All people are sometimes cruel. With some this happens rarely, with others often, but nevertheless, each of us can commit a cruel act. And most often it turns out that we splash out our negativity on those closest to us, on those whom we really love and who value us greatly. Why is this happening? What makes a person “take it out” on one of his relatives, while with strangers he restrains his outbursts of anger? Why can we offend those closest to us and not control our behavior towards them?
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Photo gallery: Why are we sometimes cruel to those closest to us?
They won't abandon us anyway
When a person communicates with someone who is dear to him, but he cannot be called very close and dear, he restrains himself because he knows that the interlocutor may not like his behavior, he will be offended and, perhaps, leave forever. It is this fear that forces us to control our emotions. When we communicate with our relatives, we are always sure that they will not go anywhere. Even if you have a strong fight with them, insult them, they still love you so much that they will forgive you. Every person sometimes needs to throw out their negativity. But he cannot do this, for example, in the direction of his boss, because this threatens him with dismissal from his job. Also, people are unlikely to allow such behavior towards colleagues or just acquaintances, since they can quickly turn away from them, not wanting to tolerate insults directed at them. Therefore, a person tries to restrain himself, but when he finds himself in a circle of relatives and friends with a bad mood, then one single word can bring him out and then he will create a scandal out of nowhere just to make his soul feel better. Of course, we all understand that such behavior is wrong, but the subconscious requires us to get rid of negativity from time to time so as not to simply go crazy from accumulated emotions. That’s why we go with this negativity to those who are most dear to us and, importantly, who value us also. Yes, it sounds paradoxical, but that’s exactly how it is. A person needs to be sure that his negativity will not upset the relationship with the one on whom he splashes it out. That's why people choose family and friends. Remember for yourself how often you could afford to quarrel with your mother because of stupidity, even knowing deep down in your soul that it was you who were wrong, and not her. This behavior is easily explained by the fact that while arguing with your mother, you knew that, in the end, she would forgive you anyway and would not go anywhere, because she loves you more than anything in the world. The same attitude is often manifested towards brothers, sisters, closest friends, in short, towards those in whose feelings we are sure.
Unfortunately, some people may have such outbursts of negative emotions towards those they value too often. In fact, he snaps at his loved ones for any reason, believing that they will always get away with it. But if a person becomes too cruel, then sooner or later the one who endures his attacks simply cannot stand it. After all, the more we love, the more we are disappointed. Therefore, it often happens that people who have suffered for a long time from cruel attacks from a loved one, eventually simply leave him forever. This happens in families where the husband mocks his wife and beats her, or where parents take out their disappointment in life on their children. Until a certain time, victims of cruelty endure and appeal to the voice of reason and love, but then at one moment they simply disappear from the life of the cruel person forever. Therefore, when showing cruelty to your relatives, you must still remember that if you go too far, they will simply disappear from your life and no one will bring them back.
People get bored
When we are constantly around certain people, they sometimes simply begin to irritate us. Most often, this happens with our closest relatives, those whom we see every day. On the one hand, we seem to sincerely love them, but on the other, there is something in their behavior that we don’t like. From year to year we observe this, and then we simply begin to get irritated because of little things. A person may want the best for us, but we will be angry with his advice because he speaks in the wrong tone. Or we may be annoyed by even his basic behavior at the table. On the one hand, we get so used to a person that we cannot imagine how we could live if he were not there, but on the other hand, we are almost ready to kill for some things that he constantly does and does not want to do as we wish. This is what causes anger and irritability. We begin to behave cruelly towards loved ones. Sometimes they irritate us so much that we generally move away from them, believing that it is simply unbearable to be around. By the way, it is precisely this kind of temporary separation that allows you to pacify your fits of anger and reconsider your attitude towards the people closest to you. When a loved one is not with us, we rethink what we did and begin to understand how wrong we were in our cruelty. Sometimes we get so used to people that we stop appreciating them, and only after breaking up and living separately for some time, we suddenly realize how dear a person is to us and how wrong we were.
