Addiction Comes From A Lack Of Love

Video: Addiction Comes From A Lack Of Love

Video: Addiction Comes From A Lack Of Love
Video: Love Addiction Comes from Attachment Injuries 2024, March
Addiction Comes From A Lack Of Love
Addiction Comes From A Lack Of Love
Anonim

If another person is needed for your survival, then you are a parasite on that person. "I suffer - it means I love." This love is called love addiction.

By the term neurosis, K. Horney meant not a situational neurosis, but a character neurosis, which begins in early childhood and covers the entire personality.

The neurotic has an excessive need to be loved. Such a person is not able to achieve the degree of love to which he strives - everything is little and little. In this reason, the second reason is hidden - this is the inability to love.

As a rule, the neurotic is not aware of the inability to love.

More often than not, the neurotic lives with the illusion that he has an exceptional ability to love. According to M. S. Among all the misconceptions about love, Peku is the most widespread idea that falling in love is love, or at least one of its manifestations.

Falling in love is subjectively experienced as vividly as love. When a person is in love, his feeling, of course, is expressed by the words “I love her (him),” but two problems immediately arise.

First, falling in love is a specific, sexually oriented, erotic experience. People do not fall in love with their children, although they can love them very much. People only fall in love when it is sexually motivated.

Secondly, the experience of falling in love is always short-lived. Sooner or later, this state goes away if the relationship continues.

An ecstatic, stormy feeling, in fact, falling in love, always passes. The honeymoon is always fleeting. The flowers of romance are fading. Falling in love - does not expand boundaries and limits; it is only a partial and temporary destruction of them.

Expanding the limits of personality is impossible without effort - falling in love does not require effort (Cupid fired an arrow).

True love is an experience of incessant self-expansion.

Falling in love does not possess this property. The sexual specificity of falling in love leads Peck to assume that it is a genetically determined instinctive component of mating behavior.

In other words, the temporary falling of boundaries, which is falling in love, is a stereotypical reaction of a human being to some combination of internal sexual urges and external sexual stimuli; this reaction increases the likelihood of sexual intimacy and copulation, that is, it serves the survival of the human race.

Even more bluntly, Peck argues that falling in love is a deception, a trick that genes play on our minds to fool us into the trap of marriage.

The next widespread misconception about love is that love is addiction.

This is a delusion that psychotherapists have to deal with on a daily basis. Its dramatic manifestations are especially often observed in persons prone to threats and attempts at suicide or experiencing deep depression due to separation or falling out with a lover or spouse.

Such persons usually say: “I don’t want to live. I cannot live without my husband (wife, lover, beloved), because I love him (her) so much. " Hearing from the therapist: “You are wrong; you do not love your husband (wife) ", - the therapist hears an angry question:" What are you talking about? I just told (told) you that I cannot live without him (her)."

Then the therapist tries to explain: “What you described is not love, but parasitism. If another person is needed for your survival, then you are a parasite on that person. There is no choice, no freedom in your relationship. This is not love, but a necessity. Love means free choice. Two people love each other if they are quite capable of doing without each other, but have chosen to live together."

Addiction is the inability to experience the fullness of life and act correctly without the care and concern of a partner.

Addiction in physically healthy people is a pathology; it always indicates some kind of mental defect, illness. But it has to be distinguished from needs and feelings of dependence.

Everyone has a need for dependence and a sense of dependence - even when we try not to show them.

Everyone wants to be coddled, to be cared for by someone stronger and even really benevolent. No matter how strong, caring and responsible you yourself are, look into yourself calmly and carefully: you will find that you also want to be the object of someone's worries at least from time to time.

Every person, no matter how adult and mature he is, is always looking for and would like to have in his life some kind of exemplary personality with maternal and / or paternal functions. But these desires are not dominant and do not determine the development of their individual life. If they control life and dictate the very quality of existence, then it means that you have not just a feeling of dependence or a need for dependence; you have an addiction.

People suffering from such disorders, that is, passively dependent people, try so hard to be loved that they have no strength left to love. They are like starving people who constantly and everywhere beg for food and never have enough of it to share with others.

There is a kind of emptiness lurking in them, a bottomless pit that cannot be filled.

There is never a feeling of completeness, fullness, on the contrary.

They do not tolerate loneliness.

Because of this incompleteness, they do not really feel like a person; in fact, they define, identify themselves only through relationships with other people.

Passive addiction comes from a lack of love.

