Loneliness In The Family

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

Loneliness in the family. Is it possible to have a family, be a husband or wife, but still feel like a deeply lonely person? In theory, this is not possible. However, in practice, when conducting a reception, family psychologists encounter this problem quite often. To make it clear to my readers what is at stake, I will give you some real examples.

Example # 1:

Elena, 32 years old, senior cashier of a large shopping center. Family experience 12 years, daughter 11 years. She turned to a psychologist complaining that she feels lonely in the family. The husband and daughter practically do not communicate with her, there are practically no joint conversations. Each family member lives his own life. In a family, there are practically no joint breakfasts, lunches and dinners. The daughter eats supper while surfing the Internet, the husband takes food only when watching "male" TV series or brought with him video discs with action films and detectives. For many years intimate relations with a spouse have been reduced to almost a minimum. Elena's suggestions to her husband “to go somewhere”, for example, to a movie, a restaurant or a nightclub, are smashed by men's laziness or the desire “to save the family budget and spend it better on new rubber for the car”. Elena pulls on herself almost all the homework, goes shopping, takes her daughter to music school and dancing. And at the same time, Elena is at times overwhelmed by melancholy and unwillingness to go home after work. Sometimes she even stayed half an hour after work in order to somehow communicate with her friends, she could even drink a couple of sips of beer for the campaign. In response to her husband's irritation at the smell of alcohol from his wife, she asked him to go out for walks in the evenings to communicate, but usually received empty promises or rejections. Having quarreled, she could cry for half an hour in the bedroom from resentment, and at the same time none of the family members came to her to support her and calm her down. Having no formally any significant reasons for resentment and irritation, and nevertheless, brought almost to the brink of nervous exhaustion, Elena asks a psychologist to help her become important and necessary for family members, to save her family, but at the same time she is not able to coherently explain when exactly did this kind of problem begin and what was the root cause of the separation of family members from her …

Personally, I'm interested in how you imagine Elena's husband and daughter. A certain narrow-minded man-hard worker who every evening with beer or with men in the garage (and one is not a hindrance to the other), is not interested in anything, his daughter is an inveterate C grade student who hangs on the phone with her friends in the evenings, etc. I can immediately assure you that all this is fundamentally wrong. The husband is, in fact, quite a decent man, a respected engineer in a computer company, with a higher education and a good salary, even if he is not an athlete, but he was not noticed in drunkenness. He does not run around her girlfriends and friends, reads in the evenings, gladly helps her daughter do her homework. The daughter herself studies at "four" and "five", is engaged in theatrical performances in the school circle, while she is a very restrained and correct girl (adolescence is still ahead). The question is, why don't people live, where have intimate relationships and interest in each other disappeared?

Or here's another example # 2.

Natalia, 28 years old. No higher education, but very educated and responsible. She came from the village, graduated from a medical school, successfully got a job in an expensive dental clinic, and met one of the well-to-do clients there. The man (7 years older than Natalia) has a wife who died in an accident, leaving a five-year-old daughter. Two weeks after they met, Natalya moved to Igor, six months later she became pregnant, they got married, and family life began. Realizing well that all this is the ultimate dream, Natalia concentrated on her children and her husband. Everything is always cleaned at home, deliciously cooked, the husband is completely relieved of routine housework. She went on maternity leave, gave birth. The birth was difficult, Natalya's health was shaken, so she did not go to work. Possessing certain medical and chemical knowledge, she unexpectedly found herself in the art of home interior design, or rather learned how to masterfully handle various wooden and metal objects, changing their color and texture, creating the effect of “aging”. She began to take orders for the house, went to her own earnings. At the same time, the husband and children were surrounded by attention and care, the house always smelled of cooked and baked goods. The husband usually spent the evening at home, went to the nearby gym. However, the effect with all this turned out to be exactly the same as in Elena's family: having a husband and two children, after some time Natalia also felt lonely and useless as a housekeeper. Not at all an old and physically healthy husband paid almost no male attention. At the same time, he referred to the fact that in the evening he went to bed early, and his wife was still doing household chores, and in the morning, when she got up to work, she, tired of nightly household chores and children, was still asleep.

When the family went out on a campaign to nature, the feeling of loneliness in a strange way only intensified: the husband spent all the time with other men and was sincerely convinced that his wife also really liked to communicate with her friends, the wives of his friends. However, Natalia suffered greatly from a lack of communication with her husband …

Natalia turned to me when, according to her, she was on the verge of betraying her husband with one of her customers. However, from the context of her stories, I concluded that, in fact, the betrayal had already taken place for about two months, it was just that the woman managed to pull herself together in time, realized that if she was identified, she would lose more than she would gain, and still tried correct the situation within the family itself.

This concludes our examples and proceeds to generalizations.

One of the reasons for the emergence of feelings of alienation between spouses

is the emergence of such a rhythm of family life, when they each live on their own schedule.

