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My career began with the question: "Can true love go unrequited?"

Kuprin's character who said "love is always a tragedy" would be surprised by such a question. The Russian classics of the 19th century and even the early 20th century greatly respected unrequited love, and saw only utilitarianism in mutual love.

By the middle of the 20th century, tastes had changed. Love stories almost entirely passed into the genre of tabloid "women's literature" with the obligatory happy ending. True love now had to be mutual, otherwise it was not love but an illusion. Love came to be regarded as a kind of "chemistry"-a powerful instinct that finds, attracts, and binds two halves together forever, since it is impossible to resist chemical reactions. Schopenhauer would have been shocked to learn how much sugar coating had appeared on his gloomy idea of the call of kin. So would Berdyaev and Soloviev, who debated Schopenhauer.

The belief that true love is wise, kind, will choose the right person and ensure the union is infantile. Like everything infantile, it looks good at first glance, but on closer examination it turns out to be just selfishness.

Infantile consciousness has only two points of view: "the world is good and will give me everything I want" and "the world is evil, it will not give me anything, I should take it away". Some people think that to move from the first view to the second one means to grow up. But no. If the infantile had grown up, he would have realized that the world doesn't have to give him anything for nothing. He would realize that it is a good and fair idea that helps people become stronger and grow (what could be kinder than that?). To a true infantile, such an idea seems evil. Everything that does not serve his good seems evil to him, so he decides to become evil himself, without having grown up at all.

The level of maturity begins when man realizes that he is not the center of the world. The world is not subordinate to him and is not at enmity with him. He and the world are parity, separate, and must somehow interact with mutual interests in mind. Such a person tries to clearly divide the boundaries of responsibility. He begins to say something like "love depends on both, and if I am not loved, nothing can be done". This differs from the infantile position in that the infantile person thought that someone should love him, give him love. As a person grows up, he realizes that he may not be loved in return. Subjects have their own wills and interests, and only if these interests and wills coincide can we speak of reciprocity. That is, a semi-mature person takes a position that is no longer demanding, but still very passive. Strict boundaries dictate him not to interfere anywhere, not to offer anything, just to wait and hope that the will of the person he likes will choose him.

How does the position of a mature person differ from this?

Let us once again trace the changes that separate the infantile personality from the semi-mature one. Infantile perceives himself and the world as a whole, there are no boundaries between him and the world. Infantile does not have all parts of the personality and therefore believes that the world is his part. Like a parasite does not have a stomach or legs and uses the body of another animal.

But the fate of the adult parasite is sad, because other people always want to get rid of him. Any infantile person has every chance of becoming embittered when he realizes that the world does not want to serve him. But if parts of his personality have time to form, he may realize that he is separate and others are separate. He has not yet learned to interact from an independent mode, but at least it becomes obvious to him that there is him and there are others. You can't take advantage of others, they'll object. You can't expect anything from them, they have their own things to do. This is a wonderful realization, but not at the level of abstraction, but at the level of concrete situations. In these situations, one begins to take responsibility for one's needs and to provide for oneself. This marks the beginning of adulthood.

To fully mature as a person, it is not enough to realize one's own subjectivity and experience respect for another's subjectivity. This is just the outline of the personality. It is very difficult to maintain unless there is a healthy exchange with the world. A person who has already gained sovereignty, but who does not receive from the world what is necessary, either suffers or returns to infantile fusion. So, for example, having starved in boredom and loneliness, such a personality may think that self-sufficiency is bad and it is better to aim for someone else again. Respecting boundaries only makes sense when a person has made a lot of connections and gets everything they need. That's why trying to have good boundaries without any internal resources is a futile endeavor.

But back to the idea of love.

While the semi-mature personality has already drawn boundaries but is passively waiting for happiness, the mature personality is actively making connections with different areas of life. If such a person develops love, it is not out of nowhere, but with someone with whom she has already established a connection. And of course, this love will be mutual. But why of course?

Some people believe that sincere love is always mutual. But what if the same girl is sincerely loved by several people? Should she return love to each of them?

If you are loved by a person who is unnecessary and uninteresting, he does not become necessary and interesting. This can happen if you are lonely and suffer from the coldness and cruelty of the world. But if you have a lot of nourishing connections, see a lot of nice and open-minded people in the world, then you get love from all sides, and feel quite relevant. Let's assume that you don't mind having a loving relationship and even starting a family, but it's pretty clear that you're looking for someone you're mutually interested in. It is not "just love" that will determine your choice, but mutual feeling.

It seems that mutual feeling is either a consequence of pure chance, or the agreement of one to reciprocate another's love. Many cannot imagine how to technically guarantee mutual love and avoid mistakes.

In fact, only mutual love is possible in the real field of interaction. Unrequited love is always born in the field of illusions. People resort to illusions only in one case: when they lack energy in the real field and borrow energy from illusions. Illusions are a loan in the bank at a high interest rate. It's an energy boost at the expense of Nothing. It is experiencing some hypothetical things with such a high, as if they were already reality. Thanks to live emotions, the brain perceives illusions as reality and creates neural ensembles based on this. These ensembles provide one-sided connection with a person, one-sided immersion in the field of relations, and the situation when she loves him and he does not love her.

What does this look like in practice?

Imagine two girls who are asked out by an interesting young man. The same or different, it doesn't matter. With both, the young man was friendly, looked at each with genuine interest, told some great things about himself, asked questions, and made a connection with each girl. Let's say each of the girls is currently single and would like to have an affair to have fun over the Christmas holidays. And in fact, this niche in their lives is empty and it would be nice to fill it.

Let me say right away that a meaningful empty niche is already an energy hole. The niche must either be filled or irrelevant. The place that this niche could occupy in life (if it were filled) should be occupied by other things. For example, she spends her evenings with her friends, which she could spend with her boyfriend, and she is very happy. She doesn't pine or make up imaginary boyfriends, reminisce about exes, or look at couples with hatred. She's having fun with friends or doing something else. That is, the niche on one side is empty, and on the other side there is no hole there, its place is taken by something else. Therefore, if one girl has internal resources and the other does not, the former will not suffer from loneliness, while the latter will.

Because of this difference, having been on a date with an interesting guy who shows interest, one girl will just be happy, and the second… will start dreaming. Why doesn't she start dreaming first? Because she already has a lot of interesting things in her life and she has a place to take pleasant emotions. You can imagine that her life is filled like a closet with fancy dresses. She agrees to buy a new, more fashionable dress, but for this she has to give someone one of the old ones. But all the old ones are also her favorites and they also suit her very well, and they are very old relatively, some of them she has worn only once and would like to wear again. So if she would agree to throw something out of her closet, it would be for the sake of a very beautiful and comfortable dress, not for the sake of the king's new dress-empty and illusions. She's not interested in sitting at home in the evening and thinking about a new acquaintance, imagining how he is. She's not interested in discussing him with her friend for three hours straight. She is not interested in looking at the phone while waiting for it to ring and rehearsing a possible dialog. All of this gives her far less energy than her actual interesting endeavors. She doesn't mind seeing him again, but she doesn't mind imagining him for hours and dreaming about him because she has better things to do.

Sometimes women say that they had a favorite job, friends, hobbies and many other things to do, but then He appeared and everything became unimportant. Such women overestimate their affairs. None of the old business can stand competition with dreams of Him. Note, not with Him (that would be understandable), but with dreams about Him. He is not there yet, he hasn't called, he hasn't said anything, and the woman has already put aside all her "favorite" and "interesting" things to imagine and dream about Him. She is ready to throw all her favorite dresses out of the closet, making room for those that she hasn't bought yet and it's not a fact that she will buy. Isn't it true that you can do that only with unnecessary and long-worn dresses, but not with your favorite ones?

Because of this simple mechanism, the first girl is not at risk of falling in love unrequitedly, while the second girl has an almost 100% probability. The first one will only push favorite affairs out of her life if the new friend offers her a real alternative. She will agree to a date, but if he only talks about himself and pays little attention to her, she will get bored and remember what an interesting place she could have been in instead. She will agree to an affair, but if the affair brings her little positive emotions, she may run away to where she feels better. She has a lot of places she feels good about, that's the thing. So she will not be lured by empty promises and hints. She will not tolerate or hope for anything, as she has somewhere to get her joy right now. Only a girl who is hungry and has no other resources can find herself drawn into an unequal, unhappy relationship. She needs at least the hope of happiness if there is no happiness in her life.

There are two major myths regarding the human personality. One ignores the role of personality, the other overemphasizes its current state.

Sometimes these myths are miraculously combined in one head. "Human is ruled by instincts" and "any human can rule himself". Or "human is an animal" and "human is the master of his life".

Both are wrong.

Man differs from animals in that all functions of his brain are subordinated to the cortex, i.e. to higher mental functions (HMF). In animals, most functions are controlled by lower parts. Exactly the same lower sections, such as the RF (reticular formation), are also present in humans. However, unlike in animals, these sections are subordinated to the cortex, the mind. Those who pointlessly repeat that humans have all the same "instincts and hormones" as animals, do not realize that all these "instincts and hormones" in humans are controlled by the cortex. This is hard to believe when observing individual members of the human species, but it is true. Indeed, human behavior is controlled by HMFs (higher mental functions), i.e. by the mind. But the mind of individual people is no good and controls their behavior badly. The problem is not in the power of instincts, but in the weakness of HMF integration. The integration of HMFs is realized only through the development of personality - a special organ of HMF control, which is poorly developed in many people.

The other extreme is to believe that since the lower parts of the brain are subordinate to the higher ones, any person can control himself. It is possible to potentially develop to this point, but it is not possible to "take control". A person needs a mature personality to control HMFs. The cortex simply will not allow an immature personality to control behavior because that personality will screw things up right away. The consciousness of many people resembles a bad director of a company, who took the chair by inheritance, but has no knowledge and skills. And then this director decides to launch a new production or increase the prices of products, and the company's employees realize that they are in danger of going bankrupt. And then they start to use distractions, invite circus performers or just turn on cartoons, so that the undergrowth is distracted from management and let the company somehow exist. No management, but no nonsense.

This is exactly what happens to the average person. He does not know how to save and distribute energy, does not feel "himself", does not know how to plan and predict, does not have goals, poisons himself, or overfeeds. Fortunately, his consciousness is so weak and so easily distracted by cartoons that his organism survives and continues to exist. The organism exists on unconscious cortical models: on habits, on imitations, on stereotypes, on other people's influences. And as soon as a person takes control of himself, it often turns out worse.

That is, morphologically a person has a control center, there is an office full of consoles, a huge monitor from which one can observe and coordinate activities. But as long as the knowledge and skills of control are not available to man, his consciousness will be asleep. The monitors will be turned off and the consoles will gather dust.

It is not for nothing that humans are often compared to animals in favor of animals. Animals seem much more reasonable because they do not harm themselves, they always try to survive and keep healthy, and they take care of the environment. Humans harm themselves all the time. Even what a person considers his benefit and advantage, in the long run kills him. This applies to the economy, ecology, and energy. The feeling is that human has degenerated compared to animals, lost his mind and is preparing a hellish fate for his own children.

A person's eating habits (and all other habits too) are terrifying. Some people turn to sugar, consuming kilograms of it and losing their taste for healthy foods. Many then blame fast food manufacturers for causing their addiction. Others, on the contrary, decide to become vegetarians and deprive themselves of proteins and animal fats. Thirds stop eating altogether because they want to have fashionable fragility. And, if they survive, they can blame fashion and glossy for it, too. Fourths make up diets so "clean" that any animal would look at them sympathetically. Humans do have minds, but what for? Is it to commit suicide in perverted forms?