The inner feeling of emptiness that passively addicted people suffer from is the result of their parents failing to satisfy their child's need for love, attention and care.

Children who have received more or less stable care and love enter life with a deep-rooted confidence that they are loved and significant and that therefore they will be loved and cherished in the future, as long as they are true to themselves.

If a child grows up in an atmosphere where there are no - or are manifested too rarely and inconsistently - love and care, then for adults he will constantly experience inner insecurity, the feeling “I am missing something, the world is unpredictable and unkind, and I myself, apparently I don’t represent any special value and don’t deserve love”.

Such a person constantly fights, wherever he can, for every drop of attention, love or care, and if he finds it, he clings to them with despair, his behavior becomes unloving, manipulative, hypocritical, he himself destroys the relationship that he would like to preserve. …

We can say that addiction is very similar to love, since it appears as a force that tightly binds people to each other. But it is not really love; it is a form of anti-love.

It was generated by the inability of the parents to love the child, and it is expressed in the form of the same inability in himself.

Anti-love is about taking, not giving.

It infantilizes, does not develop;

serves to trap and bind, not release;

destroys rather than strengthens relationships;

destroys, not strengthens people.

One aspect of addiction is that it is not related to spiritual development.

The dependent person is interested in his own "food", but no more;

he wants to feel, he wants to be happy;

he does not seek to develop, he cannot stand the loneliness and suffering accompanying development.

Dependent people are also indifferent to others, even to the objects of their "love"; it is enough for the object to exist, be present, satisfy their needs.

Addiction is just one of the forms of behavior, when there is no question of spiritual development, and we incorrectly call this behavior "love".

The study of masochism debunks another myth - about love as self-sacrifice. This misunderstanding often gives rise to masochists to believe that they endure a disgusting attitude towards themselves because of love.

Whatever we do, we do it by our own choice, and we make this choice because it most satisfies us.

Whatever we do for someone else, we do it to satisfy some need of our own.

If parents tell their children, “You should be grateful for everything that we have done for you,” then by these words the parents reveal a lack of love.

Whoever really loves knows what a joy it is to love.

When we truly love, we do it because we want to love.

We have children because we want to have them, and if we love them as parents, it is only because we want to be loving parents.

It is true that love leads to a change of self, but it is more an extension of the self, not its sacrifice.

Love is a self-fulfilling activity, it expands rather than diminishes the soul; it does not exhaust, but fills the personality.

Love is action, activity. And here is another serious misunderstanding about love that should be carefully considered.

Love is not a feeling. Many people who experience a feeling of love and even act under the dictates of this feeling actually commit acts of non-love and destruction.

On the other hand, a truly loving person often takes loving and constructive actions. The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathexis.

Cathexis is an event or process as a result of which an object becomes important to us. In this object ("object of love" or "object of love") we begin to invest our energy, as if it became a part of ourselves; this connection between us and the object we also call cathexis.

We can talk about many cathexes if we have many such connections at the same time.

The process of stopping the supply of energy to the object of love, as a result of which it loses its meaning for us, is called decatexis.

The delusion about love as a feeling arises from the fact that cathexis is confused with love. This misconception is not difficult to understand, since we are talking about such processes; but there are still clear differences between them.

First of all, we can experience cathexis in relation to any object - living and inanimate, animate and inanimate.

Secondly, if we experience cathexis for another human being, this does not mean at all that we are in any way interested in his spiritual development.

The addicted person is almost always afraid of the spiritual development of his own spouse, to whom she feeds cathexis. The mother, who persistently drove her son to school and back, undoubtedly feels cathexis towards the boy: he was important to her - he, but not his spiritual growth.

Third, the intensity of cathexis usually has nothing to do with wisdom or devotion. Two people can meet in a bar, and the mutual cathexis will be so strong that no previous appointments, promises made, even peace and quiet in the family can compare in importance - for a while - with the experience of sexual pleasure. Finally, cathexis are fragile and fleeting. A couple, having experienced sexual pleasure, may immediately find that their partner is unattractive and undesirable (I have heard about this many times from my clients). Decatexis can be as fast as cathexis.

True love means commitment and effective wisdom. If we are interested in someone's spiritual development, then we understand that the lack of commitment will most likely be painful for that person and that commitment to him is necessary first of all for ourselves in order to show our interest more effectively.

