Happiness Without Distortions

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

Happiness without distortions

Text: Ira Ford

Psychologist Alexander Roitman told journalist Ira Ford about how a woman can find balance.

- Sash, can you teach me how to balance? Make a career, bake pancakes, please your husband, be a great mother and, along the way, realize yourself in creativity?

- A woman is by nature very organic and internally stable. But … this strength, which always saves her, turns out to be a bottleneck. I'm talking about physiology. In a woman, all the answers are written by nature - this is organized reflexively, and these reflexes can both stabilize the entire system and distort it.

What am I talking about? Let's say you ask a wise woman the question: "Who is your family?" And you hear: “I know the correct answer, I am smart enough - my husband, my partner. But I cannot pronounce it - because at the animal level, right from the womb, comes the answer: "My child, my children." This perception often distorts the natural, healthy development of the family, explodes the family at the systemic level.

- What do you mean when you say "it blows up the family"?

- Let's consider two models of the family in their polar manifestations - "family for a partner" versus "family for children." What happens in an ideal family about partners? A child is born. First, he separates early into his bed - and the partner returns to bed with his wife, then the child leaves early to his room - and the parent's bedroom becomes, in the full sense, the parent's bedroom, the child is weaned, the child leaves early for kindergarten, school, leaves early work (and at some point contributes to the family), and then leaves early to his home and his family. We see the separation of the child - step by step. And what happens at the other pole at this time?

The child stays with his mother in bed, in the room, continues to eat his breast, studies with his mother in family education, waits for the birth of a brother or sister, who occupies his mother’s second breast, and finally occupies the bed and wardrobe. And such a child does not leave home either at 3 years old, or at 7, or at 23, or at 55 years old - and takes the place of a partner next to his mother. What do you think, what status remains for a man in this case? Workaholism? This is still a good option! Maybe alcoholism? Second family? Two permanent mistresses? Or do you see better options?

It seems that the first option is the ultimate, but no! For any infantile woman who is not ready to build a serious pair relationship, taking the risk of intimacy, at the risk of love, it is very tempting to live for children. And in this case, the second version of the family - even if it is vicious, aimed at hopelessness, focused on mutual destruction - seems more convenient. And in this, second, case, the husband becomes a function, a fodder base, and the family ceases to be about happiness, but becomes about preservation. But there is nothing to be done - even very intelligent women, very conscious, this place is often given hard.

- Are you one size fits all? I'm here about myself: I consider myself both smart and conscious, and I regularly choose a partner. But there are times when I choose a child - I sleep with him, I feed him, I make him a priority. But at the same time I understand - that infancy will end, and …

- Theoretically it is possible to understand it! But what is the meaning of this to understand if a man ceases to occupy a place in your interests, ceases to be a key factor in life? It is easy to understand why a woman chooses a child now. But this does not make it easier for a man - he moves away every day, moves to the second, third, twenty-fifth plan.

- And also "to be continued", right? Colic-gasics have passed, teeth have begun, teeth have gone, kindergarten has begun, the baby needs a mother again, and “at the forum they said that maybe now even more than before,” and a man from the coast of your family life has long been carried away to Turkey and that's it. still bears - on and on. And … there seems to be a hope for a passing current and surf, but every day it is more and more ghostly. And then - attention! - the second child is born.

- Well, that's all. If we consider the situation in which a woman chooses children, then after the second child the woman at the reflex level feels: everything that she wanted to receive from the man, she received. And all that remains for a man further is to become a deaf-blind-mute captain of the long voyage. To sometimes come from the sea, leave gifts at the door and go on a new voyage.

- But it all started just amazing. The demo version included games in The World of tanks at night, and going to the movies and incredible sex, and promises of eternal love.

- And the horror is that the man could not insure himself and predict in advance how it would turn out. And the woman could not protect him from this. They built a family for the sake of future children. She said, “Wait a little. I'll give birth, and I'll be yours,”and he replied:“Yes, of course, think only about our baby! He needs you now much more than I do. I will understand everything, we will understand everything”.

- And in an amicable way he had to say: "I want us to live for each other, and not for this child?"