Most often, people are cruel to relatives who are older or younger in age. This comes from differences in worldview and perception of the situation. Conflicts often arise between people because they misunderstand each other. As a result, a person begins to behave cruelly towards loved ones in order to prove his point. In fact, such cruelty manifests itself in every family. They always quarrel with their parents and grandparents, especially in adolescence. They are tired of their prohibitions and views on life, and in general their presence, so teenagers try to prick their relatives as painfully as possible. This is a kind of revenge for misunderstanding, for the fact that parents have a certain power. The teenager believes that his mother or father is offending him, so he tries to repay him with that coin. That's why he behaves cruelly towards his loved ones.
Striving for independence
Another reason for showing cruelty to relatives is the desire to be independent. It may seem to a person that those close to him are telling him how to live, preventing him from making his own choices, and so on. This is why people begin to throw various nasty things at their loved ones, pour out their negativity, insult and even humiliate. They want their family to leave them alone. Most often, this behavior occurs towards parents. But a person can also become cruel towards brothers, sisters and close friends who see that he is doing something wrong and want to guide him on the right path. In turn, the one for whom they are trying is confident that he is right or simply does not want to accept the wince. Therefore, he gets irritated, trying to defend himself from their decrees and advice, so he simply begins to fight with his relatives, showing himself as a cruel person. Over time, many people admit that in such moments they acted wrongly, because those close to them truly wished them well. But then it seemed to them that this was the only way to achieve independence and prove that they were worth something in this life.
Working with the client and
his attachment problems
- this is working with a little one,
a child in need of love.
Primary and secondary feelings
In therapeutic work with clients, one has to deal with varying degrees of awareness, identification and expression of their feelings. In this article we will focus only on the content and quality of those feelings that characterize the characteristics of the client’s relationships with people significant to him, as well as on the characteristics of the therapeutic process with such feelings. It is these feelings that, as a rule, underlie the psychological problems of clients.The most common types of feelings that clients experience in therapy toward significant others are primary feelings, secondary feelings, and demonstrated lack of feelings.
The idea of dividing feelings into primary and secondary is not new (see, for example, the article Mikaelyan L.L. Emotionally focused marital therapy. Theory and practice. / ZhPP 2011, No. 2).
This article was written in the paradigm of the system-analytical approach to psychotherapy developed by the authors (G. Maleichuk, N. Olifirovich), which assumes a holistic view of the emergence and development of the phenomenon under study.
Primary feelings. These are feelings of rejection, fear, loneliness. Behind them you can very easily see the needs; primary feelings, as a rule, express them directly. Most often, the following needs are behind such feelings: unconditional love, acceptance, affection.
The presentation of primary feelings by the client at the beginning of therapy is quite a rare occurrence; it indicates his good contact with his Self. Most often this happens in a state of life crises, depression.
Secondary feelings. This is anger, anger, rage, irritation, resentment. These feelings arise when it is impossible to express primary feelings to loved ones. Most often this happens due to fear (rejection) or shame (non-acceptance). Secondary feelings, such as anger or resentment, obscure primary feelings that speak to the emotional needs of attachment.
Lack of feelings or emotional anesthesia. In this case, the client declares that he has no feelings for close people (father, mother), they are strangers to him, and he no longer needs them. This focus of therapy is rarely a request and most often appears in the process of therapy for other requests.
Attachment trauma
The above typology of feelings closely echoes the stages of trauma development proposed by J. Bowlby. J. Bowlby, observing the behavior of children in response to separation from their mother, identified the following stages in the development of feelings in them:Fear and panic are the first feelings that grip a child when parting with his mother. The child cries and screams in the hope of returning his mother;
Anger and rage are a protest against abandonment; the child does not accept the situation and continues to actively seek the return of the mother;
Despair and apathy - the child comes to terms with the situation of the impossibility of returning his mother, falls into depression, physically becomes numb and emotionally frozen.
As a result of this kind of traumatic interaction, the child develops either increased “stickiness” to the parental figure (if he has not yet lost hope of receiving her attention and love - fixation at the second stage according to Bowlby), or cold detachment (if there was such hope lost for him – fixation at the third stage).
The most serious problems arise in children at the third stage. If attachment behavior aimed at seeking and maintaining contact with the attachment figure does not achieve its goal, the child develops feelings such as angry protest, clinging, depression and despair, culminating in emotional detachment from the attachment figure.