In fact, it's too early to scrap the human mind. Morphologically, everything in the brain is perfectly organized. People are given great opportunities to manage themselves and find ways of reasonable cooperation with each other. However, morphology alone is not enough to realize such possibilities. It is also necessary to develop a mental structure called "personality".

Personality is a system that must ensure the interaction of the organism and society. There are no contradictions between personality and society, but they are connected like a plant and the earth. The earth feeds the plant, and the plant fertilizes and warms the earth with its fallen leaves. The contradictions between personality-society, plant-earth, child-mother are seen by those who imagine one or two parasites. But the plant is not a parasite in relation to the earth, and the mature personality is not a parasite in relation to society: it nourishes society in the same way that society nourishes it.

The mature personality forms such an active, productive and well-organized system that it can take little from others and give much back. This is its meaning: the multiplication of energy. The immature personality is parasitic; it takes much and gives back little or nothing. Therefore, the parasitic personality is constantly in existential misery. It lacks love, security, attention and respect, and no one wants to give it to them because it is useless. At the same time, it builds up hostility all the time, because it is in constant conflict with others and with itself. In short, the life of an immature personality is very difficult, and those who think that such personalities have a good life are mistaken.

Harmonious state of mind and happiness are possible only with productively established relations with the environment (mainly with society). A mature personality not only allows a person to extract energy from the environment, but also to transform it, multiply it, and create something useful for others. It is the ability to increase energy that is encouraged by the brain with "happy hormones" and other rewards. There is no contradiction between being useful for oneself and for others. This contradiction arises only when a person stands in opposition to others. Integration allows a person to fit into society not by losing individuality, but by participating in a creative project. That is, if society is seen as a dead machine and the person as a living element, there is a contradiction between them. But this is a very depressing and one-sided view of the human community.

If we understand that society is a living system, it becomes obvious that a person does not need to break itself in order to fit into society. Moreover, such a broken personality will not be able to fit into a living system, will not be able to receive and increase energy. Although the real society is far from ideal, even in an undeveloped society a person can find a niche for itself and establish a healthy exchange. In this way, it will not only ensure a happy existence, but will also involve other individuals in this process, i.e. influence them.

A bad example is contagious. People easily learn bad things from each other. But it is very difficult to improve, to acquire useful qualities and habits. Develop a bad habit? Easy. A useful skill? It takes a lot of effort. What is the reason for this injustice?

I write all the time about the plasticity of personality, that everyone can change and become strong. But where are the crowds of strong personalities? Adults have a lot of opportunities. And it's strange that adults not only don't change for the better, but often go downhill.

I will try to explain all these complex issues in terms of stress and adaptation theory. It is adaptation that is to blame for all our weaknesses. But it can also do wonders for our personality. And it all depends on the approach. There are wrong approaches to personality change and there are right ones. I'll describe both in a little bit.

What we call "character" or "individuality" or even "personality" is not innate. It is something that is formed in the process of adaptation to the environment from the available material (including genes). At a certain point in time, we can consider a being that has created from within itself a structure (personality) that is maximally adapted to the situation in which it lives. Maximum adaptation does not equal perfect adaptation. Ideal is a happy life, in an active mode. And maximal adaptation is one that had enough energy to adapt everything that was formed earlier to the present.

If a person suffers but does not change, it means that he or she still has the energy to live and suffer, but does not have the energy to change. Conscious change requires a lot of energy, because the person will have to rebuild everything inside. It's kind of like a house that has a wobbly floor. It's just the floor, but the cause may be in the foundation and in the walls, and changing all that takes a lot of money that isn't there yet.

That's why when a person plans global changes, it often ends up at the level of talk and promises to "start on Sunday". Unrealized plans cause feelings of guilt and drain even more energy. Therefore, at some point a person becomes aggressive in accepting calls for change.

Those who live differently are adapted to their way of life. Adapted means they have changed from the inside out to be energized in this way. Now they just roll along the existing rails and are often very judgmental of those who do not have such rails. However, it takes incomparably more energy to change the rails than to just roll on them. In addition, those who roll often don't notice that their rails have been rolling them the wrong way for a long time. For example, fitness can go from being a healthy activity to one that destroys health. And it can be just as difficult for a fanatical crossfitter to give up his lifestyle as it is for a lazy guy to start exercising. A lazy guy is adapted to lying on the couch, saving endorphin (stress makes it run out immediately). A crossfitter is adapted to training, extracting the same endorphin from his body. A lazy guy gets stressed from trying to move to the gym, while a crossfitter gets stressed from trying to slow down his workout pace. The lazy guy has nowhere to get energy to exercise, and the crossfitter has nowhere to get energy except from exercise. Both are inefficiently adapted. But both are maximally adapted, because their energy metabolism functions only in connection with this way of life. An attempt to change the way of life immediately causes stress, that is, an outflow of vital energy. Stress is the fire that causes the system to quickly grasp the nearest available mode of adaptation and stay in it so as not to perish.

In what case will a person adapted to one way of life change that way of life? Only in one case. If during the rebuilding he immediately has an extra energy bonus to compensate for the stress. That is, he needs some kind of oxygen tank to help him swim from one bay to another. If he doesn't have such a tank, he will go in and out of the water in fear of not being able to cover the distance underwater. He literally needs energy like air.

And it is useless to tell such a person that life is better in another bay. He believes, but doesn't understand how he can get there. Promises that he will definitely become happier, healthier and richer in his new way of life are worthless to him because he needs energy for the process of change. Not later, when he's already changed. By the way, when he changes, he really won't need the extra energy. The stress will be gone, he will feel comfortable. This is the point of adaptation. But any exit from the adapted state is fraught with stress.

How do you find the energy to rebuild when the process is so stressful? Where to get oxygen for the time spent in airless space?

"Just decide!" and "pull yourself together!" help when only small internal changes are needed and the stress to be overcome is small. But such appeals have no meaning when a person has little strength and the changes required from him are big.

Why do personal growth trainings help some, fail others and cripple the third?

Because trainings create a playful space of transition and saturate this space with available energy. The task of the training is to tear a person out of the old reality, energize, change and push him or her into a new reality. Hard, sometimes destructive techniques are used for this purpose. Such techniques are really effective in pulling a person out of the familiar environment and making him or her feel like a "new person". However, the training ends, but the person has not stepped into the new environment, he has not adapted to the new real life. At the same time, he cannot return to his old life. He got new attitudes, he got hooked on a new way of getting energy, but unfortunately, this new way and new attitudes do not help him to start a new life in reality. That is why such a person goes to the next stage of training. Then he goes to another one. Instead of adapting to a new life, he adapts to training. It can be said that he did not swim to another bay, but grew gills and became an amphibian. The only way to socialize such a person is to become a trainer himself, i.e. to turn training from an unprofitable hobby into a profession.

If a person somehow manages to take something out of the training into real life and change his situation, we can say that the training helped him. Unfortunately, many trainers are more interested in the process of breaking out of reality and immersion in the space of training, rather than adapting to real life. And the ways of such adaptation are practically not developed, unlike the many ways of involvement in the game space. Therefore, most of those who get involved find themselves secondarily maladapted to reality. This means that participation in the training turns from a means to improve the situation in life into a goal, and work becomes just a way to get money for the next training. Those who become fans of trainings either leave their families or involve their spouses in trainings. Cults and any group takeovers operate in the same way.

Thus, we have looked at two ineffective ways of personality change. The first is self-talk and blaming oneself. The second is attending trainings. I would like to repeat that both self-talk and trainings do help in some cases. However, their effectiveness and safety are at least questionable.

To understand what is an effective and safe way to change yourself, let's remember the phrase "a bad example is contagious". But why? Apparently because changing for the worse does not require an investment of energy. On the contrary, it saves it. An active person can easily become lazy. It is easy for a slender person to get fat. A decent person can very quickly fall under the influence of bad company (if such company is pleasant). It is even easier to develop some kind of addiction: to start drinking more often, to love smoking, to keep playing computer games. All bad things are bad because they provide an opportunity for idleness, i.e. relaxation of the will instead of its tension. The less energy you have to put in, the faster the habit forms.

But how can you change yourself for the better without investing any energy? If rolling downhill is easy, climbing uphill always requires effort. Isn't it? Actually, it's not quite like that. It all depends on the frame of reference. If change for the better is a distant goal, a lot of energy is required. If it is only a means and the goal is some kind of pleasure, no energy is spent at all, and sometimes it even arrives.

Imagine, for example, that a girl who couldn't bring herself to go to the gym sees someone among the regulars who sparks her interest. Doesn't it make it easier to go to an unpleasant place? Or, for example, a young man who couldn't bring himself to learn a language meets a native speaker, and they begin an affair. From that moment, he has the goal - the pleasure of communicating with the girl, and the language becomes only a means. As a result, the language is mastered quickly, easily, without effort of will and expenditure of energy. It is possible to master a computer program very quickly, if with the help of this program one can immediately do something extremely pleasant. And general cleaning is much more fun when a long-awaited friend is due to visit. If you come up with a scheme in which a useful goal becomes just a means to an enjoyable goal, you are not wasting any energy.

Of course, it is not always easy to come up with such a scheme, and sometimes it is very difficult. Yes, it is not easy when pleasant things have nothing to do with useful things, and it is impossible to combine them. Especially such a scheme does not work when there is almost nothing pleasant left in life. And this scheme works best when a person finds many things interesting and pleasant. In this case, he can easily fit an unpleasant duty into an interesting work and overcome the period of adaptation almost without stress. That's why it's so easy for active people to start new things, and so hard for people at a standstill to get out of it. But once the new thing is mastered, it ceases to cause stress, and perhaps even begins to cause pleasure itself.

This is the scheme on which the mechanism of connecting resources from scratch is based. But for this scheme to work, there must be a lot of already working resources. For those who do not have such an opportunity, it is useful to at least have this scheme in mind in order to notice a chance for its realization in time. In the meantime, at least do not blame yourself for unwillingness to overcome the stress of change or, going to stress, encourage yourself with compensation (feed yourself with energy).

Compensation for stress can be all the things a person loves. Ideally, a person should have a whole set of pleasures and all these pleasures should be harmless enough. Harmful pleasure relieves immediate stress, but increases it in the future. For example, if the only pleasure is sweet food, but there is a lot of stress and you need a lot of such food, it immediately dampens the stress, but in the future it causes excess weight gain and increased stress from dissatisfaction with yourself. In addition, the body does not get the necessary nutrients from unhealthy food, which means that its overall energy state is deteriorating. The right thing to do is to choose the healthiest of what your body finds tasty. Tastes change, and what doesn't feel good today may feel good tomorrow. Therefore, it is better to gradually adapt your body to what is useful. Compromise options can be used as a transitional phase. Nuts, candied fruits, halva instead of chips and cakes - this is a compromise option, as well as natural dark chocolate instead of bars with caramel. Yes, the calories in such healthy food are not less and you will not lose weight, however, there is much more brain nutrient in it. In the future, it will help to have more energy, less stress, and therefore it will be easier to control your eating habits. Much easier than in a hunger strike situation, which is the most stressful and therefore always followed by periods of gluttony.

How to raise my self-esteem?

This question is very often asked.

But why raise it?

