relationship with what I see, a feeling is not born in me.

Painting as a result of meeting, contact, feelings, born in the relationship between the artist and some object (subject), in my case, is not created. I can look at her and will never understand what experiences, what impression I had at that moment, what feelings filled me and what experience I got. And I remained the same, without a share of changes.

It seems to me that the same happens in relationships. When we come very close to each other, we merge, we grow together with the skin. And instead of two people, one person appears. It becomes completely incomprehensible where whose needs, desires, what feelings and emotions you are experiencing. Self-sensitivity is significantly reduced.

Fusion is our first experience of meeting the world. In the womb, and even after birth, we experience ourselves as one with our mother. This unity gives us a sense of security, peace and satisfaction of all needs. A kind of bliss that we are constantly trying to achieve in adulthood.

Naturally, when we meet a person who can evoke a range of pleasant feelings in us, with whom we enter into a close relationship, we often unconsciously return to the first experience of intimacy, namely the relationship with our mother. In a period of symbiosis, a sweet moment of unity, where needs are guessed and immediately met. That is why, at the beginning of any relationship, we are so fascinated by the community of interests, "reading thoughts", "guessing desires", the feeling of meeting "two halves".

No matter how wonderful the period of merging is, the bliss ends.

The other is not Mom. He is not able to guess what we want, and sometimes he is not at all able to give what we need. Not to mention the fact that he is not obliged to do this.

In addition, the process of separation and individualization is natural for each person. Instinctively, we are somehow aware that we are a separate subject. Accordingly, sooner or later, anxiety from such closeness, in which we disappear, and tension, from unmet personal needs (even unconscious ones), grows.

In order to return to myself, to realize what I want, what is happening to me, need to move away.

If the first experience of intimacy was traumatic, and no safe attachment has been formed, then the separation process will be associated with high levels of anxiety and fear.

The loss of the object of attachment is so unbearable that we do our best to prevent it from separating. We regress into those pre-verbal experiences that we experienced in infancy, where the loss of contact with the mother, her departure, was tantamount to death. After all, without her, the child cannot satisfy any of his needs.

So, often already from adults you can hear "I will not survive without him / her"; "my life without him / her will become empty"; "I need him / her like air", etc.

If we do not know how to move away, move away in order to return to ourselves, to our feelings and needs, then the exit from the merger can be quite abrupt and painful. After all, we have grown to each other, which means we need to be torn off with the skin. As in the song "Parting Little Death".

To avoid re-traumatization and such intense experiences, people often choose to remain in such a merger. As a result, such a relationship can develop into codependentswhere it is impossible to truly satisfy your needs and develop. As mentioned above, sensitivity to oneself, as well as to another, is lost. In such relationships, we notice that, always, nothing new is introduced and cannot be seen. This is a relationship that is frozen in time.

Unlike codependency, proximity is a free choice. When every day I choose to be or not to be with this person, to love him or not to love him. The ability to move away to some distance makes it possible to make this choice, to make it conscious, based on OWN feelings and needs.

I move away in order to hear and feel myself, to see the Other separately, completely, as He is. And only in this way a feeling is born, and only in this way I have an impulse to approach / or not to approach. A new meeting then fills us, brings satisfaction and pleasure.

And it's not for nothing that museums recommend looking at the canvases from a distance of 2-3 meters! If I come close I will see either my nose or a stain of paint!)