Quality Termination Of The Relationship

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

"Dad! I love the girl, she doesn't love me. What should I do?". And do you know what the king of England answered me? “What to do, son? To suffer!" Grigory Gorin "Kin IV"

An incomplete relationship is what we take with us from the past to the present and carry it into our future. An incomplete relationship is a process that must be lived through, drawing conclusions and accepting the whole gamut of your feelings. What is hindering this process? Why do you need to experience your feelings? And what do psychologists call a quality end to a relationship?

In Gestalt therapy, there is the concept of "contact". Each satisfied need has a completed contact (completed situation) under it. The easiest way to explain this is with an everyday example. You are hungry and go to the refrigerator (contact phase - precontact), open it and choose to eat for you. Let's say you pick a salad, take it out and eat it (contact phase). After that, you felt a sense of satisfaction and satiety (post-exposure). For you, this situation will be completely over. If, for example, you went to the refrigerator and changed your mind, or didn’t eat a salad because you’ve already full, this situation can also be called complete, so you don’t feel hungry and your need was eventually satisfied. Any action will be considered complete if it is not emotional.

In a relationship between two people, everything happens exactly the same. But rarely does anyone completely go through all the stages in a relationship and experience the end of this relationship. Feelings (anger, guilt, resentment, hatred) that require an exit remain with the person, are suppressed, and then transferred to other relationships, especially if the person immediately entered into other relationships in order to leave the latter. Having unresolved emotions, he gets stuck at a high emotional level, and spends a tremendous amount of energy on this. And emotions do not disappear anywhere and continue to destroy a person from the inside. To feel more comfortable, he “invents” protective mechanisms against the negative emotions of his past. Here's a real example. The young man broke up after 5 years of relationship with a girl. Although there was a lot of talk that they were parting, after the breakup the young man remained in pain and he began to "reanimate" himself every day, saying that "I am fine." When I talked with this man, he told me that he practically believed that everything "passed" for him in relation to his beloved. But in reality, this may not be the case. Denials of feelings, positive thinking, switching to external activity in life, to other relationships are not very effective, since in none of these options a person gets the experience of living in relationships and their feelings in them.

One more example. The 38-year-old woman divorced her husband six months ago and maintains a relationship with him, maintaining physical intimacy in them, which further emotionally reinforces their union. Such relationships of ex-spouses nullify the possibility of new relationships, since without "letting go" entirely and completely one relationship, it is impossible to build others. We cannot live a double life, where, on the one hand, we have a past relationship with their grievances, and on the other, a new relationship. For a new one you need to have free space.

There are situations when a person abruptly leaves the relationship (it does not matter if it happens through his fault or through the fault of a partner), and he does not have time to understand what is happening. Thus, the breakup brings with it an unfinished situation and the same unfinished feelings in it. In a breakup, people avoid goodbyes, explanations, and this further complicates the completion of the situation.

What to do with unlived feelings? The first thing to do is become aware of them. Accept without pushing them into yourself. No denial, no condemnation. To live this feeling of loss that was in life. Find a way to release these feelings, write a letter to your ex, keep a diary, talk with loved ones, seek help from a psychologist. Do not strive to establish a relationship with another person as soon as possible, do not look for a “savior” in him from your troubles and pain. Give yourself as much time as you need to end the relationship. It is impossible to "force" yourself to end the relationship faster, or give yourself only 2 weeks to complete it.

At the beginning, we talked about the three phases of a relationship that are important for every person to go through. There is also a fourth phase of relations, let's call it CONCLUSIONS. This phase can also be called a quality completion of the relationship. If you have an unfinished relationship with someone in your life, you can do this helpful exercise.

An exercise. In order to analyze your past relationships, you will need to answer the following questions:

What happened?

What emotions did this evoke?

How has this affected my life?

What price did I pay for this relationship?

What did I not say in them, did I not?

Which of this would I say or complete, and which no longer matters to me?

What kind of partner was I in this relationship?

What did you expect from the other, what did you put into this relationship?

What kind of relationships do I need in the future, and which ones are unacceptable for me?

For what am I grateful to my former partner?

By answering questions related to a partner, a person absorbs valuable experience that will help him not to make mistakes of the past in the future in other relationships. This experience can subsequently affect his relationship with another partner, on his perception of another person. A deep debriefing can lead to a new perspective on what happened and a detailed understanding of the relationship. Good luck on your journey to awareness and quality accomplishments!