Apparently, people think that low self-esteem is some bug that has accidentally appeared in the system, and if you fix it, everything will immediately become better. Insecurity will disappear, contacts with people will improve, and a lot of problems will evaporate.

It's kind of like personal boundaries. Many people believe that all their problems in life because they can not outline the boundaries for themselves. That's why they give in where they don't need to, or they step on other people's boundaries for some reason. And if you realize your own boundaries, life will get better.

In fact, both stable self-esteem and good boundaries are a consequence of sufficient internal resources. Not necessarily a lot, sometimes a little is enough, but zero is not enough.

Let's imagine a person without internal resources, even if not everyone fully understands what it is. Such a person has external resources: some work, some money, some relationships, some housing, but no internal resources. No internal means that he is very dependent on external resources and constantly clings to them. He is afraid of losing his job and therefore fears any wrong steps. Some of the money is given to him by his parents and he has to listen to moralizing all the time. He clings to his partner in the relationship and is afraid of losing him. He owes someone something for housing, too. That's the way it is with everything. He has nothing or very little of his own. Can such a person have a stable self-esteem and good personal boundaries?

Many people think that dependent self-esteem and weak personal boundaries are evil. But no, this is often a good thing, it is an adaptation to a situation of lack of internal resources. If such a person does not yield and adapt at work, he will be in constant fear of being kicked out. With his parents, he also can not build boundaries as a person independent, because he depends, and all the time must yield to their leadership, and when he does not yield, he feels guilt and fear. And it's all stressful. And you need to remember very well (!): stress is something the body will always avoid in the first place, because a few minutes of acute stress = death. Therefore, the body is willing to do anything to avoid too much stress and a quick death. Of course, a quick death from a quarrel with your parents will not occur. But the body still avoids stress because a little here, a little there, so it will grow up and the end. With an dependent personality, this can happen at every turn. Therefore, the body maintains a level of acceptable anxiety, and if internal resources are not available, lets the boundaries float free like bad currency.

This is the only reason why such a person's boundaries are always floating and his self-esteem depends on others, because he himself depends on others. It does not seem to him, he actually has no internal supports, only external ones, which he does not control (external ones cannot be controlled). He's always fawning or exalting. If he only fawns, he will accumulate aggression, and if he does not fawn, he will become afraid, because he can only rely on others. That is why such a person humiliates himself excessively, and then he pushes excessively, and it seems that his boundaries are bad, and it is necessary to work on his boundaries.

But working on boundaries is useless as long as there are not enough resources within those boundaries. Working on the boundaries will do nothing or, on the contrary, will lead to a decrease in resources, because instead of developing them, a person will experiment with the boundaries.

It is also useless to work on self-esteem as long as there are no internal resources. If you want to become independent very badly, you will have to create an illusion, because in reality there is no independence.

And also very often the attempt to make one's self-esteem independent early on leads to a person developing a consistently low self-esteem. She is told "you are beautiful", but she thinks she is ugly. Or she is told "you are smart", but she is sure that she is stupid. This happens very often with a person when he/she has no internal resources to have an independent adequate self-esteem, and he/she is tired of being dependent on other people's evaluations. Then the personality simply fixates on low self-esteem. She decides (unconsciously usually) to consider herself ugly, stupid, weak, not to depend, not to wait, but to be prepared for the worst. And then, no matter how much she is externally persuaded that she is beautiful, she will deny it. To many people this seems like coquetry or even vampirism (extorting compliments), but no. The person is really waiting for some proof, but until there are no internal supports, he does not feel the strength of these proofs and does not trust them. Therefore, it is useless to persuade such a person from the outside. It must gain independence from other people's assessments at the expense of its own internal supports.

If a resourceless person suddenly registers a high self-esteem, the situation is even scarier. Since she has no internal resources, she is also very afraid to hear from the world that she is not beautiful. So she creates an autistic cocoon, stops taking the world's evaluations seriously at all, devalues the world and considers it a "circus of freaks" or a "crowd of envious people". But this cocoon works not only in terms of evaluations, but also in terms of everything else. That is, such a personality is isolated from the world by such dense defenses that completely deprive it of exchange with this world. This means that they block the possibility to develop their resources.

Why does this not happen to a resourceful (i.e., having internal resources) person? On what is sustainable and independent self-esteem built? Yes, on internal resources. If you have something for sure and you are told that you don't, you don't experience pain and self-doubt. For example, if you have an automobile, would you begin to doubt it from saying that you don't have an automobile? Material things are either there or they are not, and with inner resources that is the same! They are so definitely there that the confirmation of the world is not required. If you doubt something, it means you don't have the inner resource, there is hope or illusion there, but no resource.

And the important thing is different. The opinion of an individual or even a group of people means nothing and does not affect your self-esteem when you:

1. know exactly what you are, so you're already formed

2. do not depend on this group in any way.

If you are still searching for yourself and depend on this group, then excessive independence of self-esteem can harm you. In this case, it is better to listen to the opinion of these people and change. That is, an independent self-esteem can be afforded by a person who already has everything and is ready to provide for himself, both financially and emotionally. But if he cannot provide for himself yet, but wants an independent self-esteem, nothing good will come out of it.

So how to distinguish between a grief rescuer and a person who can really help? And how to understand what fate awaits such a helper?

Some people think that stories about rescuing people from the bottom are harmful because they give the illusion that it happens. And instead of abandoning those who drown themselves of their own will, their loved ones die.

That happens, too. However, can people be urged on the basis of this to never help a drowning person? And what would people become if they made that their imperative? That is, the rule would apply not just to monsters, but to anyone who is in trouble for any reason. Or does anyone think that it is possible to draw a line between an alcoholic and a drinker, a marginalized person and a person in crisis, a prostitute and a kept woman? There is no such line, and the rule of "don't save" will turn human civilization into a cesspool faster than the most reckless rescue.

Nevertheless, reckless rescue is also evil, just not on the scale of humanity, but on the scale of the rescuer's individual ruined life.

So I want to describe what a reasonable rescue looks like and what its safety rules are. Figuratively speaking, to save someone a rescuer should at least be a good swimmer and ideally have a boat and a diving suit.

The cardinal rule for a rescuer is to take care of your own survival first and foremost. Preferably not instead of saving others, but first and foremost. A drowning rescuer cannot save anyone, but can drown other rescuers who rush to save him. Therefore, every rescuer must take care of his own rescue, relieving others of this duty, and only then rescue.

Why does such a logical rule work so poorly?

Because it is not clear how to distinguish prudence from greed, cowardice and selfishness. A person lives, helps no one, not even his own mother, pulls everything on himself, and refers to the fact that he cares about his own safety. He says "I not strong enough to help others. When I get stronger, then yes". That is why the first rule of the rescuer "first grab yourself, then pull the other" in ordinary life does not work very well. It often turns into selfishness (and selfishness leads to disconnection from the world and depression).

There's a woman, for example. She is very afraid that she will be ruined, so she is always looking for ways to protect herself. She discovers the rules "10 signs that your fiancé is a future abuser", reads "secrets of psychopaths", but after reading she realizes that everything is even more dangerous than she thought. She decides that the only way to protect herself is not to have a relationship at all. It's not just "don't wade in the water" ("don't meet strangers"), but forget about the water - it's dangerous.

Or man. In an attempt to ensure his own safety in marriage, to protect himself from cheating, divorce and separation from his children, he first tries to look for "where her button is". He learns textbooks on hypnotic control over women, and then decides that it is not necessary to marry at all, and it is better to treat the birth of children philosophically, that is, to completely relieve himself of responsibility, because it is impossible to control the behavior of wives.

So the only right rule of safety in relationships seems to many people to be separation, that is, guarding one's own boundaries from any proximity at all. It is understandable that when people are so frightened, stories about monsters and frogs turning into humans are annoying to many. It seems like a cynical trap.

Actually, there's no trap. I want to explain that it's not magic at all, that no technique will help it, and that there's no need to count on luck. You need things of a completely different nature.

What are these things?

What is a boat for a rescuer to pull a drowning person into?

The boat is its own supports. The very resources.

One of the most important resources for an adult is work (12 resources in total can be identified, but more on that later). Work is one of the 4 cardinal points of the circle of resources. If anyone is aware of the system of 12 zodiacal houses, this is the Midheaven, 10th house. But I warn you at once, predictive astrology has nothing to do with the system of resources.

A work is a place in society where a person works and receives material reward for it. If a person has such a place and the loss of this place is not expected, he or she feels protected and in demand. This is the minimum that a work must provide in order to be an external resource.

When is work not a resource at all? When a person does nothing at work and/or receives no reward. The reward does not have to be in the form of money, but it must be something that will provide the person with security. If a person receives no reward or the reward is much less than he or she estimates the effort expended, the work is not a resource. It can sometimes be an energy drain. If a person does nothing at all at work, but receives reward, the work is formal, and the person receives reward obviously for something else. For what - a separate question, you can look for localization of the resource there.

How does work turn from an external resource into an internal one? This happens when the goal of work ceases to be the result - that is, the reward - and becomes the process itself. When the process becomes pleasant and interesting, it stops absorbing mental energy, but absorbs only physical energy. A person gets tired, of course, wants to eat, then sleep, and simply "his head stops working". That is, he exhausts his physical resources, but much later than the one for whom the process is uninteresting and unpleasant. The latter gets tired much faster, and not only mentally, but also physically, to the point of headache and weakness in the body. He needs tea breaks, emotional saturation from time to time, relaxed communication with colleagues, social networking, and without it he feels like a hunted horse. If the situation with energy expenditure is quite critical, work can no longer be considered a resource, even if a person receives a salary. Yes, he gets money, but he lives in constant stress or depression, gets sick and cannot spend the money on development.

That is, without minimal enjoyment of the process, work cannot be considered a resource because the reward is almost entirely burned up in the stress of unpleasant work. The exception is such a large reward, which a person perceives as a real capital for the future in a limited time frame. That is, he does not intend to spend his whole life in such a job, but works temporarily to do something he likes later.

When the pleasure from work becomes large enough, work turns from an external resource into an internal one. The transformation is completed when the person himself begins to control the receipt of pleasure (he can always find a similar job and get joy from it). The difference between an external resource and an internal one is that the reward comes from within, not from without. Not in the form of money and praise, but in the form of one's own pleasure. That is, a person begins to feed himself by the very process that he himself starts by working. If earlier he waited for payday or hoped that the boss would approve the result (waiting for compensation for the energy spent), now he gets the energy himself, immediately. And salary and praise are additional bonuses to this energy. Of course, such a person will quit his job if the boss stops paying him. Besides pure energy (mental energy), he has to eat something else, and he wants an equal exchange with his employer. So he will look for a place where he is paid adequately, but he has the high from his favorite work and energy.

The more autonomous getting energy from work becomes, the more it becomes a sought-after profession, the more powerful an internal resource it becomes.

I will stop at this point for now.

If we go back to the examples of stories from the previous two posts, is it clear what is the difference between a person who does not have such an internal resource and a person who does? What would have happened in this story with N if her work had been only an external resource, i.e., bringing her only money and status? If such N had met her sexual charismatic, she would have gradually become more and more disinterested in other areas of life, because it is a physical law. The more the organism can extract energy, the more its attention to that area grows. No one can take attention away from what is very pleasant and transfer it to what is unpleasant. It can be done for some limited time, forcing oneself "for the sake of usefulness". But the stock of "pure will" is very limited, because stress develops, and the raised level of cortisol requires compensation in the form of pleasant sensations. Therefore, motivation (desire) is needed for activity, not self-coercion. This is the basis of the chemical regulation of the living organism and because of it man is always drawn to what brings him energy. It is only in his power to gradually reorganize the system to start getting energy from useful things. But if work is not yet an internal resource, then, meeting a source of high, a person has every reason to develop an addiction to it. Unless the source quickly escapes or is unavailable for some other reason. But as long as the source has not escaped, the person will be more and more involved.

