To be strong, to endure hardships, clenching our teeth, to go through life with our heads held high, not asking for support and help… It seems to us that only by becoming like this, we will earn the respect and love of the most important people for us. Where does this installation come from and is it really so? Psychologist Galina Turetskaya tells.
«No strength, no desire to live.» — Natasha closed herself in the apartment, plunged into a bedside depression for several months. Money is running out. She broke off relations with a loved one, quit her job …
She is the youngest child in the family, but she has never been helped financially. Even when the cereal ended in a rented apartment and Natasha fainted from hunger on the bus, she did not even go to her parents to eat. Not to mention asking for a loan.
“If I admit that I failed, they will stop loving me.” Of course, she didn’t think about it the way people think about what to wear or where to go on vacation. But the thought was deep inside. Here’s how: first we think a thought, and then it thinks us.
The belief that “I am not loved if I am weak” took a long time to develop. Passing by the office where Natasha worked, my mother was carrying lunch to her older sister. Many years later, Natasha asked: “Mom, why?” Mom was genuinely surprised: “Yes?! Didn’t I bring you both lunch?!»
The sister’s birthdays were planned in advance, the gift was discussed at the family council. Of her gifts, Natasha remembers only a doll — for eight years.
First birthday in independent life: a dormitory neighbor bought a hefty teddy bear and flowers on a scholarship — and did not understand why Natasha had a tantrum. And she seemed to have run into reality like a lamppost: it turns out that someone might want me to have a holiday ?! It happens?
To open up to love, you must first face bitterness and anger and mourn the loss without blaming yourself for weakness.
There is no love, because there is an attitude to be strong? Or do you always have to be strong to get even a little bit of love? It’s like the eternal argument about what came first, the chicken or the egg. What matters is not the dialectic, but the result.
«I love my parents. From the last forces. But this is no longer about love, but about its deficit, about the sucking need for acceptance. And inside — the accumulated resentment. For every birthday. For every meal passed by. For the money borrowed from parents for the only time taken back. And you can’t be offended by your parents, otherwise they won’t love at all?
But in order to open up to love, one must first face bitterness and anger and mourn the loss without blaming oneself for weakness. Only after that Natasha was able to confess to her family that not everything in her life corresponds to the rainbow illusion that she created. And her parents didn’t push her away! It turned out that she herself built the wall of dislike from the ice bricks of resentment. This cold fettered her, not allowing her to breathe (in the literal and figurative sense, because resentment fetters the body, makes breathing superficial) …
A few days later, Natasha told with tears how she read an article about the healing of a woman: when you can come to your mother, put your head on her knees … And just at that moment her mother called, which in itself happened infrequently: “Daughter, how are your affairs? Come visit, I’ll feed you delicious food, and then we’ll lie down with you, I’ll just stroke your head.”
The ice has broken. Definitely.