Love Relationship. Separation From Parents

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

In order to approach the question: how a man and a woman build relationships with each other, let us first consider how the psychology of a man or a woman is formed in a biological subject. Biologically, we all carry the characteristics of one sex or another, but are we psychologically mature men and women? And how is this or that psychological maturity formed? In our society, it is not uncommon for the biological and psychological ages of the same person to be inconsistent. For example, a man 45-50 years old with the psychology of a teenager or a woman 30 years old with the psychology of a 5-6 year old girl. One can only imagine how such a woman or such a man would build relationships with the opposite sex.

We all know from personal experience that there is no ideal relationship and that the task of each of us is to find a partner and gain some experience with him, often not very pleasant, to learn a lesson for our own development. And, as a rule, we find perfectly suitable partners for this. If, for example, in childhood, at an early stage of development, your parents took care of you only functionally (regularly changing your diapers, fed on time, put you to bed, etc.), while being emotionally cold with you, and you you suffered greatly, although you don’t remember this, then you will most likely find such a partner who will reproduce your childhood traumatic experience, giving you the opportunity to live loneliness again and again, learn to deal with this pain, forgive your partner, accepting him and your own ideality. And the second option: once, having resigned yourself to your loneliness, you yourself began to fence yourself off from the outside world with emotional coldness. In this case, you will most likely find a very anxious hysterical partner who, from your coldness and detachment, will go crazy, attacking you, controlling you and actualizing your fears of being completely absorbed by someone. In this case, your task is to learn how to contact the outside world, become more sensitive, notice another person nearby and learn to negotiate with him, explaining his characteristics to him.

But often all these difficulties in marriage are hushed up, suppressed and added to the locker. But one fine day, even after decades of living together, this locker can open and "skeletons" will fall out of there. Moreover, these skeletons are not only resentments and hidden anger from relationships with a partner, but also skeletons from our childhood.

Why is it so important what trauma we received as a child? Because very often, and almost always, we project onto our partner those children's needs that were not met in relations with our parents, namely, the experience of emotional and bodily fusion, warmth, intimacy.

Let me give you an example. We often want our partner to guess our desires and not tell him what we want, as it was in early childhood, when we still did not know how to speak, and my mother guessed what we needed from our cries. This is how we behave with our partners, forgetting that we have long been adults and we know how to speak. Partners need to be informed about their desires, using what nature has given us - speech.

We forget about all this, of course, during the period of falling in love. We feel so good, because a loved one makes thousands of attempts to please and predict all our desires. We try to extend this experience as long as possible. But this is just a stage of falling in love, idealizing a partner, passion, merging and euphoria. All this ends sooner or later. This stage has nothing to do with true love between a man and a woman. The stage of love is much more relaxed. It is characterized by various experiences, including negative ones. And if you can accept that your partner has nothing to do with your idealistic expectations of falling in love, if it is possible for you to accept that your partner is far from perfect, he can be alienated, withdrawn, angry or hysterical if you see in all this finally, after all, did not devalue him and continue to see his good qualities, then this is love - to admit that your partner can be different: evil, greedy, picky, but at the same time loving, gentle, generous, and you learn to live next to such an imperfect person - this is love.

But only psychologically mature men and women are capable of this.

How do you achieve this psychological maturity? To do this, you must go through the experience of separation (separation) from your parents. Separating does not mean leaving for another city, stopping communication or burying them. Psychological separation occurs in three stages: 1) the emergence of tension between the parents and the child, 2) declaring their anger, resentment and building their personal boundaries, 3) forgiving each other. This process can take years and may never even be completed. Consider how the separation process occurs in men and women.

For a man, in order to separate from his own mother, it is important to internally accept that the mother in his adult life is the woman who will now always take second place after his chosen one. More aggressive forms of separation are suitable for controlling, authoritarian, intrusive mothers' sons. In this case, the son thanks his mother for everything she did for him and directly announces that he has grown up and now his mother cannot be the main woman of his life. Softer forms of separation occur on the inner plane, i.e. in psychic reality, when the son decides for himself to push the mother into the background, freeing up space next to him to create full-fledged partnerships. At the same time, he does not really react to her grievances, reproaches, manipulations, aggressiveness and jealousy. He understands his belonging to another woman and then he can freely unite with her. And the mother, if she is mentally healthy, makes room for her daughter-in-law herself, recognizing her primacy for her son. All conflicts between the daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law are from the category of competition, which of them is more important for that single man. So that the mother does not worry so much about the “loss” of her beloved child, it would be nice for her to switch all her attention to her husband or some other man, to take care of herself and her personal needs more. This process begins around the teenage age of the son and can drag on all his life if the mother “does not give up”, or it may not start at all if the mother stops all attempts of her son to show aggression towards her from birth and threatens him with the loss of love. A psychologically healthy mother - this is a rarity in our culture - herself fades into the background, recognizing that her son needs to grow up, she accepts her son's aggression and lets him go to other women, symbolically or directly informing him that he is now free from her power.

Now let's talk about how important it is for a woman to separate (separate) from her parents. All girls, starting from a certain age, experience attraction to their father, if there is one, or to an older man in her environment, idealizing and falling in love with him. This can happen already at the age of 5-7 years. This is the so-called Oedipal age. During this period, the girl reaches out more to her father, starting to compete with her mother for him, thus making the first attempts to separate from her.

In this case, what will the mother do, who has her own psychological childhood trauma? She will hinder this love, be jealous and interfere with the emotional contact of the daughter and father. Moreover, such a mother will not be aware of this behavior. Such an obstacle to contact between a daughter and a father can wear very hidden, veiled forms, for example, the devaluation of everything that dad does in relation to his daughter: “he put on the wrong shoes”, “fed the wrong ones”, etc.

The father in such conditions may withdraw himself and become indifferent to his daughter, or he may experience a strong sense of shame as a reaction to the manifested feminine attractiveness of a little girl. Then the oedipal conflict cannot be safely resolved.

During this period, the father must, without seducing his daughter, inform her that she is delightful and beautiful. He approves of her femininity and does not interfere with her contact with boys, especially during adolescence. Thus, the daughter receives initiation as a woman, recognition and blessing from the first man in her life - the father.

At the same time, mom and dad are happy with their daughter's growing up and demonstrate a warm attitude towards each other.

If the separation from the real parents is not complete, then most likely the man or woman will organize it with their marriage partners. Such couples cannot part peacefully, accepting the fact, for example, that the relationship is exhausted, thanking each other for everything they could give and take in this relationship. It will definitely be a very traumatic breakup. Therefore, I urge all parents to allow their children to become independent of you, to accept their aggressive feelings and love for you.

(c) Yulia Latunenko