When we say that N had internal supports and was stronger than D, we are talking about the fact that she got a lot of energy from work, fed on it, it was her alternative source, she could be happy even without D. But D had no such sources in his pit, his life was darkness and only N became his light. Before her, he got some high from alcohol and women dancing around him, and this involved him in a vicious circle of such a life, where he lost more and more internal resources. As a result, he had no energy left at all to stop drinking, get a job and work. D just didn't have the energy for it all. That is why he resisted and scandalized for so long, trying to draw N into his life. He wanted to get a source of energy in the form of N into his den, but he did not want (could not) change for the sake of it. It required an expenditure of energy that he simply didn't have. He hated to work, he used to drink, he hated society. To reshape his life required incredible effort. Therefore, he often wished he could just die, because it was difficult to give up N, but he could not physically fulfill her condition to change.

What was it about N? She got so much energy from her life that every part of that life nourished her. She enjoyed her work and was excited about her plans, she enjoyed socializing with friends, she loved her home and felt very comfortable there. So she was perfectly fine. And although she really wanted to supplement her beautiful life with her favorite D, but she did not want to change everything just for that, and could not. It was 100% clear to her that the pleasure would quickly disappear as soon as she plunged into a life together with an unemployed alcoholic jealous man. She was much more afraid of this life than she was of losing D. That is, while D was writhing and thrashing with unquenched passion, N was not thrashing at all. She knew she was doing the right thing. She, of course, hoped that D would pull himself together, but she realized that it did not depend on her, she had already done everything she could. She showed him her love, offered him constructive ways out, said that she would wait for his real actions and went away to live her life.

Therefore, N's condition was getting stronger day by day, her longing for D was dulled, overshadowed by new emotions. D, on the contrary, yearned more and more. The vivid experiences of N’s love became brighter and brighter against the background of a gloomy life, and so gradually the motivation for change was born in him, and energy for it was accumulated. In addition to longing for N, he also longed for the new life he had touched through her. And although he did not see his place in that life yet, the attractiveness of that life gradually reached its climax. When his motivation grew enough, it became scarier and more painful for him not to see N than to quit drinking, scarier to lose everything he wanted than to go to work. When he got involved in the work, it was no longer so disgusting and energy-consuming. When he came up with his own creative project, he was able to get a lot of energy from the work himself, thus gaining an inner support. Going back to the pit started to look unrealistic. Especially since he had already been there and knew exactly how bad it was.

In addition to this one, I will tell another story where a man pulls a woman out of the bottom. I have more than one such story, but here is an example.

K was a prostitute. She had a difficult childhood, a drunken father, an "absent" mother who disappeared with lovers from time to time. When her father went on a bender, little K and her younger brother lived poorly, sometimes even starving; once they ate hunger pills and got poisoned. After that, the mother stopped disappearing, but began to beat them more often. In short, K's fate was not easy. She did not study well, started her sexual life early and when she turned 16, she suddenly realized that she had to go to the capital. She arrived there by train, without money, with the intention of finding a "boyfriend" on the same day. She was immediately caught by some gangsters, she was put up somewhere, used by a bunch of people. Then she became a prostitute. I describe all of this not to elicit tears or disgust, but to show the magnitude of the decline and the depth of the trauma. For example, K did not realize that she could not be beaten. She sincerely believed that when she was beaten, it was a manifestation of strong emotions, caring, and therefore good. Beatings are dangerous to health, yes, she understood that, but it's like cigarettes - harmful, but pleasant, and therefore normal. She said that when you get beaten, it doesn't hurt at first, it's a thrill. It hurts later, but you can take it. In general, it's like drugs: first it's high, then it's bad. And of course she took drugs too, though not systematically. That's the kind of girl she was. I won't even talk about her sexual tastes, it's probably obvious to everyone.

Many people would think that a creature of this type could only attract a clinical sadist or a person on the verge of complete moral disintegration. That was mostly the case until K met O.

The year before, he had buried his beloved wife, whom he had pulled out of illness for five(!) years. She had cancer. At first it seemed to everyone that she had recovered, but then the same diagnosis came back. For five years he drove her to foreign clinics, got her medicines, fed her from a spoon, and for the last year he did not leave her for a minute, even turning from an atheist into a believer, hoping that maybe God would help at least. O used to be a successful businessman, but during the last year of his wife's illness his business was shaken, and a lot of money and time was spent on treatment. So by the time he met K, he was lonely, completely broken emotionally, and almost poor. And although financial matters were getting better, there was no energy to actively engage in business, and life had almost lost its meaning. So we can say that O was also in a very bad energy state. However, his inner core had once been formed and had not gone anywhere. There was just a lot of energy going into grieving, experiencing loss and finding fault. He, in his 30+, had no children, his beloved wife was always not very healthy. So there were practically no loved ones left.

I think K was attracted to O because she needed help. That is, their relationship began according to the classic victim-rescuer scheme. According to the classic, the rescuer was supposed to turn into a victim and then into an aggressor. However, it turned out differently, because it was not about roles or even schemes at all, but about inner pillars, and I will never tire of repeating this. O had a strong core, that is, powerful moral principles and the skill to accumulate energy. He was partly broken by the loss of his wife. He was fused with her because of her illness and helplessness, and he could not start a full life. In particular, he could not afford not only to have a lover, but also simply to pay sexual attention to women. His dying wife immediately came to mind.

K was the one he was able to pay such attention to because she needed help. He was able to say to himself "it's not lust, I just have to", especially since lust was out of the question at first. Just O was walking home from the store in the evening. He lived in the center, in a large apartment that he first sold while his wife was sick, and then bought back when she died, in memory of their life. He saw some scumbag beating up a fragile girl. It is clear that the scumbag was thrown to the pavement and fled, and the girl clung to O. First with a request for an urgent drink, then to wash the blood, then to spend the night and so on, the story is classic. And there are few good men who have not fallen into a similar story.

As banal in this story was the fact that at night this girl came to O and creepingly got sex from him, half asleep. So the next morning he owed her and she moved in with him. Afterwards, O blamed himself entirely. He said he had some kind of crazy breakthrough in him and he "started to actively use this child" (the child was 19 at the time). He was so caught up in sex and animal sensations, and he had forgotten so long ago what it was like, that he didn't care about anything else at all. For example, he would buy K alcohol and go along with her in everything for sex. K liked quite specific sex, and O was not comfortable with it. However, he made concessions and did whatever K asked for in order to get what he wanted. He thought that these games could be tolerated, because in the end they still had normal sex, which he really needed. A few weeks later, K disappeared after stealing from O. Everything possible was taken from his apartment. Apparently, K had invited a whole group of thieves.

O was shocked. Not because he'd been ripped off, but because he'd let himself immerse himself in that chaos, drinking that girl's alcohol and having dirty sex. Nevertheless, whether chaos or shock, it all pushed him upwards. Disgusted with himself and the situation, he quickly pulled himself together, sold a large apartment, rented a modest one, invested in business, actively engaged in it, worked 15 hours a day, and then went to the pool, swam for an hour and a half, came home and passed out. He ate once a day, but a lot. That was his schedule for months. He was no longer interested in sex, he no longer indulged in melancholy. He put away his wife's pictures, he started running in the mornings, swimming in the evenings, and working hard the rest of the time. At first it seemed to him that such a hard regime would turn him into a zombie. But after two months he had a lot of new ideas and energy. He wondered how such simple and profitable ideas had never occurred to him before. And ideas always come when there is a surplus of energy.

All in all, in a short time O had risen and come into excellent condition. When K emerged again, miserable and dirty, he decided to atone for his mistake by doing something useful for her. He took pictures of her ID and let her know that one more theft and she would end up in jail. Out of hunger, K vowed not to repeat such a thing. He further told her that if she liked S&M games so much, she would have to obey him in everything. She readily agreed, thinking it was a sexual game. But the game was different. She had to do physical training, follow the regime, pour cold water, learn English and solve math exercises for 5th grade, read abstruse books and write essays, and most importantly not to drink and cook herself healthy food instead of sandwiches. K got bored of it quickly. Although she liked the sex, and liked it just the way she liked it, everything else was a dull bore. So she soon ran away again. She'd run away for a couple weeks, then come back for a week or two, and so on several times.

O says that every time she came back to him he was almost in mourning. He didn't want to let her back in, but every time some strange duty compelled him to give her a chance, knowing exactly that she would fail. It was true that O felt no attraction to K, and even sex made him negative. He tried to engage in it as little as possible and only for her sake, to keep her motivated to get better. He didn't get any bonus from the relationship at all, he did everything out of a sense of duty that he made up for himself. I had no doubt at the time that he was raping himself, suppressing her and it was all going to end very badly. By all classic signs, such a relationship should have ended in some kind of nightmare.

However, it didn't work out that way. O was successful at work, all his endeavors began to yield profit, he started going to various status feasts. One day he took K. And K, looking at O from the outside, suddenly realized that she was the lover of a very successful, intelligent and very respected man. She examined him with amazement and suddenly fell in love with a terrible force. Notice, it really did happen suddenly . She first stuck to him, then became attached, and only then suddenly fell passionately in love. She was stuck out of mercantile interest, attached out of desperation, and fell in love when she suddenly realized what a treasure she had and how high above her he was.

This story reminded me of the miracle that the Soviet educator Makarenko once performed and described. Street children, juvenile delinquents, people without principles, deeply traumatized from childhood, turned into good people in his commune. Some of them even became mature individuals with high moral principles. At first hunger kept them (at least there was food in the commune), but the need for work discouraged them. Then they got involved and began to change faster than the people in Zimbardo's experiment. Please read Makarenko's books all those who are interested in the topic of personality change. It is very interesting material.

And in this story, I saw with my own eyes how a human personality came together from a pile of human garbage. A thief, a sexual deviant, a slacker, a liar, a cheat and a drug addict began to change into a different person. She studied obsessively, took courses, went to college, started working, took on every job, looking for something for which she would be praised by O. Praise from O became her goal in life. O told her that she had to develop, to learn and approved only that. He worked all day and she, imitating him, worked too. He became her guru. Of course, it looked suspicious, and again I thought it would not end well. The only consolation was that she had stopped doing drugs and street prostitution. Anything other than that was better, but I was far from believing that submitting to one human could make another human a person.

But here's what happened. K's servility did not meet with any support in O. He disapproved of her servility and made it clear that he was unpleasant and tiresome when she exalted him. He asked her for an even, calm relationship. He encouraged her to take responsibility more often, expressed respect for her boundaries and asked for respect for his. He had no passion, treated K as a relative, and had sex with her very rarely. Their sex was completely free of sadomasochistic elements. K was cured of it as soon as she fell in love and realized that her lover not only didn't like it, but even disgusted. She easily fell in love with gentle sex because she had enough of the mere feeling that her master’s will. O was no longer disgusted by sex, but he still lacked motivation. He continued to do it out of a sense of duty, because K needed it. At the time, he complained that he would probably never regain spontaneity and real pleasure again. Either he had simply grown up, or the loss of his wife had broken him forever. He even looked for a sexologist to help him with this problem, but then he gave up. His potency was normal, but he had no spontaneous desire. Sometimes he remembered the intense, animal pleasure of the first days of his acquaintance with K, but this pleasure seemed too dirty to him. In general, sex became something of a conscious half-spiritual practice for him. And for her, it was the only way to be intimate with the one she loved. And so he couldn't refuse her.