For the same reason, commitment is the cornerstone of psychotherapy. S. Peel and A. Brodsky note that addiction (addiction) can be inevitable if a person does not want to find opportunities to solve problems. Addiction is not a chemical reaction, it is an experience based on a stereotyped subjective reaction of a person to something that is of particular importance to him.

By the end of the twentieth century, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, neuropsychologists, and other scientists turned to the neurochemical research of love. Scientists have compared brain tomograms of romantically loving couples and drug addicted patients. As a result, in both cases, the same zones were active, responsible for the so-called "reward system".

This is expressed by an increased level of dopamine (a substance produced in the brain in large quantities during a positive, according to the subjective perception of a person, experience). Only for lovers this increase was natural, and for drug addicts it was artificial. The dopamine hormone gives a feeling of joy, satisfaction, the well-known feeling of "butterflies in the stomach".

The main indicators of addicted love are the following:

The effect of "corridor vision": obsessive thinking, the inability to focus on other things, all thoughts are absorbed by the "ideal" image of the object of passion.

Sharp emotional changes in mood: a feeling of "flight" and mental intoxication: a lover has an exacerbation of feelings, an emotional upsurge, there is a desire to sing, dance, do something extraordinary, unusual, unexpected.

Disturbance of appetite: either lack of it, or excessive consumption of it, digestive upset is possible.

Feelings of anxiety, insecurity, instability, meaninglessness of life, depression and depression (sometimes suicidal thoughts).

Ignoring the freedom of another and a growing need for change, "improvement" of the "loved one" (in accordance with their ideas, which may change).

Love addiction is a constant concentration of feelings and thoughts on the object of passion: such relationships largely determine the physical, emotional, state of a person, his social activity, relations with other people.

An obsession arises that only loving attention can change life for the better.

The basis of addiction is a feeling of inferiority, low self-esteem, self-doubt, fear of life, excessive anxiety.

E. Fromm proposed his own classification of pseudo-love:

Love-worship is a form of pseudo-love in which a person, psychologically losing himself, seeks to dissolve in the object of love: he lives someone else's life, experiencing inner emptiness, hunger and despair. In this process, the worshiper deprives himself of any sense of his own strength, loses himself in another person instead of finding himself in him.

Addiction-love is a special form of pseudo-love, in which two lovers transfer onto each other the projections of complex experiences associated with their parents (fears, expectations, hopes, illusions), which brings disharmonious tension to the relationship. The formula for such love is: "I love because they love me." The partner seeks to be loved, not to love.

Sentimental love - such love is experienced only in fantasy, the imagination of a lover, full of inspiration and sentimental feelings.

Sentimental love has two flavors:

1) the lover experiences "substitutionary" love satisfaction through the perception of love images from poetry, plays, films, songs;

2) lovers do not live in the present, but can be deeply moved by memories of their previous relationships (or happy plans for the future, fantasies of future love): while the illusion is maintained, two people experience enthusiastic feelings.

Love as a symbiotic union is an active form of symbiotic unity in which everyone loses their independence (through psychological sadistic-masochistic relationships), being neurotically attached to the other, the partner is “absorbed” by the other or wants to “dissolve” the other in himself. Such relationships are associated with "exposure", "exposure" of the shortcomings and weaknesses of lovers. Love tends to give, symbiotic relationships tend to the opposite.

Another form, love-possession, also correlates with such relationships: a situation when, after marriage, two people lose their love for each other and the relationship turns into a "corporation" in which the selfish interests of one partner are combined with another (instead of love, we observe people who have each other). friend, united by common interests).

Meaning-projection love is an unusual form of violation in love associated with a parental situation when both do not love each other: in such relationships, problems are often transferred to children, who act as a compensatory mechanism.

Love is always a wise choice and goodwill. In a mature love relationship, there is always a large space for freedom and satisfaction of your own needs, to achieve your own goals and individual growth of the personality. Such relationships do not tolerate possessiveness.

Healthy, mature love is unthinkable without respect, it is impossible without the inner personal growth of both partners. Undoubtedly, in love there can be a place for sadness, however, even long periods of sadness do not affect the inner psychological stability of lovers.

According to Fromm: "It is an illusion that love certainly excludes conflict"; healthy, mature love relationships are always full of living dynamics and include not only the desire for amorous unity, but also the clash of opposites. This is the complex, ambivalent nature of love.

Love does not tolerate violence, it is open to creative freedom, there is no cowardice in love, but there is masculinity, there is no despair, but there is joy, there is no possessiveness, but there is giving, there is no isolation, but there is a dialogue.

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