Moreover, what is important is not so much the physical presence of the object of affection, but also his emotional involvement in the relationship. An attachment figure may be physically present but not emotionally present.
Attachment injuries can arise not only due to the physical absence of the object of attachment, but also due to his psychological alienation. If the attachment figure is perceived as emotionally unavailable, then, as in the situation of its physical absence, separation anxiety and distress occur. This is a very important point, we will return to it later.
In both cases, the child grows up in a deficit of unconditional love and parental acceptance, and the need for affection is chronically unsatisfied due to frustration.
His Self is deficient (G. Amon’s term), incapable of self-acceptance, self-respect, self-support; such a person will have low, unstable self-esteem, is extremely dependent on the opinions of other people, and is prone to creating codependent relationships.
In therapy, you can meet with clients who are fixed at different levels of disturbance in the need for attachment. The most difficult situation is certainly when the therapist encounters the client's emotional “unfeeling.”
You can encounter different types of emotional insensitivity - from complete anesthesia to varying degrees of alexithymia. All alexithymics, as a rule, are traumatists. The reason for such insensitivity, as mentioned earlier, is mental trauma - trauma in relationships with loved ones or trauma in attachment.
As you know, injuries can be acute or chronic. Attachment injuries are usually chronic. Having encountered in therapy the client’s insensitivity towards a loved one and quite rightly assuming trauma in the relationship, the therapist, most often unsuccessfully, tries to look for cases in his anamnesis that confirm this.
However, the client often cannot remember vivid episodes of rejection by significant others. If you ask him to remember the warm, pleasant moments of the relationship, it turns out that there are none either.
What then is there? And there is a neutral, even indifference, attitude towards the client-child, although at the same time parents often flawlessly fulfill their functional parental responsibilities. The child is treated not as a little person with his unique emotional experiences, but as a function.
They can be attentive to his physical and material needs; such a child can grow up in full material prosperity: shod, clothed, fed, etc. The area of spiritual and emotional contact with the child is absent.
Or the parents may be so absorbed in their own lives that they completely forget about him, leaving him to his own devices. Such parents, as a rule, often become “excited” in their parental functions and remember that they are parents when something happens to the child (for example, he gets sick).
Client M. recalls that her mother “appeared” in her life when she was sick - then she “left the Internet” and began to actively carry out all the necessary medical procedures. It is not surprising that this client developed a painful way of existence - it was through illness that she managed to somehow “bring back” her mother.
The child in the situation described above is in a state of chronic emotional rejection. Chronic emotional rejection is the inability of a parental figure (object of attachment) to unconditionally accept their child. In this case, the attachment figure, as noted above, can be physically present and functionally perform its duties.
The reasons for the parents' inability to unconditionally love and accept their child are not a matter of ethics and morality for the therapist, but are related to their psychological problems. They (problems) can be caused both by their life situation (for example, the child’s mother is in a situation of psychological crisis) and associated with the characteristics of their personality structure (for example, parents with a narcissistic or schizoid characterology).
In some cases, the reasons for parental insensitivity may extend beyond their personal life history and be passed on to them through intergenerational connections. For example, the mother of one of the parents was herself in a state of mental trauma and, due to her emotional anesthesia, was unable to be sensitive to her child and give him enough acceptance and love.
In any case, the mother turns out to be incapable of an emotional response and, therefore, is unable to satisfy the child's need for affection and, at best, is physically and functionally present in his life. The situation described above can be corrected by the presence of an emotionally warm father or another close figure, but, unfortunately, this does not always happen in life.
In adult life, an attempt to fill the deficit in love and affection is carried out, as a rule, not directly - through parents, but in a substitute way - through partners. It is with them that scenarios of codependent behavior are played out, in which secondary feelings intended for parents come to the fore.
With parents, such clients often behave in a counter-dependent way, acting out a scenario of lack of feelings. And only after getting to therapy and going through the stage of discussing the client’s codependent relationship with his partner, it is possible to achieve an emotionally detached, distant attitude towards his parents.
Client N. behaves with her partner in a typically codependent way - she controls, is offended, accuses her of lack of attention, and is jealous. In her contact with her partner, the whole set of “secondary” feelings manifests itself - irritation, resentment, anger.