They lived this way for several years. She, in love, trying to develop and grow, and he, passionate only about his work and his hobby, and constantly encouraging her to develop. It seemed to everyone around that she needed it, and his detachment made her strive to grow all the time. And yet there was something unbearably sad about that relationship, and I didn't even want to watch it. I thought it would be a good thing for O to find another woman, but K would likely bring back down. That's why I started to think it was as much of a cross for O as a sick wife. If his wife was seriously ill all her life, he would spend his life taking care of her. And that's the right behavior for a strong person. But it is a rather sad fate. To be truly happy in such a destiny, one has to be very advanced spiritually, personality power alone is not enough for that. And I was not sure that O's spirituality was enough to live such a life and feel happiness. Or rather I was sure that it was not enough. He is not an adept, he is an ordinary person and needs ordinary happiness.

I lost sight of them and then suddenly O showed up and said he and K were in big trouble. When I saw K, I was shocked. In front of me was a completely different person. Not only had she become exquisite and spiritualized in appearance. She changed in some bizarre way from a mentally retarded (I even suspected oligophrenia at first) to an intelligent woman. I couldn't realize what it was because I saw a lady from an educated family, not a girl from a pit. The problems between O and K started when K grew up as a person. She now had an education, an interesting job, her own money, respect of colleagues, friends, personal ambitions and plans, and, as a result, the need to control her own life. She began to feel stressed by O's attitude towards her.

She still loved him dearly, as she said, but she saw that he didn't love her, and she wanted to start living separately. She insisted that she would just leave without taking any money. Now she was earning her own money and could afford a small apartment, but O wanted to buy her an apartment and provide her with money. She reasoned that it would lead to his control, to her duty to him, which meant she couldn't get away from him at all, as she wanted to. And he thought that her demands for autonomy were a kind of rebellion or hysteria, and would lead to nothing good. So he said that he would be glad to be free and to free her, but he wanted to be sure that her life would not go down the drain, because she was not a stranger to him. That is, he reasoned like a parent who is not against the child's separation, but is afraid that the child will be lost.

When talking to me in person, K started crying almost immediately. She talked about how she couldn't stand living with O and feeling worthless, how she wanted love, not this "rotten stinking kindness". She was tired of constantly picking up crumbs on the floor, meaning she was happy to see him smile and punch walls for praise. Anyway, K first poured buckets of anger on O. Then she started crying even louder, saying she was lying, that she was a spoiled brat, that O was a saint, that he was so good to her, that she wanted to leave because she was tired of poisoning his life, that she was ashamed. All in all, K was full of conflicting emotions, and the bottom line was that she had outgrown the parental model of relationships. She had built up so many resources that this model had become too cramped for her.

In the end, O and K agreed on a compromise. He rented her an apartment for a year and let her float free, promising not to control or "stay out of her life." K left. O even tried to start some kind of relationship, but all the time he remembered K with some resentment. He could not understand this resentment and asked me about it. He had dreams of K being raped and murdered, woke up in a cold sweat, grabbed the phone, but every time he remembered his word to her - to let her go. But, after a long time, he couldn't stand it and called her before Christmas and invited her to a restaurant. They met, talked for a long time, O told about his unsuccessful relationship with another woman, and K told him that she had never been with anyone and did not even want to try. O clearly realized that he was looking at K with different eyes. He looks at her as a beautiful independent woman and he is very attracted to him sexually. He said that he loved her differently than before, felt passionate and suggested trying another relationship. K cried and said that at that moment everything was happening exactly as she had imagined a thousand times.

With the permission of one of my clients, I want to tell the story of a miraculous transformation of chaos into cosmos. This will be helpful to those who are convinced that happy relationships are impossible with "bad" partners. There are few things in the world that are impossible for integrated personalities.

I'll call the client N and her partner D. They met by chance, when N came to a friends' house for some presentation, and D came there with an acquaintance to have a drink.

By that time he had been drinking for many years, and for the last six months without stopping. But since there were always many women around him, who agreed to cook for him and buy him quality alcohol, and to call a doctor with a drip for their money, he never got drunk to the end, but was just permanently drunk.

His last wife was either an actress or a model, who went to Europe and took his daughter with her. According to legend, he was terribly worried about it, couldn't forgive, couldn't forget. The young girl, that is, his ex-wife, was very much pitied by everyone. They say that he abused her, brought her to anorexia nervosa, she was in a mental hospital, but this is all according to legend, and he denied. His inner circle partly hated him, partly pitied him, and some did both. He stole girlfriends from all his friends, some of them even wives. In general, he was a real charmer, and acted (according to legend) on women magnetically. His model wife (or actress) was his fifth, but the child was only from her. The others did not dare to give birth because he (according to legend) did not want to. This last wife adored and supported him. She earned good money, traveled constantly to Europe, and finally some rich man persuaded her to leave this horrible husband who drank her blood.

He was a good painter once, had great hopes, and was known in narrow circles. However, he sold few of his paintings, and the last ones he simply burned and "quit painting" because his wife "betrayed" him and "took away his child".

He was a typical female bloodsucker: an alcoholic, a bum, a beggar and a womanizer, and, according to legend, an abuser as well. It is understandable that when N became interested in him, everyone discouraged her and begged her not to come near, not to approach, to run as far away as possible. It was obvious to everyone that he needed a victim, especially since she was wealthy and not as young as all of his exes. Older than him by three years, and he was over thirty. And she was quite pretty, but not very pretty, more like an ordinary woman, but a very strong person. She literally radiated strength. She was always happy, calm, confident, she was always active, she did everything well, she had a lot of energy. Basically, you could say she was the sun while he was decomposing in the swamp. At least that's how it looked to everyone.

Of course, I didn't believe in the success of their relationship either. But at least I thought she was a hundred times stronger than he was, so he would suffer. He'd try to reach for her, and then most likely he'd fail and give up, doing something nasty as a goodbye. I told her that honestly. I told her that nothing would come of their relationship, but that he couldn't ruin and trample her like everyone promised. Of course, she would have done it her way, but she was grateful for my words, because within a week her friends were calling her screaming "AAA" and "Noooo!" and telling her terrible things about him.

They met, by the way, in a spectacular way. He saw her at this presentation, drunk as always, and he came over and knelt down. And said to her quietly: "My angel, I recognize you, help me, I'm dying." And she did not falter, but blossomed from these sweet speeches and from his disheveled, unshaven and even dirty appearance. Then, of course, everyone began to wrinkle their nose and whisper that she was "in the shit", that this was a story about beauty and the beast. But, fortunately, it didn't turn out that way.

She went to his house, or rather to his "studio" that his ex-wife had given him. She talked to him all night, looked at his paintings and told him in the morning that she had fallen in love with him too. And I left. There was no sex, but there were kisses and all sorts of crazy revelations. And, as is common in such cases, mysticism that speaks of a soul mate, but I won't talk about that nonsense. Apparently, he used all the charm, hypnosis and sexuality he could muster. And she really really fell in love. She said something like "he's the best, he's the best, I wouldn't have believed it before" or something like that. And then her friends and acquaintances started calling her and discouraging her from talking to him. "I really want to have sex with him, I fell in love like a girl, - she told me very sadly. - But they tell me that he will infect me with AIDS, drive me crazy, charm me, then cheat on me, humiliate me, make me a masochist, deprive me of everything, and then throw my heart away. Is he really that terrible?" But I knew him very little and could not tell her anything. I advised her to do what she wanted and not to listen to anyone, because she was her own mistress (and a real mistress, that is, she definitely had a "center"). And I didn't risk anything, because no matter what I told her, she would do it her way, it was clear.

Attention: I am not writing this story for women to help alcoholics, drug addicts and abusers. Very many such women are in the cemetery. And it is better to remember about it. The point of the story is different. I want to tell you that the main thing is your own supports. If they are absent, even a good man can make you suffer a lot. And if there are a lot of them, even a monster has a chance to become a human. Or the monster will remain a monster, but it won't hurt the woman. She'll quickly become disillusioned and walk away.

At first, the story seemed like classic sex shamanism. D consistently took his "angel's" heart to pieces. The sex was fantastic and magical, constant night calls, constant love and, of course, fights. Well, he was the one fighting. He promised to throw himself out the window or call a prostitute if she "didn't come right away". There were some other ugly scenes that I don't even want to tell you about. He used every method he could to loosen her. But she wouldn't give in. She loved him, she talked about it, she was sad during fighting’s, but she was not jealous or involved in his madness. It was as if he was going crazy on his own, while she watched it from the sidelines like an angel. One day after another of his storms and jealousy scenes (although he was cheating, not her), she said she couldn't see him anymore. And refused to see him at all.

She got involved in a job from which she never once turned off. When I asked her if she was sad, she said that he had given her many wonderful hours (they had been together for four months), that she was grateful to him, but that she could see that he was wallowing in his marginality and that instead of wonderful hours there would be more and more sad ones. And she doesn't want to be hurt. So she made the decision to break up. She said that it was as good with him as it had never been and would never be with anyone else. But sex is not the main thing in life, and love should not only consist of passion. I asked her if she wasn't attracted to him. She would say, "I'm attracted to him, but I can see that the good things are over, and only bad things will come next". This man frightened her, and that was enough(!) not to strive for him, not to respond to any provocations. Not to throw herself on his neck when he suddenly appears where she is: to greet him calmly and go about her business, and if he hooks her, to leave. This was a super-iron lady. She didn't visit his social media page, where he spread a million painful hooks. She didn't respond to his emails, and when they got too shrill, she deleted them without reading. She told him only one thing: "Please, leave me alone, you don't want to change, live as you know". He threw tantrums, swearing that he would change, but only with her, and without her he could not. She replied that four months was enough for her to lose faith. He suffered constantly and complained to everyone. He disappeared for two months. Then he showed up again. Everyone felt sorry for N because they thought it was very difficult for her to withstand his siege. But she watched it calmly, didn't expect anything and told me that she didn't believe in his changes because she didn't see them. All in all, she had very good judgment and held herself perfectly. And not a single day, not a single evening she was not bored, because she started a new project and had new plans. She didn't have a lover because she felt sorry for D and wanted "him to calm down". I did not see her suffering, although I saw her love for D. But love did not cancel her conviction that he would hurt her, and she did not want to be hurt.

When D realized that provoking and hooking was useless, and there was only darkness ahead of him, and the light of his life had gone with her, he began to transform. What was he supposed to do? The more he transformed, the better she treated him. When he found a job, made repairs and quit drinking, she came back to him, but refused to live with him for a long time, saying that she did not trust him completely. He tried to accuse her of mistrust, but she didn't feel guilty for her mistrust. I don't trust, that's all. I love him but I don't trust him, I can date him, but I can't live with him. Sometimes he would try to blackmail her and pressure her, and she would immediately drift away. Each time she was ready to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel had finally gone out. And every time she said that he gave her happiness, thank him, but then there was only pain, and she didn't want pain. And he saw that she would never come and it was useless to pull her, he had to change completely or lose her.

