Анна ШиманDraft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
Why do we let other people treat us with disrespect? Why do we put up with being ignored, used, cheated on and not valued? Why do we keep staying in relationships that destroy us?
A person could live with satisfaction if they learned to rely on themselves, to respect themselves first of all, and to sense and recognise their real capabilities. So why doesn’t this happen, what gets in the way, and what can be done about it?
Let’s work out how emotional hunger destroys our lives!
Relying on yourself is, first of all, being aware of the boundaries of your personality, your feelings, thoughts and values. It is a correct understanding of your capabilities, which comes from being able to assess realistically your competence, your psychological state and how much strength you have.
Relying on yourself is possible if a person has a certain degree of autonomy — psychological autonomy above all. That is, they can clearly see where I am and my territory is, and where another I is with its own territory. Archetypally, this is shaped by the image of the father in a person’s psyche. Here it is very important for us to know how this image was formed in childhood: through the mother’s relationship with the father, through one’s own relationship with the father. And later on — through relationships with other men around: friends, colleagues, a boss, competitors.
A newborn child is psychologically merged with the mother; they share a single psychological field, and the child feels itself to be its centre. This is a normal, childlike way for the psyche to adapt to reality. The child does not know that the mother has a will of her own and decides herself to take an active part in the child’s life: she feeds it, rocks it, picks it up when it cries, covers it, soothes it and helps it live through tension or pain.
In the child’s psyche the situation looks different: subjectively it seems to the child that it is the source of everything that happens to it, that it rules this world, because it perceives its mother as its habitat, as the world around it, with which it is merged. Disturbances in this period of development create a strong dependence on the feeling of merging and unconditional acceptance.
If the child did not get enough of this feeling from the mother, a distrust of the world and a hunger for love will form inside.
If the mother merged with the child too strongly, and all her feelings were projected onto the child (and not onto the child’s father), such a child will, deep inside, constantly feel the threat of being swallowed up — of merging.
Can you imagine something that gives you pleasure suddenly slipping out of control, and you becoming dependent on it? Such a break in contact gives rise to strong aggression and a drive to break free — that is, to destroy the object of one’s pleasure.
These experiences come so early that they are hard to become aware of. That is why the early years largely determine the scenarios of future relationships. Those who are hungry for love will constantly seek to merge with anyone who has shown even a little sympathy and warmth. That person’s will and right to their own resources will not be taken into account, because the same mechanism is still at work: I am the centre of the world, and here, at last, in this world I have been lucky enough to meet “food” and make up for the lack.
This is how we begin to destroy ourselves, our relationships and other people, because we see in them not separate people but a resource with which we want to fill our hunger.
In the second case, when there was too much merging, a person likewise cannot tell their own boundaries from other people’s, but lives with a sense of constant pressure from the world, hides, and also feels hunger inside. On the contrary, they do not let themselves enjoy anything, out of fear of dissolving in another person. So when a relationship enters a period of growing closer, such a person feels aggression. They may provoke quarrels and destroy promising relationships out of fear and an inability to cope with the feeling of being suppressed. They cannot explain their feelings to themselves — they do not know how to handle them, because in the field they shared with the mother there were too many of her feelings, too much love. There was no room for the child in this contact, and it got used to suppressing its anger, or even rage, at there being too many maternal feelings. Such a child grows up feeling that they are the centre of the world, yet they are not allowed to be themselves: the world (the other person) matters more.
In relationships this leads to a person often confusing their own territory with someone else’s and starting to serve it: for example, they believe that by not expressing their negative feelings they are protecting the other from themselves, and so are investing in the relationship.
They consider it their duty to take an active part in the other’s life (although nobody asks them to — it is an idea they have in their head, this is what they are used to), they take on more and more tasks, start controlling the “development” of the relationship, and do not notice how they create an ideal picture inside themselves and begin to serve it.
Here a “we” appears, which is a product of fantasies about an ideal relationship. Meanwhile the real person alongside becomes invisible in their needs, expressions, desires and will. Then the first partner gradually burns out and feels dependent on the ideal picture of the relationship in which they have confined the second; aggression and anger gradually build up. After a while it demands an outlet, but because it is not recognised, it all lands on the other partner: either through a row, or through passive-aggressive forms of communication — ignoring, pretending that “I don’t need you”, “I’ll manage on my own”, “I’m above this”.
So what is the result?
Here we have two scenarios of the hungry child:
one did not get enough and is now forever searching for “the mother’s breast”; the other got too much and now does not know who they are or how to be satisfied, if “the mother’s breast”, as an image of pleasure and love, is so dangerous that it can take possession of you.
Neither scenario leaves any chance of a healthy exchange with other people and the world. It is either “I must be given, and I am waiting, but I am not worthy”, or “I must be given, but I will decide how myself, and control it — everything will be as I wish”.
How is this connected with the father and with boundaries? I will write about it in future articles.
How can we solve the problem of emotional hunger, which makes us violate boundaries: either keeping our own wide open so as not to miss the “food”, or destroying other people’s so as to get the “food” without becoming dependent on it?
What is needed here is to grow up psychologically. The process of growing up includes becoming aware of these scenarios and, most importantly, giving up compensating for them, giving up resentment towards our parents and a hard childhood. Giving up expectations may bring pain and unpleasant realisations and feelings, but at the same time it can grant the long-awaited freedom to see the world around us in all its diversity, to find ourselves and our place in it, and to live our own, unique life. To make independent decisions (rather than ones that grow out of childhood hunger), to learn to take and to give, to exchange, and through this to develop.
Be well.
Anna Shyman, psychologist.
