Me Or You?

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

Author: Julia Stulova

Me or you?

Has it ever happened in your life that your relationship with the opposite sex has become more like a game of catch-up? The partner runs away from intimacy and commitment, and I catch up: I try to prove my love and achieve reciprocity. Or my partner is constantly encroaching on my freedom, trying to drag me into a chain of obligations, and I am hiding in flight for numerous inventions "why now is not the time and why everything will not work out early." Runaway and Catching Up. Eternal drama of unhappy love. Long known, but still unresolved.

And if you have been in the place of one of them, the Runner or the Chaser, then, perhaps, you will be interested to know something about where they run to? But first, let's find out who they are?

Runaway and Catch-up are two roles in a codependent relationship. They are linked to each other by bonds of emotional dependence. Two halves of one whole.

The one who catches up lives in a rapid alternation of erotic excitement (falling in love) and disappointment. The most important thing in the state of being in love is idealization and the feeling of merging, which are experienced by the Catching One as the height of bliss, the greatest pleasure. Catching up with the naivete of an infant believes that the strength of his boundless passionate desire alone is enough to achieve what he wants from a partner. And thus puts himself in a slave dependence on a partner.

Disappointment and devaluation of a partner is inevitable. Then the cycle repeats with the same outcome.

The Runawayer, no less than the Catching One, needs love and care, but hides this behind a mask of self-sufficiency.

It has the following behavior:

- an overvalued attitude towards a significant other who is outwardly avoided;

- the closeness of the inner life from a significant other because of projective fear (one's desire is attributed to another) of control on his part and "absorption" by him;

- the formation of substitutional dependent relationships with other people.

Codependency between the Catching Up and the Runawayer can develop from the very beginning of the relationship. A vicious circle is formed: the more activity the Catching up with, the more the Runaway moves away from him, thereby increasing the partner's fear of rejection and abandonment and stimulating his activity. The conflict of interests intensifies, at some point it becomes so unbearable for the Runaway that he runs away into a new addiction. A new addiction can develop from another person, things, alcohol, work, from the process of raising a previous partner. The purpose of the emergence of a new addiction is the transition to a relationship that is less dangerous for his intimophobia.

It is important that one does not live without the other. Even if two Catching Ones come together, then one of them will catch up more strongly and the second, sooner or later, will start to run away. If two Runaways converge, then companionship may develop between them, but intimate-personal relations will not work out again.

I am like you

Despite the seemingly enormous difference, the Catching Up and the Runaway suffer from the same problems: a lack of intimacy and trust in their relationships with significant others. They feel a sense of worthlessness and uselessness, but they cannot create intimate relationships with independent people and are not carried away by them, considering them unattractive, uninteresting. In other people, they are attracted by what, firstly, nostalgically familiar, secondly, gives hope for the realization of childhood fantasies and, thirdly, promises to heal the wounds that are the result of childhood object relations. Those who run away are selectively sociable, not inclined to stable personal relationships, and often tend to live alone.

… me again?

"I again" comes at the moment when you understand that, trying not to be the Catching One, you become the Runaway, and vice versa. The conclusion is simple, it is impossible to free yourself from codependency by trying to change your relationship with your partner. How else?

Let's go back to the question we asked at the beginning: where are they running? This question itself contains the answer. Run away and Catch up are ways to achieve love and care. Therefore, it is necessary to deal not with a relationship or a partner, but with the need for love and care.

What's wrong"? “Not so” is that this need of ours is similar in nature to the needs for the love and care of children. “Not so” is a feeling of childishness and failure, which is hidden behind these needs. “Not so” is our unconscious desire to remain a child further, to win in the end the struggle for the love of another person. That's when we can grow up. Confidence that "if someone loves me, then I can do anything." Similar to the confidence of the monster from the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast", and some other fairy tales. From infancy, we are hammered in with the idea that love and happiness must be earned. That it is not enough just to be, it is imperative to be certain. So we try to become certain, and the guarantor of what we have become is the love of another person. After that, you can already "be" the way I want. Deserved. An eternal struggle to be yourself. And, like any struggle, there are no winners or losers in it, therefore, I become somehow definite, and I just stop being myself. Vicious circle.

We

Sympathy for another is based on similarities with him. If we “don’t like anyone” or “we don’t work with anyone,” then most likely I don’t like myself and I’m unable to improve relations with myself?

There is a third way between escape and fusion. The path to oneself is the path to the other. The closer I become to myself, the closer I can become to another (I have already passed this path with myself, so now I know how!). The better I get to know, understand and feel myself, the better I can understand and feel the other (again, using the experience of working with myself). The more I grow up myself, the more I can see an adult in something else. If I turn my relationship with myself from a struggle to intimacy, then what will prevent me from doing the same in my relationship with another.

We are me and me. This is how I feel about myself. More often people call this self-esteem. If your self-esteem is low and you often scold yourself, how do you feel about yourself? Then why should your partner treat you differently? If you yourself are afraid of intimacy and responsibility for intimacy, then why should your partner treat it all differently?

We sometimes want someone else to do our job for us. For someone to love us, start caring about us, become strong, and let us be weak (or vice versa).

Friends of my friends have an amazing child. When he was about three years old, he said to any words of adults: “I am here! Here! " Independence (independence, inner freedom) begins with this "I myself!" Who will learn to love you? Who will learn to take care of you? Who will learn to take care of you? Who will learn to appreciate you? Who will teach you all this?

Only after that, we are you and me.

Based on the book by G. V. Starshenbaum “Addictology. Psychology and psychotherapy of addictions”.