There is no relationship with her parents: the father, according to the client, was never emotionally close to her, the mother was always more preoccupied with herself. The client has long come to terms with this attitude towards her and no longer expects or wants anything from her parents. At the same time, she directs her entire flow of unfulfilled need for love and affection towards her partner.
Therapeutic Reflections
Most often, clients with the attachment problems described above make a request regarding a codependent relationship with a partner.Therapeutic work with such clients is working with the trauma of rejection. During therapy, the client undergoes a process of immersion in the trauma of rejection that existed at an early stage of his development, which we call an actualized crisis.
This is a targeted, controlled therapeutic actualization of previously unexperienced trauma with the aim of re-experiencing it in the therapeutic process.
The therapy process here has several successive stages. It usually begins with a discussion of the real crisis in the relationship with a partner, which is usually a client request.
Here the client in therapy actively presents secondary feelings (anger, resentment, jealousy, etc.) towards his partner. The therapeutic task at this stage is to switch the client to the area of primary feelings (fear of rejection, non-acceptance).
This is not an easy task, since the client will have strong resistance to recognizing and accepting the primary feelings-needs (acceptance, unconditional love) behind the secondary feelings. Resistance is maintained, as noted above, by strong feelings of fear and shame.
The next stage in therapy will be awareness and acceptance of the fact that primary feelings-needs are displaced from the primary object and directed towards another object. This primary object is the parental figure with whom the attachment relationship has been disrupted.
The therapeutic task of this stage of therapy will be the sequential passage of stages of sensitivity to an object with a broken attachment from the stage of absence of feelings through the stage of secondary feelings and, finally, to primary feelings-needs.
The therapist unfolds the emotional process from emotional anesthesia and secondary emotions that perform a protective function to primary feelings that speak of needs for intimacy and affection and fears of not getting what they want.
Working with a client and his attachment problems is working with a small child in need of love. The most appropriate model of therapy here is the mother-child relationship model, in which the therapist needs to contain and give a lot to his client.
If we imagine that in moments of experiencing primary emotions (fear, pain of loss, feelings of uselessness and abandonment) we are in contact with the childish and vulnerable part of the client’s “I”, then it will be easier to understand and accept him. This is work “here-and-now”, at close range, requiring empathic attunement to the client’s current state.
Working with emotions from a detached position is ineffective. Empathic inclusion is the main tool for the therapist to work with the problems under consideration. Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in the place of another person, understand what it is like for him, experience sympathy and express it in contact.
Empathy, non-judgmental and unconditional acceptance and congruence of the therapist (Rogers' triad) help build a safe and trusting therapeutic relationship - a relationship of emotional intimacy that the client lacked in his life.
As a result, the person who turns to the therapist feels understood and accepted. Such a therapeutic relationship is an optimal nurturing, supportive and developmental environment that facilitates the client’s process of personal growth.
There are possible analogies here with secure attachment, which is a safe haven that protects from the stresses of life, and a reliable base from which you can take risks and explore the outside and inner world. Even the most powerful and rejected feelings can be experienced and assimilated in intimacy, no matter how difficult and painful it may seem.
In the process of interaction, people with attachment problems find it difficult to be in therapeutic contact. Due to their hypertrophied sensitivity to rejection, they are also unable to maintain real contact and often indulge in reactions.
In a situation that they “read” as rejection, they have strong secondary feelings - resentment, rage, anger, pain - and they do not allow them to remain in contact. The interaction partner is a secondary object onto which feelings addressed to the primary rejecting objects are projected.
Client N. sought therapy with problems in her relationships with men. During the course of therapy, it became clear that these relationships in her life always unfold according to a similar scenario: after a successful first stage in the relationship, the client begins to have more and more complaints about her chosen one, irritation, jealousy, reproaches, resentment, control.
Behind these actions and secondary feelings, the process of analysis reveals a strong fear of abandonment, rejection, uselessness, and loneliness. A client in a real relationship, not realizing these feelings, tries to put more and more pressure on her companion. It is not surprising that her men “escape” from these relationships with enviable consistency.
