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EXECUTIVE
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Coaching
Examples of Abandonment |
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On a
deeper level, dichotomies can explain conflicted personal relationships. For
instance, in a classic love triangle, persons A and B are in a committed
relationship. B eventually feels the marriage going stale, and starts to feel
trapped, bored, even smothered. In response to these half-recognized feelings,
B begins a secret affair with person C. When s/he thinks about it, B says to
himself that the relationship with C is adding excitement or sensuality to
life, and may even believe that the affair with C is enhancing his marriage to
A! Eventually, however, the situation becomes stressful, as the lies accumulate
and become more complex. Frequently situations like these end up with everybody
unhappy.
Conventional
explanations may range from the marriage going stale, through complex theories
about a mid-life crisis, to negative opinions about committed relationships in
general.
Explaining the
dynamics from the point of view of dichotomies both makes sense and leads
to resolution.
When the
dichotomy of feeling smothered vs. feeling abandoned begins to dramatize in a
marriage one or both partners begin feeling trapped or unfulfilled, feeling
that life is passing them by. This unrecognized internal force can then
unconsciously dramatize as an external event, namely the affair. The affair
creates the temporary illusion of freedom and relief from smothering. But as
the affair progresses, new demands may emerge there, while the marriage
languishes and may feel weakened, its existence threatened. Then the opposite
side of the feeling smothered dichotomy, the one that houses threats of
aloneness, may begin to dramatize externally. Subliminally worried about being
stranded alone at this stage of life, B rushes back to the marriage, to
temporary relief. Our unfortunate person B may subsequently find himself going
back and forth between relationships; unfulfilled everywhere and unaware of the
source of his difficulties.
If he were to recognize that both
relationships have become unstable "solutions" to alternating feelings of
abandonment and smothering, he would be at the starting point for an effective
resolution, using a much expanded set of choices, made from his own
center. |
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