The alternatives to divorce are so varied that trying to cover them all is unrealistic. However, it is possible to highlight those that are more common. But since few people go to a specialist to live through the aftermath of divorce, it is complicated to describe them. In my practice, I have encountered a rather specific strategy of living through a divorce, which I will refer to as the strategy of fixated love. In most cases, this strategy occurs among those partners who have acquired the conditional status of “abandonment” and never got over the divorce.
To describe the relationship between two people who have started a family can be described as a cycle that has emotional and erotic ties and tends to change.
Looped love is the experience of a relationship cycle that has “de jure” ended, but “de facto” still functions in the imagination of one of the partners.
What is the peculiarity of this love, and why does this love eventually become a curse and a stigma for one of the torn family?
This cycle always begins from an uncertain position in the family and marriage creation. It is when the relationship comes from some temporary factors. And these factors include everything but love. For example, a person with sexual problems gets marriage just to have sexual intimacy. Or a dislike of one’s own body is a common motive to attach it (that body) to someone else. Or, the lack of a permanent relationship leads to consent to the first proposal. Or, a desire, by all means, to get married often to address some pressing need for housing, wealth, career, and more. It is clear that the attractiveness of these factors very quickly loses its novelty, and then there is a need to create a relationship. After all, the reason for their creation is, unfortunately, not the reason for their continuation and creation. And here of great importance are the children who have had time to appear by that time. That is, in a sufficiently violent way, concerning the other partner, there is a reason to continue this relationship – a child. Later, the relationship will transform into a kind of alliance between the two people. In this alliance, there will be a rising emotional and erotic confrontation between the partners and its hyperbolization, on the background of the growing overblown idealization of the child. All of this lasts until one of the two meets a loving relationship or even an imitation of one and begins to reproduce the withdrawal from the existing alliance. When the breakup has occurred, the one who has firmly strengthened this alliance by serving his deficits and manipulating the child is left alone. Although, by and large, the partners are alone toward each other in such an alliance.
Further events entail the settled life of one and the complete collapse of the other’s illusions. And this other continues to create the illusion of existing love, and the completed cycle begins to unfold in a new phase, but already with the help of his imagination and even quite often with the help of delirium. So it turns out that the breakup of a relationship leads to a loss of reality and “getting stuck” to the point of losing the connection.
Not only the reality is lost at this point. Time is lost in it. As a result, the divorce events, for example, ten years ago, are described as if they were lived yesterday. The “abandoned” partner continues constructing the illusion of a returning relationship and adjusts his entire life to this illusion. Often he believes that everything will come back the way it was. Unfortunately, this belief is sometimes so strong that anyone who sits on its existence and questions it becomes the enemy, on whom all the unused sexual energy and awful anger will be directed.
The manipulative nature of “abandonment” also affects the child, making him a means of manipulation and thus destroying his essence.
It is impossible to stop this pathological process. The more successful the partner’s life, the more violently the cyclicality of lost love is activated, and the more the boundaries of the destruction of the imagination of the “abandoned” widen.
What is the mystery of looped love?
There may be two answers to this question. First, a person’s reality is so incompatible with his imagination that he excludes it. Then there is no chance. One has to live in the neurotic realm. And for the rest of his life. The chances of getting out of it are zero.
Secondly, the upbringing of a person and his experience of different stages of life did not contribute to development but strengthened fixations at the damaged life stages, leading to constant aggression towards oneself and its projection onto the world around.
And so it turns out that the abandoned person lives through cycle after cycle of the family he once lost. And he alone cannot get out of this cycle. For this cycle is a figment of his imagination, or rather he.
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