This is the point in the relationship that can be realized in therapy and break the usual pattern of interaction, break out of the usual stereotypical pathological methods of contact.
The number one task for such clients is to try to stay in contact without reacting and tell the partner (using I-statements) about their feelings and needs. This is also very difficult for the reason that in this situation the fear of rejection is actualized. Although the leading feeling is often resentment, which “does not allow” to speak openly about one’s feelings (pain, fear).
This therapy may not always be successful. Such therapy, as mentioned above, places great demands on the therapist’s personality, on his maturity, sophistication, and on his personal resources. If the therapist himself is vulnerable in terms of attachment, he will not be able to work with clients with similar problems, since he cannot give anything to such a client.
For nonresidents, consultation and supervision with the author of the article via the Internet is possible.
While you want to be yourself and live in peaceful relationships with your family and friends, very often their expectations and demands become a source of stress and unhappiness for you. Often, peace and sincerity in the family come into conflict; you are forced to choose: enter into conflicts, sticking to your opinion with your family, or maintain peace and harmony in the family at any cost.
The biggest obstacle preventing you from reconnecting with intention is your own ideas about what other people want and expect from you. In those moments when you feel manipulated by your family and their interests imposed on you, switch your consciousness from this to your own thoughts. When you take responsibility for attitude towards loved ones and family, you will be able to create relationships with them that will be in harmony with the universal Spirit.
To the question why you are the only person responsible for the relationship with yourself from your relatives, there is a clear answer: the reason for this is that you are ready to succumb to the pressure that your loved ones put on you and, moreover, you are subject to the low influence of such feelings as regret , guilt and anxiety.
When it seems to you that attitude towards loved ones you lack something, this means that this something is missing in you - after all, the shortcomings that you notice in other people. This is just a reflection of the negative aspect of your essence - otherwise, they would not bother you at all, since you simply would not notice them.
In order for the nature of relationships in the family to change, you need to change your thoughts about your loved ones. Throughout your life, people have treated and will continue to treat you the way you, through your behavior, allowed them to treat you. If you constantly think that your loved ones are doing wrong, you will continue to have such wrong relationships with them. If you constantly focus your attention on what irritates you, you will notice this in your family.
Even though people tend to blame other people for their feelings, in reality they are only your feelings that you create with your thoughts. By focusing your life's energy and attention exclusively on positive aspects, your relationships with loved ones can change for the better. In your mental family relationships, you will stop being angry, offended, irritated and even despairing. If in your mind you intend to live in love and harmony with your relatives, this will happen in reality.
The attitude towards close people sometimes depends on your mood, although they may not be involved in the situation that affected you. I want to discuss the topic of relationships with loved ones, with relatives. Each of us has had moments of misunderstanding in our relationships with our family. Sometimes it seems to us that we know better what to do and what not to do.
What determines our attitude towards loved ones?
There is a key question I will ask. It will give you important thoughts, and maybe it will allow you to take back responsibility for what is happening, that is, give you back your own power. And the question is: are you a kind person in relationships or are you a strict person?
There is an idea that it would be good if your close and dear people supported you in everything, would always be for you, and would forgive you some mistakes. But there is reality, which sometimes differs significantly from ideal ideas. And sometimes, in fact, we are as strict as possible with our loved ones. It happens that they get the most. And if suddenly they are guilty of something, then for some reason our reaction sometimes does not correspond to the degree of seriousness of what happened. Only because they are not as perfect as you would like. Or they do not fulfill the role or function in your life that you believe they should perform. And this creates a very large number of problems, a lot of pain arises.
Sometimes, instead of supporting a loved one, we begin to condemn him or somehow interfere with him, because his opinion or ideas about something differ from ours. Why are you a strict person towards your mother, but you don’t notice your mistakes? Why can’t you forgive your father for something, but you easily forgive yourself for intemperate words?
In fact, the support of loved ones is very important to each of us. And the easiest way to get it is to give it yourself. Once again I remind you that if there is something missing in your life, then you need to start experiencing it or doing it as much as possible. Do you want to be loved by your loved ones? Start loving and accepting them as they are, without trying to change them or set them on the right path.
Is it better to be strict with yourself or be strict with your loved ones?