Their struggle lasted about a year, and during that year D changed completely. He no longer drank, that is, he drank only two glasses of wine sometimes and nothing else. He found a job, started painting pictures because she said he needed to paint. He did renovations, cooked her meals all the time, and completely transformed himself. He started to play sports, got fit and bought a car (he hadn't driven for ten years because he drank). He changed completely and became different, even his image changed from very sloppy to very neat. No one believed in such a transformation, everyone was waiting for a huge setback. There were, but they were very small, and after every step backward, he jumped forward to regain the trust of his angel.

What kind of business he came up with I can't tell you, he was lucky (how else), but even before the business he was already making a decent living and selling his paintings. And was helping her with her work. And when he came up with his business, he got rich quick right away. And she took up creative writing. They were already living together, then they got married and moved to another country. Sometimes they take his daughter with them, she and his daughter have a great relationship. He gives his ex-wife money, although she has a wealthy partner and earns money herself. But he's still very protective of his ex-wife and daughter. He carries his N in his arms and has painted a hundred portraits of her. Apparently, he really believes that she is an angel. They've been together for seventeen years.

I'll leave the tamers of the shrew for a while and ask the women.

Women, do you want to know the simple secret to building a successful relationship?

For nothing someone thinks that there is no such secret, that there are no universal and simple recipes. In something there is no such thing, but here it is. And it has been known since antiquity.

The secret is simple: never make steps toward intimacy in response to a man's indifference or aggression.

It is also good to always encourage any right action of a man. But the main thing is the first one. Never, under any circumstances, break this rule from the very beginning. From the very beginning of the relationship - this is very important, because if you never observe this rule and suddenly start abruptly, the effect can be the opposite. Which I'll tell you later.

But if from the very beginning you consistently and clearly build a field of relationships in which it will be possible to receive love and intimacy from you only by giving you the same love and intimacy, in which every step backward of the partner will lead to a decrease in your interest, it will be almost impossible to draw you into a relationship with imbalance. You will always have someone with you who cherishes you, and anyone who doesn't will have no access to you.

It seems that this rule is not only logical, but simple. Why take a step toward intimacy with someone who is indifferent or aggressive? Isn't it the healthiest reaction to pull your hand away from the cold or fire? Isn't it mutual warmth and mutual pleasure that pushes people closer together?

Unfortunately, this is only true for holistic and mature people. Immature people are so fragmented and contradictory that it takes unthinkable strength to enforce this rule. And a scientific consilium to figure out where to apply this rule.

Pierre Janet first wrote about the internal fragmentation of the psyche and personality. He was a brilliant psychologist, who worked before Freud and even before Breuer, the author of the concept of "interiorization", on which the whole theory of unconscious processes and almost all psychology of the 20th century is based. Pierre Janet is less well known than those who made extensive use of his discoveries, because he went a step further and wrote many paradoxical things. He described various psychic phenomena in his books, and his "energy system" quite accurately explains a great many phenomena still considered mysteries. Janet studied female somnambulists and hystericals to understand the mechanism of mental automatism. Janet's main conclusion: a healthy psyche is characterized by great plasticity and at the same time integrity, its processes are coordinated and at the same time have great flexibility, so a person with such a psyche is practically immune to suggestion. The unhealthy psyche, "weak" as Janet called it, is uncoordinated, fragmented, each part acting on its own. To maintain at least some constancy, plasticity is disturbed, ideas are fixed, many become obsessive. Apart from cases of obvious pathology, when the fragmentation and fixity of the psyche is great, there may also be cases of normal underdevelopment. This is mostly the case at a young age, making young people contradictory, suggestible, prone to going to extremes and getting infected with affect. All I'm trying to talk about in this blog is that when there is a lack of personal development, an adult behaves in an infantile manner. In this case, being deprived of youthful advantages, such a person suffers more, as well as causes suffering to loved ones.

For the normal well-being of a personality, it needs at least a minimum of personal supports that it can independently maintain. An unformed personality needs a minimum of external resources and supports to feel its existence and security. A formed personality can for a long time make do only with internal ones. An unformed personality is quickly destroyed in extreme conditions, easily influenced, quickly infected by ideas, immediately surrenders "itself". A formed personality can resist and survive for quite a long time without any external supports. Its reserves are limited, but they can last for a very long time, depending on the strength of integration and the power of the inner core. But that's a lyric. The point is that if the personality is not fully formed and deprived of external supports, it turns into what Janet wrote about: a fragmented, contradictory, disorganized being incapable of self-control.

Let's imagine a woman like that. If no one takes control over her, she is in a chaos of feelings, ideas, emotions. She submits to almost any external movement, and it is difficult to resist, because her personality is fragmented and no one part of it outweighs. The sense of duty, the desire for pleasure, planning, defense against stress is activated. She wants to get away and fly, or on the contrary to behave strictly according to the rules, or like to be promiscuous, or disgusted by such hints. It would not be an exaggeration to say that she is looking for a "master". Of course, she is not constantly looking for someone, which would mean that her goals are unified, and her goals change, and in fact there are no goals at all. But in the moments of fatigue from her maya, anxiety, chaotic world or boredom and monotony, such a woman really wants to find someone to whom she could entrust herself.

After such an extensive digression, it should be clear why a woman, especially a young woman or a woman who has just come out of symbiosis (parental or marital), cannot build relationships consistently. A simple recipe is too complicated for her, she wants one thing or the other, and most importantly cannot contain any emotions. In response to rudeness there may be a passionate desire for intimacy to immediately relieve stress, and in response to affection suddenly begin boredom and an unbearable need to sarcasm. Guilt replaces aggression and vice versa. She literally "can't hold her own," acting stupid and destructive instead of being reasonable, confident, correct, and thus attractive to equally reasonable, confident, and correct people. No. She is scattered, disheveled, and torn energetically and emotionally. She flares up and cools down, energized and de-energized in the moment. The number of holes in her psychic field is unaccountable, and as soon as one is tightened, a new one appears.

Sometimes it is noticeable outwardly, and by behavior and speech almost always. That's why reasonable, confident and correct people shun her. Those who sense her weakness and the chaos inside are attracted to her. She is like a flower that exudes nectar that is too luscious or even too poisonous for people who are looking for healthy relationships and mutual love. But people who have the same chaos inside are drawn to her because they see their own in her. Or they have a certain rod, but very specific, more like a bumblebee's trunk, and they fly to this flower to collect honey. However, it is just not honey, and those flying are not bumblebees, and the woman is not a flower. So the little vampire's feet get stuck, he gets furious, and tears it off with the petals. And sometimes he finds a way to drink the nectar without being glued, but since it's more of a poison, he quickly goes mad. Or another scenario: a predatory flower slams its petals down and starts eating the brains of such insects. In general, the stories are many, they are fascinating and all about passionate and painful relationships.

It's true that most bitches are secretly or explicitly looking for a "tamer" man. So they unleash all their chaos on any man they like, hoping that he will somehow organize it or go to hell. Unfortunately, they are often dragged to hell as well.

There are two most popular interpretations of the phenomenon of "bitchiness", conventionally male and conventionally female. Male: spoiled by parents, selfish woman who is easier to leave than to correct, but if everything is not very bad, such a woman will be cured by love and respect for men, she will give up her selfishness and become a good wife. Female: a bitch is a woman disappointed in men, who is forced to behave this way for self-defense or revenge, and is cured by love, tenderness and tactfulness of a loving man.

As we can see, the two interpretations offer opposite models of behavior for the bitch's partner. The masculine urges to set hard conditions and, if the conditions are not met, to leave because “she doesn't love him”. Women's calls for long and hard work to gain the bitch's trust, enduring all of her antics and shake-ups in order to gradually “melt her icy heart”.

In fact, both models perform poorly. And both are good under certain conditions. The first model works when the man's conditions are not rigid, but clear and very fair, he is consistent, he is decent himself, he is interesting to the woman, he does not obey her, but does not offend her either.

In order to organize a more chaotic and contradictory partner and build the right field of relations, it is very important not to offend him/her yourself and not to deceive. You need to watch yourself and be very tactful, do not fall for provocations. In response to his/her rudeness, it is better to politely say goodbye, thus letting him/her realize his/her behavior and feel guilty. If you yourself regularly violate boundaries, attack and behave tactlessly, it is impossible to sort out where you are at fault and where the other is, and therefore impossible to build a field. In this case, a more chaotic partner will easily pull you into chaos and you will be surprised at your own insanity. To have a normal relationship, it is better to communicate with a more organized person, more stable and mature than yourself. And if your partner is less organized, you have to watch yourself very(!) carefully and be twice as stable.

Such a fair, but firm and consistent position really has a chance to charm the bitch and make her recognize in a man the one she wants to entrust the leadership. But is it good to give leadership to someone, even the kindest of men? Of course not. However, it can be better than driving yourself and others crazy and ruining your life. In general, it is the same submission, only not to one, but to everyone. It is best to take your personality into your own hands, at least gradually. And sometimes your partner can help in this, if he or she does not use the power, but gradually returns control to where it should be. But more on this crucial point later. For now, let us dwell on the fact that such a model can work and create something like a harmonious couple. But for this, the man must show himself to be a very decent person (who can be completely trusted), and the woman must turn out to be not so much a bitch as an unbalanced, contradictory, emotionally unstable person who strives to become an adult. A real bitch has learned to live in her own chaos and coexist with her own demons. Therefore, she will not go so easily under the power of a man. But more on that next.

The female model of taming a bitch (this "love, tolerate, gain trust") is highly criticized by men. No one wants to love, endure, conquer and end up being used and humiliated. Such a picture makes any man ready to become a monk. Men do not see the logic in showing women their weakness when they expect them to be strong. However, under certain conditions, the female model works too. And increases in the eyes of a woman's male strength. If a man manages to maintain a sense of dignity, not to humiliate and show only one weakness - love, he can well afford to "conquer a woman. At a certain point, showing his love, he can make it clear that his hopes are exhausted and relationships without reciprocity he is no longer interested. Most "bitches" will not be able to let go of such a man and will run after him, agreeing to get rid of bitchy behavior. Basically, these are all descriptions of the male model, just from a different perspective.

If you use the models in a straightforward way, they don't work at all. To "bend a bitch hard" means to be sent to hell at once or to be accepted and vengefully humiliated a little later. "Winning trust" by humiliating yourself means losing not only her respect, but also your own. In a word, any models are nothing, only inner harmony and one's own core matters.

The main thing to note is that effective behavior in both models is essentially the behavior of a very mature and internally stable person. An immature and unstable person will use both models excessively and make a mess of things. His emotions will muffle and blindside him all the time, for the bitch has an uncanny ability to blow up his brain. In either model, the partner will behave exactly the way an extremely hysterical and unstable girl behaves: send to hell, then apologize, then disappear, then demand something, then change his plans again. This is the best way to antagonize a partner who has a desire for a normal relationship. But a partner with the same chaos inside might like it. The other question is where those partners will end up together.

Incredibly, a mature person is able to pull an immature partner into a relationship that will help that partner mature. It is a relationship with a high degree of trust but also with the preservation of boundaries, with great warmth but a balance of contributions, with shared responsibility but personal obligations, with saturation with the energy of the outside world but without the coldness of distanced relationships. A person who is unwilling to develop will not be able to tolerate such a relationship. A person who wants to develop and is ready for it will find such relationships favorable. For those who have been cast away into chaos, there is a huge number of others like them, ready to dance around witches' fires with them, to drink each other's tears and blood, and to practice spell magic.

