Julie Reshe. "I wanted to give him all of myself, but he ...

"

The variations derived from the title of this essay a frequent leitmotif of complaints of
those asking for psychological help, it is not foreign to humans of any gender and age.
Let's try to trace the origins of thinking, which causes the possibility of such complaints.

For Western culture it was quite customary to treat a human as an essentially selfish
being. It seemed that it could be extracted from society, explored separately from others
and whats discovered in the result will be the truth of the matter.

For example, Machiavelli was convinced that humans are egoistic, in all their actions
they are guided only by their own benefit. He believed that the social dimension for a
person is secondary and therefore "people will rather forgive the death of a father than
the loss of property."

Such a conception of a human being is an echo of the theological Christian perspective,

suggesting the presence in humans of an individual and unchanging soul. This
perspective is still at the core of our current intuitive thinking about humans and is often
successfully promoted by pop psychology. When we enroll for a training called "The
Path to Self-Discovery." we almost convert into Christianity.

The theological perspective overlooks the obvious fact that by origin, humans are from
childhood. In accordance with theological perspective, humanity begins with the
creation of an adult Adam, only then it is supplemented by Eve. The theological
perspective considers the ability to love others as the highest virtue, which must arise in
humans as a result of their efforts to overcome their selfish nature.

Replacing the theological perspective comes the realization of humans as essentially

social beings. The myth of a person as an initially individualized egoist irrevocably
retreats into the past.

From the point of view of the theological perspective, attachment was seen as a state
that replaced the original state of individualization. It was believed that, by initiating
attachment humans either sacrifice their basic selfish interests, or are guided by their
selfish need to satisfy the sexual instinct. Both options assumed that isolation is a more
natural state for a person. From the point of view of treating a person as a social being,
everything is the opposite.
The primary and more natural state is fusion with others. The newborn child continues
to function as a single mechanism with those who are taking care of her. If this
mechanism did not work, that is, the child would be deprived of care, she could not
survive. The aggravating need of a person for another is related to its evolutionary
feature, because a human is born with an unformed brain, needing much more care
than other mammals.

The crying of the child, unlike the popular opinion, is not so much an attempt of the child
to manipulate adults (this is only a retrospectively speculated meaning of crying), but
rather a reaction to a break with the guardian speaking metaphorically, the child
bemoans the mere fact that she is no longer in the womb and in their confluence a gap
was introduced.

Here we are talking not only about the lack of selfish needs of the child, but also about
the initial lack of awareness of herself as a separate person with any needs.

The primary state of the acute need for the other never ends. We never become
completely detached from others and can not completely eradicate our basic need for
intimacy. At any age a person reacts more sharply to social pain, which is a reaction to
the death of the other or to isolation from others, rather than to physical pain. Studies by
modern neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman confirm that Machiavelli prioritized
incorrectly the pain of losing a loved one is more traumatic for us than the loss of
property.

Romantic closeness rather completes our basic, ineradicable need for a caregiver, and
is not based, as Freud believed, on the selfish desire to satisfy a sexual instinct
sublimated into a feeling of love. This is revealed by the widespread ideal of romantic
love the absolute fusion of lovers, canceling their independence.

As we see, the theological perspective of consideration does not grasp the principle of
the basic dependence of a person on another in reality, not our separation from
another is replaced by affinity, but, on the contrary, the closeness is replaced by
disunity, which is always only relative, because there is no person who completely
ceases to need the other.

In contrast to the ideas often imposed on us by pop psychology, becoming an adult,

which is associated with the acquisition of independence is inevitably a traumatic
process. The very birth of the child, that is, separation of her from the body of the
mother, is already a traumatic event, her subsequent isolation presupposes a
traumatization equivalent to the level of her isolation.

Self-sufficiency comes to replace the cohesion in the form of an unmet basic need to
be one with the other.

We form our individuality in trauma, while not ceasing to be children until the end.
Therefore, adulthood is not the abolition of the initial pain away from the caregiver, but
only the development of a certain degree of tolerance to this pain or compensatory
mechanisms that help replace it, but this pain never completely disappears, because
our childhood need to be one with others.

We always balance between merging and independence, never ceasing to be to some

extent dependent and allowing independence only as much as we have developed
tolerance for its traumatism.
Adulthood, as well as affinity, is associated with pleasure, but it is more a
sadomasochistic pleasure of a self-harm. The joy of independence is acquired, so it
needs to be learned, while the joy of intimacy is familiar to her from the very beginning.

Remaining within the theological perspective, we often believe our willingness to wholly
belong to someone is our acquired virtue and even reproach the other for the lack of
such readiness. In fact, the willingness to totally merge with or dissolve into another is
not an acquired quality, of which one is justified to be proud of, on the contrary, such
readiness indicates the absence of a hard and painfully acquired ability to be an adult.

We do not need to learn the ability of giving ourselves to others completely; in our
biology, it is already prescribed as a basic one, growing up, a human learns exactly the
opposite the ability to be a person who has gone through the trauma of separation.

Close relations between adults can be divided into two types: mature and immature.
These types of relationships are on a different scale of independence: immature
relationships are the reproduction of the childhood type of absolute need for the other,
whereas the mature ones are the relationships between people that have entered into
the taste of the sadomasochistic joy of isolation from others.

In the first form of relationship another person is needed, we can not do without her, in
the second a person is more important than necessary. The phrases "I need you"
and "you are important to me" carry essentially different psychological impacts. The first
phrase means "I can not do without you," and the second - "I will manage without you,
but I choose to consider you to be someone important for me."

The problem of modern society is that the current romantic, which still promote the
absolute fusion of lovers, is more relevant to the immature type of relationship. In
particular, the complaint "I wanted to give him all of myself, but he ..." presupposes a
desire to establish an immature type of attachment that would legitimately frighten the
formed personality, threatening her with confiscation of the adulthood acquired by
self-torture.

It should be understood that a mature type of relationship that allows two individuals to
be independent represents an unreachable ideal, since a person never completely gets
rid of her need to be one with the other; nevertheless, nothing but an excessively
sparing attitude toward ourselves prevents us from striving for this ideal. At a minimum,
we can stop bothering the psychotherapist with the above complaint.