In fact, it is better to be strict with yourself. For example, keep your word. And the attitude towards loved ones should be kind, honest and loving. It is very important to support a loved one when necessary. So, whatever you want to get from your family, give it yourself. Your care and your understanding can work wonders because your loved ones give you strength. By loving them and receiving love in return, you become stronger.
There is a wonderful film based on the novel by Eleanor Porter “Polyanna”. If you haven't watched it, be sure to check it out. The main character is a cheerful, brave girl who loved her relatives no matter what, and in the end received an award. Her playing “for joy” enlivened the whole city.
Just think about your attitude towards loved ones. Should you be strict or should you just love and accept them?
Working with the client and
his attachment problems
- this is working with a little one,
a child in need of love.
Primary and secondary feelings
In therapeutic work with clients, one has to deal with varying degrees of awareness, identification and expression of their feelings. In this article we will focus only on the content and quality of those feelings that characterize the characteristics of the client’s relationships with people significant to him, as well as on the characteristics of the therapeutic process with such feelings. It is these feelings that, as a rule, underlie the psychological problems of clients.The most common types of feelings that clients experience in therapy toward significant others are primary feelings, secondary feelings, and demonstrated lack of feelings.
The idea of dividing feelings into primary and secondary is not new (see, for example, the article Mikaelyan L.L. Emotionally focused marital therapy. Theory and practice. / ZhPP 2011, No. 2).
This article was written in the paradigm of the system-analytical approach to psychotherapy developed by the authors (G. Maleichuk, N. Olifirovich), which assumes a holistic view of the emergence and development of the phenomenon under study.
Primary feelings. These are feelings of rejection, fear, loneliness. Behind them you can very easily see the needs; primary feelings, as a rule, express them directly. Most often, the following needs are behind such feelings: unconditional love, acceptance, affection.
The presentation of primary feelings by the client at the beginning of therapy is quite a rare occurrence; it indicates his good contact with his Self. Most often this happens in a state of life crises, depression.
Secondary feelings. This is anger, anger, rage, irritation, resentment. These feelings arise when it is impossible to express primary feelings to loved ones. Most often this happens due to fear (rejection) or shame (non-acceptance). Secondary feelings, such as anger or resentment, obscure primary feelings that speak to the emotional needs of attachment.
Lack of feelings or emotional anesthesia. In this case, the client declares that he has no feelings for close people (father, mother), they are strangers to him, and he no longer needs them. This focus of therapy is rarely a request and most often appears in the process of therapy for other requests.
Attachment trauma
The above typology of feelings closely echoes the stages of trauma development proposed by J. Bowlby. J. Bowlby, observing the behavior of children in response to separation from their mother, identified the following stages in the development of feelings in them:Fear and panic are the first feelings that grip a child when parting with his mother. The child cries and screams in the hope of returning his mother;
Anger and rage are a protest against abandonment; the child does not accept the situation and continues to actively seek the return of the mother;
Despair and apathy - the child comes to terms with the situation of the impossibility of returning his mother, falls into depression, physically becomes numb and emotionally frozen.
As a result of this kind of traumatic interaction, the child develops either increased “stickiness” to the parental figure (if he has not yet lost hope of receiving her attention and love - fixation at the second stage according to Bowlby), or cold detachment (if there was such hope lost for him – fixation at the third stage).
The most serious problems arise in children at the third stage. If attachment behavior aimed at seeking and maintaining contact with the attachment figure does not achieve its goal, the child develops feelings such as angry protest, clinging, depression and despair, culminating in emotional detachment from the attachment figure.
Moreover, what is important is not so much the physical presence of the object of affection, but also his emotional involvement in the relationship. An attachment figure may be physically present but not emotionally present.
Attachment injuries can arise not only due to the physical absence of the object of attachment, but also due to his psychological alienation. If the attachment figure is perceived as emotionally unavailable, then, as in the situation of its physical absence, separation anxiety and distress occur. This is a very important point, we will return to it later.
In both cases, the child grows up in a deficit of unconditional love and parental acceptance, and the need for affection is chronically unsatisfied due to frustration.