While women complain that men are unreliable (womanizers and scoundrels), men claim that women are insufferable (bitches and hysterical).

It is often not obvious to both that one is closely related to the other. For example, men try their best to demonstrate reliability, but soon they feel overwhelmed and need chaos. Or women try hard not to be bitches, but soon feel that repressed emotions are tearing them apart, and it is easier to make a scandal.

I'll give you an example of how you can deal with the causes of a problem rather than the effects.

When men get tired of women being "unbearable", they literally mean that women are hard to carry on their backs. Never mind that at the same moment women are saying that they carry "everything" on their backs. Women carry "everything" and men carry women themselves. At least that's how they perceive themselves, but they want to carry a light nymph, not a kicking horse. Unsuccessful knights, who dropped the burden halfway through, complain that women themselves do not know what they want, that their behavior does not obey logic, that they can be offended by nonsense, throw a tantrum. And also about the bitchiness of women and the fact that they do not appreciate a good attitude. Therefore, with them you need to behave very harshly and very consistently, otherwise they will get in over their heads and drive you crazy with contradictory messages.

A man who tries to fulfill all the desires of a woman condemns himself to hell. She ruins him financially and emotionally, and then brutally throws him away, humiliating and cheating on him. This is the main male bogeyman, it can be seen in the classics from century to century, already in Ovid, and the most frankly described by Mazoch in his "Venus". It is not without reason that this ridiculous work is still read: Mazoch was called by his contemporaries the second Turgenev, despite the entire gap in artistic value, and now many people have Turgenev in the dust, and Mazoch is reread, retold, screened. If you go to any pickup forum, you will hear the same scaremongering: you can't submit to women, you have to bend them softly or hard, only then there will be stability in a couple. In short, when a man tries to provide a woman with "reliability," he often believes that first of all he must overcome the demon in her, tame and humble her bitchiness. That is, men see the source of a woman's main unreliability in herself. Some women like to play along, offering to "tame" themselves, and some women do not play along, but sincerely believe that a bitch lives in them. Otherwise, how else to explain that from time to time in them "for no reason" there is anger and rage, which disappear without a trace, if the man does not give in to the tantrum. Therefore, women often write and say that they need a man who will be stronger than they are, and will be able to "keep them in line". No one wants a rapist, of course, but a gentle "tamer" - alas, many.

The classic strategy for taming a bitch was described by Shakespeare. His Katarina was a hysterical, a real madwoman, beating her younger sister and smashing heavy objects on the heads of her teachers, and even the groom immediately hit her in the face, and he, as a true nobleman, could not answer her in the same way. So the groom had to bend her not by physical force, but by subtle moral violence. And of course, she bent over and fell in love. When the Chinese shocked the world half a century ago by masterfully brainwashing several American spies into becoming passionate fans of their regime, their methods had not been a secret for centuries. Shakespeare laid out point by point how to brainwash a person quickly.

First, a person must be put in a situation of complete physical dependence (so that he does not run away). Secondly, deprive sleep and food to shake up the nervous system (here Shakespeare refers to hunters who tame falcons for hunting). Third, to keep in constant tension (not just in fear, but to impress with illogicality and unpredictability of actions, so that all patterns explode and there are no logical supports left, but only fear). Fourth, achieve a trance of mental overload. Fifth, reach out and make it clear that love and devotion is the best way to get safety and food, and the more love, the better. The Chinese researched, and Shakespeare foresaw, that the human psyche is so quick to update the flow of sensory information that it quickly rearranges all reference points when exposed to total influence.

It is important to pay attention to just one point: the less dependent a person is on someone, the less chance he has of instilling anything in that person. Total brainwashing is possible only with absolute dependence. Women can consider themselves safe if they remember that they should have their own work, their own professional goals, their own creative plans, and in general a lot of their own.

I am more interested in talking not so much about the risks of women who allow themselves to be tamed and made dependent and submissive, but about the risks of men who follow the path of the tamer. There are so many ways to arouse a human's interest and hold his attention, and then make that attention grow and expand.

At first, this strategy seems right to a man: the fewer friends a woman has, the less she is interested in work, the more attention she devotes to a man and the more she is in love. And vice versa: the more she is in love, the more attention she wants to devote to him, while she is less and less interested in work, friends disappear, hobbies cease to worry. If at the beginning of the relationship she could bitch, "test" the man, troll him and even hurt him, now she has turned into an ideal soulmate, agreeing to everything. The rapport, as pickup artists say, has been reached. This rapport may even begin to strain a man who is not ready for a serious relationship. In this case, the man may start to fight back and destroy the rapport, causing the woman in love agony. However, if he is interested in creating a family with her, if the woman seems to him beautiful enough, intelligent, suitable for him in everything, and he himself is not against becoming a husband and father, such a man may decide that everything is going just great. It is great that he replaces the whole world to his beloved. The disadvantages of this are seen far from immediately, if he himself is ready to spend a lot of time together. If he is passionate about work and sports, however, he may notice that sometimes a woman's extra dependence comes out sideways. She is too sad when he is delayed, she is always bored without him, she is overly jealous, although she apologizes for it. It's like a tamed demon is always trying to get out and ruin life.

It is logical that during such a period the couple has the thought of pregnancy. It seems to the man that the child will take up his wife's extra energy and give him some freedom from her control, and their couple additional connection and stability. And when the pregnancy occurs, it really does look that way. Alas. Soon many men, especially selfish men, begin to feel the lack of attention. Demanding and claims of a woman increase, because the woman begins to worry more about the future, but the attention, admiration and adoration becomes much less. She spends a lot of time socializing with other young mothers, reading, watching, thinking only about the baby and how to better build a nest, and almost ceases to be interested in sex. Or not, but it's not like that anymore. The man is not the center of attention. If the woman continues to work and be tired, the man may feel in the background, as if the woman got what she wanted from him, caught him in a trap, and now she is not interested in him as a man, but only as a breadwinner for the child and a material resource.

And again it seems to the man that it is necessary to increase her dependence, to deprive her of her remaining supports and then she will be more attentive to him. It seems to him that the reason for the problems is her residual independence. She considers the child not his, but hers, and in quarrels hints that she can handle it herself, if suddenly he doesn't really need it, please, he can be free, she doesn't insist, she only wants to be together on her terms, not like this. Instead of sharing his wife's passion for budding motherhood and allowing her to have her own footing, many men think the opposite. About knocking the supports out from under a woman's feet and guaranteeing yourself control of a situation where chaos ensues. Women have no idea of the panic that grips many men at this time. On the one hand, the demon in a woman tries to bend him and make him serve, now and then blackmailing him to leave or just tears (and the child suffers too). On the other side the dismal option is to abandon the child and remain a scoundrel and villain for life. In such circumstances, men are afraid to get too involved in fatherhood to prevent themselves from being manipulated even more, and instead of getting closer, they withdraw more. But to ensure control of the situation, actively seek ways to turn the wife into even more dependency. Both materially and emotionally.

Men do it by stupid, and sometimes even very stupid methods, unfortunately, quite effective in the early stages and therefore survivable. For example, they may lower their wife's self-esteem so that she does not rely too much on her independence and values them more. To cut off avenues to painful blackmail with a child, they may make it clear that they are less interested in the child than in dinner and sex. They try to look like complete cynics to fight back against the attempt to tug at their feelings. Or they may hint that there are other women who would be happy to feed and love them. When a woman is pregnant, such declarations are like knocking a bench out from under her feet with a noose around her neck. However, instead of seeing it all as a warning to increase their independence, many panic and capitulate. The woman agrees that she is responsible for the relationship, agrees to any conditions of the man and tries to behave in such a way that the man remains her husband and father of the child. At this point, the man feels that the bitch is finally tamed and the stability of the marriage is ensured for years to come. He is also confirmed in the correctness of the chosen strategy. But this is a sad delusion. Provided him not stability, but a guerrilla group collecting ammunition in the forest and waiting for the opportunity to start a war.

A fairy tale is a symbolic description of the balance of power in a situation. Therefore, by finding a fairy tale about your problem, you can get a key to analyze it. Fairy tales are traditionally aimed at a young audience, as they symbolically reflect the process of growing up: the search for strength (for example, a princess), the development of will (getting rid of witchcraft), the ability to establish connections with the world (magic helpers), and so on. Each fairy tale can be interpreted in different ways, because the same symbolic arrangement of forces allows us to look at different problems from different angles.

In the previous two posts we talked about the tale of the wolf and the piglet and the tale of the prince and the wolf. It is very important to realize that two different tales describe the same situation, and the difference arises in the perception of this situation from two different sides. Practicing psychologists are well aware that when dealing with a conflict in a couple, it is not uncommon to hear two opposite stories about the same situation. The aggressor often turns out to be the other, and the person is the poor victim, and so on both sides. Often a third fairy tale is also included in work with a couple - the picture of the world in the eyes of the psychologist, which is considered "objective" because the psychologist has basic knowledge and experience. However, there is no such thing as an objective picture. What can be conventionally considered an objective picture consists of several very different pictures. The ability to view the situation as several different pictures at the same time distinguishes a good specialist. However it is impossible to move in different directions at the same time, so one direction must be chosen for real action.

In the fairy tale about the prince and the wolf, the wolf voiced this rule when he asked the prince to take the firebird without touching the cage, to take the horse without touching the bridle. The prince was prone to maximalism and, in the end, got everything at once, because his wolf was an unrealistically powerful wizard. If no wizard serves you, and you don't even have a genie in your lamp, it is better to keep a sense of proportion.

If we try to formulate a general principle of getting out of the situation, the way out is to realize the tale of the partner, to stand in his place and see the situation through his eyes. To "see through the eyes of another" does not mean to submit to the other, as some egoists like to scare, starting to talk about Nazis and adapting to the role of a victim. On the contrary, to see through the eyes of another for most wolves means to get up from their knees and stop giving their back, because from the position of another this back looks quite different. And from the position of a piglet, to see the wolf's tale about the prince means not only to understand the wolf's motives and stop hating him, but also to get on your own feet as quickly as possible, because without that the wolf will not leave.

Let's look at situations from my actual practice that fit into these tales. I hope that many will recognize their own.

Situation one. Many women describe the impasse they reached after having one and especially two children. The situation is standard: professional skills have been lost or not developed because marriage and childbearing happened after or during college. The husband has lost his love interest over time and behaves more and more rudely and demanding. Conflicts become more frequent and escalate into violence: emotional, economic, sometimes even physical. I have nowhere to go with my children, I can't live on alimony, I don't have a place of my own. My husband is against working for pennies and does not allow me to make friends and hobbies. No one to help. It's hell.

The victim's infantilization in such a situation has economic and physical rather than personal reasons, so it is somewhat awkward to call it infantilization. However, the woman is economically and physically dependent, and this is the main cause of the problem. If such a woman had her own place, a good job and sufficient income to support her children and hire helpers, the problem would have a completely different character. It is very important to compare what is more dangerous in this case: to stay in the situation for the sake of gradual acquisition of resources or to leave it as soon as possible. In case of obvious physical violence, my advice is to leave, and to look for ways to physically distance yourself as soon as possible. Until such ways are found, conflict should be avoided at all costs. These are the rules of physical safety, which should always come first.