What is meant? And the fact that such a curious phenomenon arises in this pair, when a man and women, formally being husband and wife (or common-law spouses), being considered outwardly as a completely prosperous couple, in real life, are as if in parallel worlds, communicating so little and touching each other with a friend that I personally, in my psychological practice, define such couples as follows: loneliness in the family or "close, but not together." For two decades now, leading a personal reception, cooling down to each other, conflicting and divorcing spouses, I am deeply convinced of the following:

Married life according to the principle "Near, but not together"

almost always ends first with the alienation of the husband and wife, and then betrayals, divorces and personal tragedies

not only for former spouses, but also for their children.

And I am also convinced that the majority of those of my dear readers who already have at least some kind of life and family experience will certainly agree with me in the following assessment:

Married life according to the principle "Near, but not together"

in fact is not a marriage, but an intermediate state before the crisis of relations.

Or even, one of the varieties of the very crisis of these very relations …

The core of the problem is loneliness in the family. If you try to characterize the essence of the situation right away, then it is as follows:

The problem of "loneliness in the family" arises in those families where initially, or in the course of family life, there is a household

a bias of the areas of family responsibility towards one of the spouses.

That is, a husband or wife (most often, of course, a wife, but sometimes a husband), due to a variety of reasons and circumstances (about them a little below), shoulder almost the entire (and sometimes even the whole!) Load of household, household and child-educational family problems, and eliminate them so diligently that they themselves almost completely remove themselves from the life of their spouse (husband, wife), become for him (her) no longer a person, not a "beloved half", but just a "servant", "Service personnel", "housekeeper (com)". And therefore, a creature that is clearly uninteresting, to talk with whom (oh) is elementary "nothing", who (s) "does not understand anything in life", his (her) outlook on life is outdated, and advice and tips are always wrong and therefore they cause only irritation, and even open aggression.

If this paragraph seems to you very-complicated-twisted, then I will explain again: the problem of "loneliness in the family" usually describes the situation when one of the spouses (usually the wife) performs most of the household, household and child-educational problems in the family, fights with all this host of never ending and not reducing problems practically alone, but the other half at this time rests, "develops intellectually", makes a career, makes money, but has sex and goes to resorts and recreation centers … often already with completely different people. And for the second half, no remorse is foreseen: according to them, “they also created a family with a bright and sexy personality, and now this is some kind of tortured and brutal creature that only does what goes around the house in a saggy T-shirt, swears with children because of the lessons, and all the talks of which (oh) about the increase in prices for sausage and the fact that other couples go out of town every weekend for barbecue, and we always sit at home! And this is not surprising: well, where will I go with him (her)? It’s just a shame, it’s uncomfortable in front of people!”

Simply put:

The family problem "loneliness in the family" arises there and when one of the spouses shows excessive initiative and responsibility for everything that happens in the family in this case, eventually gets bogged down in the midst of economic, household and child-rearing affairs, essentially begins live their own stressful life and therefore it is not surprising that the other half over time … also begins to live its own life. Much more interesting, intellectual and erotic, of course.

This is how, over time, real "parallel worlds" of a husband and wife are formed, when, living together, in fact, they just live next to each other, they turn out to be a man and a woman who do not love each other, but simply lodgers who have common children, a car and a dacha (if there is a car and a cottage). And the ending of this story is always the same:

• - eternal scandals due to the fact that when the wife vacuums or mops the floor, all the help of the husband consists only in the fact that (sitting on the couch and watching TV) he raises his legs;
• - the husband is offended that the wife, who runs straight from work to the parents' meeting at school, and then goes to the store, you see, did not cook that day;
• - the wife is annoyed because it is she who washes and drags the heavy tires on the balcony (due to the lack of a garage);
• - the husband is dissatisfied with the fact that the wife is always unhappy with everything, the wife is unhappy with the fact that the husband is happy with everything, and the children fearfully hide in their room when mom and dad begin to communicate as always, in a raised voice;
• - intimate life in a couple freezes or is carried out in a tensely embittered state of constant begging for attention;
• - Regular scandals lead to the fact that one of the couple (whose nerves can not stand the first) begins to drink too much, or stay late at work, or change, or … create a new family. With those very new hopes that “now everything is different for me, not like before,” that almost always break up against the fact that even creating a “fundamentally new” family, a person does it with the psychological stereotypes of family behavior. And, after three to five years, more often than not, the new family begins to painfully resemble the old family, with all the standard set of all those "charms" that we just mentioned above.

And stating all this, having a very wide experience of working with such pairs, I want to say two things:

First. Realizing that you live in the "family loneliness" variant, the most correct thing is not to create a new family (as in the well-known proverb, it may turn out to be "the same egg, only in profile"), but to try to "reformat" the existing family, that is, the one in which you live at the present time.

Second. There is no need to follow everyday stereotypes and assume that only men are always to blame for a situation “close but not together”! Trust my practice experience-:

Certainly the most comfortable in a family situation.

It is the husbands who most often feel “near, but not together”

however, in fairness, it should be admitted:

In the emergence of this very situation

usually their overly responsible wives are to blame.