His Self is deficient (G. Amon’s term), incapable of self-acceptance, self-respect, self-support; such a person will have low, unstable self-esteem, is extremely dependent on the opinions of other people, and is prone to creating codependent relationships.
In therapy, you can meet with clients who are fixed at different levels of disturbance in the need for attachment. The most difficult situation is certainly when the therapist encounters the client's emotional “unfeeling.”
You can encounter different types of emotional insensitivity - from complete anesthesia to varying degrees of alexithymia. All alexithymics, as a rule, are traumatists. The reason for such insensitivity, as mentioned earlier, is mental trauma - trauma in relationships with loved ones or trauma in attachment.
As you know, injuries can be acute or chronic. Attachment injuries are usually chronic. Having encountered in therapy the client’s insensitivity towards a loved one and quite rightly assuming trauma in the relationship, the therapist, most often unsuccessfully, tries to look for cases in his anamnesis that confirm this.
However, the client often cannot remember vivid episodes of rejection by significant others. If you ask him to remember the warm, pleasant moments of the relationship, it turns out that there are none either.
What then is there? And there is a neutral, even indifference, attitude towards the client-child, although at the same time parents often flawlessly fulfill their functional parental responsibilities. The child is treated not as a little person with his unique emotional experiences, but as a function.
They can be attentive to his physical and material needs; such a child can grow up in full material prosperity: shod, clothed, fed, etc. The area of spiritual and emotional contact with the child is absent.
Or the parents may be so absorbed in their own lives that they completely forget about him, leaving him to his own devices. Such parents, as a rule, often become “excited” in their parental functions and remember that they are parents when something happens to the child (for example, he gets sick).
Client M. recalls that her mother “appeared” in her life when she was sick - then she “left the Internet” and began to actively carry out all the necessary medical procedures. It is not surprising that this client developed a painful way of existence - it was through illness that she managed to somehow “bring back” her mother.
The child in the situation described above is in a state of chronic emotional rejection. Chronic emotional rejection is the inability of a parental figure (object of attachment) to unconditionally accept their child. In this case, the attachment figure, as noted above, can be physically present and functionally perform its duties.
The reasons for the parents' inability to unconditionally love and accept their child are not a matter of ethics and morality for the therapist, but are related to their psychological problems. They (problems) can be caused both by their life situation (for example, the child’s mother is in a situation of psychological crisis) and associated with the characteristics of their personality structure (for example, parents with a narcissistic or schizoid characterology).
In some cases, the reasons for parental insensitivity may extend beyond their personal life history and be passed on to them through intergenerational connections. For example, the mother of one of the parents was herself in a state of mental trauma and, due to her emotional anesthesia, was unable to be sensitive to her child and give him enough acceptance and love.
In any case, the mother turns out to be incapable of an emotional response and, therefore, is unable to satisfy the child's need for affection and, at best, is physically and functionally present in his life. The situation described above can be corrected by the presence of an emotionally warm father or another close figure, but, unfortunately, this does not always happen in life.
In adult life, an attempt to fill the deficit in love and affection is carried out, as a rule, not directly - through parents, but in a substitute way - through partners. It is with them that scenarios of codependent behavior are played out, in which secondary feelings intended for parents come to the fore.
With parents, such clients often behave in a counter-dependent way, acting out a scenario of lack of feelings. And only after getting to therapy and going through the stage of discussing the client’s codependent relationship with his partner, it is possible to achieve an emotionally detached, distant attitude towards his parents.
Client N. behaves with her partner in a typically codependent way - she controls, is offended, accuses her of lack of attention, and is jealous. In her contact with her partner, the whole set of “secondary” feelings manifests itself - irritation, resentment, anger.
There is no relationship with her parents: the father, according to the client, was never emotionally close to her, the mother was always more preoccupied with herself. The client has long come to terms with this attitude towards her and no longer expects or wants anything from her parents. At the same time, she directs her entire flow of unfulfilled need for love and affection towards her partner.
Therapeutic Reflections
Most often, clients with the attachment problems described above make a request regarding a codependent relationship with a partner.Therapeutic work with such clients is working with the trauma of rejection. During therapy, the client undergoes a process of immersion in the trauma of rejection that existed at an early stage of his development, which we call an actualized crisis.
