2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
After one of the marital consultations, I started thinking about a suitable metaphor for a codependent relationship. The first image that came, and, in my opinion, quite successful - the image of slaves and masters. If the master wants something, his desire is basic, the desires of others are not counted, others are slaves, and must strictly follow the rules and instructions.
The roles of a slave and a master can alternate, or they can be static in time - someone in a relationship is a constant slave, and someone is a master.
Let's look at the effect of these roles with some examples of codependent behaviors
1. Do not admit your desires and feelings to a slave like a master. Admitting, asking, explaining means showing your weakness and vulnerability.
The man-master acts sharply, with pressure. It is better to humiliate, suppress the slave so that he obeys unquestioningly, realizing all his inconsistency. For example: a husband cannot ask his wife with the question: "Let's discuss our plans for the upcoming nellel, I plan to meet with a friend after work on Thursday," instead, on the designated day, he confronts his wife with a fact, and if she objects, he says that will do as he wants, and no one decides to him, accuses his wife of being in control of him. Meanwhile, as on his part, you can see an egocentric position, the desire to put his desires at the forefront and neglect of the needs and plans of his wife. 2. The master believes that the slave should share his worldview and hobbies, the desires of the slave should coincide with the desires of the master. For example: a husband expected that at night he and his wife would be intimate, but the wife fell asleep; the husband pointedly turned on the TV and turned up the volume; in the end, a quarrel occurred between the spouses, both went to work in the morning sleepy, nervous. Another variant. The wife addresses her husband in a derogatory tone: "How can you listen to this music ?! It is for people with low spiritual needs."
3. The slave is ready to sacrifice his interests, pleasures, needs, so as not to cause disfavor of the master. For example, the wife feels bad - the pressure has risen, but, despite this, she goes to cook dinner and iron her husband's shirts, so that he does not call her lazy and go to another. 4. The slave completely transfers responsibility for his life to the master. Let the master decide what is good for him and what is bad. For example: the husband completely assigns responsibility to the wife in matters of where to invest money, where to relax, how to raise children, or the husband decides what the wife should eat, what books to read, how to look, what she can say in his presence, and what not and etc.
5. A slave cannot have his own hobbies, interesting work, there should be no communication outside the home, any informal contacts are considered treason … All the interests of the slave must be subordinated to the interests of the master and what happens between them. For example, the wife decided to go to the theater with her friend, and the husband bombarded her with accusations of indifference, infidelity, said that in revenge he would go to drink beer with friends.
In the relationship between a master and a slave, there is no place for the free manifestation of interests, positive feelings, support, but there is a lot of suppression, criticism, irritation, anger and resentment.
Such relationships are also called sadomasochistic.
Here is a quote from S. Cohen, which characterizes the motives for acting out and maintaining such a relationship.
Exciting is the ability to evoke strong affective reactions in another, to overcome barriers created by others; feel that you have control and dominate over another, that you can make the other feel bad, guilty, weak, inferior, inferior. An exciting activity is to hold the other in the palm of your hand, bring him to a state of loss of control by attacking, leaving, and then again making sure that this does not happen. The game conceals a more serious destructiveness - the destruction of the autonomy of another person and his freedom of choice.
Erotization subdues destructiveness; the person can pretend that this is some kind of love affair, an exciting game, desired by both participants. This is a completely different matter than admitting that one person hates, envies and is disappointed because the other has his own life, that he is separate and independent, and then the first one wants to destroy it all (compare the relationship between Wanda and Severin) (Sacher-Masoch, 1870). The danger of fusion in the form of passive masochistic surrender is overcome through the illusion of omnipotent control, the ability to render the other helpless.
A person has a deep irrational attitude that in this way he controls the relationship, when in fact he only destroys them.
Dear readers, I hope this article was interesting and useful. I would be glad to receive your comments
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