- Even then, when they exchanged rings, he had to say: "We live for each other, not for children." When the husband says this, he gives his woman a chance to choose himself as the alpha and omega of your common life, means that they are part of this family, that they will live this life happily ever after - together, and will die in one day. And that the children will bring them their grandchildren for blessing, and the grandchildren will have time to bring and show their great-grandchildren. This gives the family a chance for a common future.

- Is there a risk that the family that said “I want us to live for each other” will abandon the idea of children?

- And what is the connection? I don't think there is such a risk. Children are a physiological component, but we want someone to entertain us, we like all this fuss, a crowd that makes noise, rattles, beats everything that it reaches and paints the rest. And I also believe that in a family that has chosen a husband and wife, if some kind of misfortune happens with the difficulties of childbearing, the family mission will remain. And with the appearance of children, the family does not lose anything: it will be more stable and directed towards infinity.

- Is the bias towards children in a woman - is it the main bias? Is there still a bias towards work, towards creativity, towards the husband “I live for him, and without him I’m no one”?

- I think that the bias towards children - it is basic, the most natural, often found, prescribed in the settings of a woman. Because “a woman who lives for creativity” sounds good, but in our society there are few such women. “A woman who lives to work” is such a phenomenon, but society seems to be coping with it well: such women very quickly either drop out of the family, or create specific families, taking into account their peculiarities.

- The main thing in what we are talking about today is “is the woman inside herself happy”?

- I think that the level of happiness and balance of a woman depends on the answer to the question: "Will this girl or woman come to a psychologist with her task or not?" If it does not come, it means that it has its own regulatory mechanisms. For example, let's take a woman who lives alone and has a relationship that replaces a family: they meet once a week, and they are happy with it. And if she says: “Everything is fine,” then she hardly needs to go to a psychologist. Or there are women who say: “I have not been able to build happiness. But I have peace and will, prosperity, public respect and tomorrow. " Their voice does not ring, but in general everything is OK.

There are women who explain their problems succinctly: “Yes, this is because there are no good men. But maybe, thank God - you yourself with a mustache. And these, too, most likely will not go to a psychologist. Because tomorrow is a woman for whom a man has no value, she is ready to take a pregnancy from a test tube, raise a child, give it to the world and continue to work, or, as she herself says, “self-actualize”. Both modern literature and cinematography - even Sex and the City, even The Devil Wears Prada, or Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears - are cult films for these girls. Some Russian girl from Yaroslavl can't help but admire after watching such a film. And inside it there will be a tension that will move our society with you from the pole of yesterday to the pole of tomorrow.

- You have 2 daughters. One has grown, the second is growing. There is a gap of 20 years between them: you can still influence one, and you cannot influence the other.

- The eldest watches “Sex and the City” with delight, but at the same time builds a very conservative patriarchal family and looks for prospects there. And five-year-old Michelle is raised by such a different self that she is virally saturated with a different image of happiness. I automatically follow the constructions of the new world, stuff it with possibilities, try to hammer 4 languages into it, music and chess are meta-skills. And it would never occur to me to give it to cutting and sewing. But not so long ago it was believed that a girl who knows how to sew will not disappear anywhere: my eldest daughter can cut and sew. And a couple of years ago I darned my socks myself - not because I didn't make money on new ones, but because I love them. And now I buy socks that you want to mend - it won't work: non-woven, with protection in the heel and toe. New technologies. And, in relation to the family - socks that lay a new image of the family.

- So how do you keep the balance?

- We watch advertisements, leaf through the gloss, breathe in this trend, without noticing it ourselves, and … there is nothing to be done about it - a gas mask against the future has not been invented. Therefore, to the question "How to keep the balance?" I will answer briefly: to honestly decide which trend I choose, which God I serve, to which future I want to take my great-grandchildren. If I don't need anything except a holiday, then maybe it's not about the fact that I need a family, children or a husband - maybe a family is superfluous for me, and I don't need pain, inner loneliness, and I choose a holiday, a search yourself, self-realization. Isn't it beautiful too? And if I choose a family, then the question is which one. The only question is an honest choice of heart, without regard to fashion.