This is a targeted, controlled therapeutic actualization of previously unexperienced trauma with the aim of re-experiencing it in the therapeutic process.
The therapy process here has several successive stages. It usually begins with a discussion of the real crisis in the relationship with a partner, which is usually a client request.
Here the client in therapy actively presents secondary feelings (anger, resentment, jealousy, etc.) towards his partner. The therapeutic task at this stage is to switch the client to the area of primary feelings (fear of rejection, non-acceptance).
This is not an easy task, since the client will have strong resistance to recognizing and accepting the primary feelings-needs (acceptance, unconditional love) behind the secondary feelings. Resistance is maintained, as noted above, by strong feelings of fear and shame.
The next stage in therapy will be awareness and acceptance of the fact that primary feelings-needs are displaced from the primary object and directed towards another object. This primary object is the parental figure with whom the attachment relationship has been disrupted.
The therapeutic task of this stage of therapy will be the sequential passage of stages of sensitivity to an object with a broken attachment from the stage of absence of feelings through the stage of secondary feelings and, finally, to primary feelings-needs.
The therapist unfolds the emotional process from emotional anesthesia and secondary emotions that perform a protective function to primary feelings that speak of needs for intimacy and affection and fears of not getting what they want.
Working with a client and his attachment problems is working with a small child in need of love. The most appropriate model of therapy here is the mother-child relationship model, in which the therapist needs to contain and give a lot to his client.
If we imagine that in moments of experiencing primary emotions (fear, pain of loss, feelings of uselessness and abandonment) we are in contact with the childish and vulnerable part of the client’s “I”, then it will be easier to understand and accept him. This is work “here-and-now”, at close range, requiring empathic attunement to the client’s current state.
Working with emotions from a detached position is ineffective. Empathic inclusion is the main tool for the therapist to work with the problems under consideration. Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in the place of another person, understand what it is like for him, experience sympathy and express it in contact.
Empathy, non-judgmental and unconditional acceptance and congruence of the therapist (Rogers' triad) help build a safe and trusting therapeutic relationship - a relationship of emotional intimacy that the client lacked in his life.
As a result, the person who turns to the therapist feels understood and accepted. Such a therapeutic relationship is an optimal nurturing, supportive and developmental environment that facilitates the client’s process of personal growth.
There are possible analogies here with secure attachment, which is a safe haven that protects from the stresses of life, and a reliable base from which you can take risks and explore the outside and inner world. Even the most powerful and rejected feelings can be experienced and assimilated in intimacy, no matter how difficult and painful it may seem.
In the process of interaction, people with attachment problems find it difficult to be in therapeutic contact. Due to their hypertrophied sensitivity to rejection, they are also unable to maintain real contact and often indulge in reactions.
In a situation that they “read” as rejection, they have strong secondary feelings - resentment, rage, anger, pain - and they do not allow them to remain in contact. The interaction partner is a secondary object onto which feelings addressed to the primary rejecting objects are projected.
Client N. sought therapy with problems in her relationships with men. During the course of therapy, it became clear that these relationships in her life always unfold according to a similar scenario: after a successful first stage in the relationship, the client begins to have more and more complaints about her chosen one, irritation, jealousy, reproaches, resentment, control.
Behind these actions and secondary feelings, the process of analysis reveals a strong fear of abandonment, rejection, uselessness, and loneliness. A client in a real relationship, not realizing these feelings, tries to put more and more pressure on her companion. It is not surprising that her men “escape” from these relationships with enviable consistency.
This is the point in the relationship that can be realized in therapy and break the usual pattern of interaction, break out of the usual stereotypical pathological methods of contact.
The number one task for such clients is to try to stay in contact without reacting and tell the partner (using I-statements) about their feelings and needs. This is also very difficult for the reason that in this situation the fear of rejection is actualized. Although the leading feeling is often resentment, which “does not allow” to speak openly about one’s feelings (pain, fear).
This therapy may not always be successful. Such therapy, as mentioned above, places great demands on the therapist’s personality, on his maturity, sophistication, and on his personal resources. If the therapist himself is vulnerable in terms of attachment, he will not be able to work with clients with similar problems, since he cannot give anything to such a client.
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