If there is no threat to life and health, and it is only a question of a difficult moral climate and emotional pressure, you should consider two lines of strategy:

reduce the severity of the conflict +

look for an opportunity for economic independence

Note, the measures are only effective together. Seeking reconciliation with her husband to remain in a dependent position is not effective. Trying to find means to develop resources (education and job search) while continuing to fuel conflict is also not effective. It is necessary to work in both directions: to try to find a compromise with the husband to reduce the degree of hell in the family, and at the same time to try to stand on your feet, to someday ensure your independence and the ability to make your own decisions.

The tale of the wolf and the piglet, as cynical as it sounds, can help us realize the need for both. As long as the pig needs to get high, to sing and dance, it will be dominated by another creature, because the singing and dancing must be provided by someone. The feeder usually considers himself a benefactor, but in the eyes of the piglet he is a predator. It is important to remember that the wolf in this situation is almost always living the prince's fairy tale. He feels that his pressure and demands on his wife are necessary protective and custodial measures. He provides for her and the children, he works for the family, he is against her spending time with questionable friends or working at questionable jobs because it is dangerous for her and the children. That is, no matter how rude and cruel the wolf may look or even be objectively (wolves can be those beasts, unfortunately) he always justifies his behavior by the fact that otherwise it will be worse and his princes (wife and children) will die without his guidance. The wolf does not doubt this, otherwise he would trust his wife with more freedom, if he were sure of its benefits for her, the children and the family. Therefore, there is only one way out of such a situation - stop conflicting with the wolf, thank him for his care and guardianship and try to agree with him on the possibility of gradual independence, allowing him control. For example, ask for an opportunity to study or part-time work for a prospect. As practice shows, most wolves go for it, overcoming the fear for the family. If the wolf is fatally uncorrectable in his paranoia and is afraid of any female autonomy, will have to either become independent in secret or run away (as in the case of a physical threat).

Now about another situation, which also worries many people. Many women (sometimes men) ask what to do with a partner who does not want to do anything, literally degrades and dies, clearly needs care and help, but behaves in such a way that it is impossible to help him. There is a strong attachment to him, often even great love, there used to be a lot of plans and prospects, and it is not clear how to act now, when he has turned into a suitcase without a handle "it is hard to carry, and it is a pity to leave".

In this situation, the suffering wolf does not know how to help the prince, who does not listen to him and very soon may turn out to be dead, and the wolf will have to get magic water somewhere, which is only in a fairy tale. Such a wolf can understand everything well about the will and independence, but he sees in front of him a man in a deep personal crisis, who was normal before and who has a chance to stand on his own feet or die if he is not helped. Depending on the situation, such a wolf can either rush to freedom, but feel how he is held by the prince and the burden of responsibility, or on the contrary chase the prince, who runs away from him towards his death. The way out of this terrible fairy tale is through understanding the fairy tale of the other side.

On the other side is the piglet. The essence of the pig is that it wants to receive help from the wolf, but to dispose of it in its own way, sometimes to its own detriment, and the wolf's guidance is regarded as violence. If a piglet runs after a wolf and begs for food, it is a hungry piglet and can be fed, but preferably with adult food, useful for work, not for sleeping. In the event that the piglet runs away from the wolf, it is not necessary to chase him. He can be told to ask for help when he decides to get out of his hole in the way the clever wolf suggests.

The key question is what constitutes acceptable help. Acceptable help is practical help that the person needs, ideally asking for it. Help can be offered to strangers, and help can be offered persistently to loved ones, but help in any case should not increase dependency. If the piglet is not unconscious, it should formulate what it wants and what it will do with it. The wolf must be sure that his help will be for good and not for harm, and think not only about the immediate, but also about the future. If the pig wants money to eat and go look for a job, that's fine, if he asks for money to drink or play, that's not fine. The same goes for non-material support, the main question is for what: to do nothing or to do.

The more the wolf understands that the prince has the right to make mistakes and has the right even to die (!), and the wolf's duty is only to offer advice or support, i.e. the less the relationship resembles an act of symbiosis and more the relationship of two separate individuals, the easier it will be for the wolf. The wolf's problem is the inability to share boundaries because of a mother's love. But if the wolf realizes that with each act of imposing his will in the eyes of the "rescued" he turns into a predator, he may be less willing to impose his will. If the prince is demanding, the wolf should be prepared that when he refuses to fulfill the prince's whims, he will be an enemy in his eyes. But that doesn't mean the whims have to be fulfilled, because with each new whim fulfilled, the fusion is greater, and thus the potential hatred at the breakup is greater. The sooner this one-sided feeding frenzy ends, the better.

In the previous post I told a story about a wolf and piglets, which describes a picture of the world of people with an external locus of control and egocentrism. Now I will tell another tale about those who are first mistaken by piglets for mommies (daddies) and then identified as wolves. These are altruists with an external locus of control.

Some people think that such altruists, ready to rush to the piglets' aid, necessarily have an internal locus of control, i.e. they are responsible for themselves. In fact, that's not true at all. Both piglets and those who babysit them have an external locus of control, otherwise they wouldn't have such big problems.

The internal locus of control is the center of personality, its assembly point. The internal center of control does not appear by itself, but is formed in the process of personality integration. To make it easier to understand, imagine an economic model, for example, a company that operates efficiently. Such a company will have a centered structure - agreement and unity at the management level, but enough freedom, motivation and responsibility at the production levels, and there will be well-established connections between all levels. And most importantly, such a company will be inserted into the external environment, i.e. into the market, on the most favorable terms. Beneficial for herself, which is important for her prosperity now, beneficial for others, which is important for her prosperity in the future. This is roughly what an integrated personality looks like. Therefore, it is useless to ask how to change the external locus of control to the internal locus of control or to look for the reasons for it in early childhood, when the personality is still disassembled and dependent. The internal locus develops simultaneously with the development of independence, is formed in the process of personality maturation, and is not born by itself.

An external locus of control means that there is no single center inside the personality, its parts are not connected at all, conflict with each other, steal energy from each other, sell their resources or refuse to extract them, instead of using them ecologically and increasing production. Due to poor internal organization, the personality does not find power within itself and seeks this power from the outside. Depending on the level of egocentrism, such a person has two ways: to pull energy from others or to give himself into slavery. Thus we get two main types of people with an external locus of control: the infantile and the servant.

Many people think that an adult infantile can climb on the neck of an integrated personality, but this is technically impossible. The integrated personality is like a prosperous company. Honestly pays taxes and willingly participates in charity, but never becomes someone's resource appendage or passive slave, as this would mean the end of its prosperity. Prosperity is based on the principle of active exchange of products (not resources!) with the surrounding world. Therefore, an integrated person does other people a favor by involving them in active exchange, encouraging them to create their own products, to build their own internal locus of control.

I used to think that egoists with an external locus of control ("cannibals" and abusers) would not change, but that altruists could be helped to change their locus by telling them the risks. However, over the course of several years, I have been sadly convinced that there are more egoists among my clients than altruists. Moreover, altruists with an external locus of control very easily(!) turn into egoists with an external locus, i.e. it is easy to change from altruism to egoism, all you need to do is to be scared and angry at the "cannibals". It is very difficult to change the external locus into an internal one, it requires work and personal development. As in the fairy tale about vampires, those who are bitten by them become like them. Many realized victims want to take revenge and be violent. This is why in my texts I focus on the destructiveness of hatred and the inadmissibility of enmity. For an egoist who is angry at the world, no integration and inner locus is possible! First the hatred must pass and only then integration can begin. As for good altruists with an external locus of control, in my opinion, they are many times more sympathetic than egoists, but they cannot be role models either, much less angels.

It is no accident that in the tales of the wolf and the piglets, the hungry infantile always meets the predator. He has absolutely no chance of one day finding a gingerbread house without a witch inside. This is what all those who help infantile people hope for: to fill their black hole with love and help them gain trust in the world. So why doesn't it happen? Why all the love and all the warmth flow into the hole, and the claims only become more and more, until hatred comes?

It's the law of homeostasis. The more something comes from outside, the less it is produced from inside. If you have a small child in front of you, you can give him a lot of love and care, but you should also proportion the level of care and independence of the child. If he can already do something on his own, you can't do it for him. Everyone knows the tears that flow from a three-year-old child who is not allowed to do on his own what he is trying to do. Tears do not happen to everyone, but only to those children who react painfully during this period to the encroachment on their fragile self. But even those children who do not react painfully, also have their fragile self, even if they agree to cede it to adults. But the child's self is a value and it is necessary to show respect for it. You cannot do everything for a person, because that would mean contempt for his personality. There may be great love and fear for him behind it, but this is love for the object (even if it is the most precious thing in the world), not respect for the subject. A relationship with a person, even a small one, must include both love and respect. And the more mature a person is, the more respect is required, in addition to object love.

A rescuer, however kind he may be, does not save a person's personality, not his independence (independence cannot be provided from outside), not his self, but his object essence (body and emotions). He genuinely loves him, he emotionally spoon-feeds him, he gives him warmth and even money, yet he ignores his personality as a fact. That is, he is okay with the personality and probably hopes that this personality is out there somewhere. More likely he thinks nothing of it, being guided by mere sympathy, but in this sympathy there is no room for respect for another's personality, otherwise he would care much more about its autonomy. It is for this that the rescuer suffers, and he suffers almost always. The piglet for a while takes him for his mother, the manna of heaven without a personality, and then is surprised to recognize in him another personality subjugating him, and begins to hate him. It is like the anger of a child whose spoon has been taken away from him by an adult so that he does not smear soup on the walls. The child would not be able to explain where the anger came from in him, because the process of lunch went more efficiently. In the same way, the infantile who begins to hate his guardian cannot explain why he annoys him so much, why he sees more and more arrogance in him, why he wants to put him down, humiliate him or demand more and more. Sometimes the infantile becomes afraid and ashamed of his behavior, but he can not finally cope with anger. And when the savior can not withstand and allows himself defensive aggression, "puts in place" and accuses him of rudeness and ingratitude. Then the infantile is finally confirmed in his feeling: before him is a wolf, who with the help of a pigskin rubbed into his confidence, but initially wanted to devour him and subjugate him. It's a sad and cruel interpretation, but you can't say that it's not based on anything at all. Isn't it?

The tale, in which the guardian and rescuer lives, has other emphases. The Russians have a fairy tale about a prince and a gray wolf that fits the situation well. In this fairy tale, a magical wolf meets an unfortunate prince and helps him in all his affairs as a friend. This "friendship" begins with the prince mourning the bones of a horse eaten by someone (means of movement, probably a social elevator), and the wolf decides that he is the culprit. To atone for (group) guilt, the wolf serves the prince. The prince literally rides him, the wolf provides him with all the wonders of the world: a bird of happiness, a horse and a wife, and then even revives him and brings him back to health. For all this, the wolf gets nothing but the release of guilt. The prince does not obey and respect the wolf at all and does everything in his own way, because of which the wolf has to correct all the prince's mistakes again and again and get into new troubles. The wolf is freed from voluntary slavery only after having exhausted all the prince's whims to the end. They say goodbye dryly and "forever", not wishing to continue their "friendship".

In real life, a fairy tale for a rescuer begins when he meets a suffering prince, that is, someone who evokes sympathy and guilt. As a result, an identification takes place. But is it abnormal to feel sympathy? That's fine. Moreover, it is absolutely necessary, if you do not want to turn into a poor pig from another fairy tale. However, the empathy of a person with an internal locus of control is different from the empathy of a person with an external locus of control. Sympathizing, a person with an internal locus does not feel the desire to kneel down and give his back. First of all, he does not consider himself the cause of misfortune, and secondly, he understands well that someone else's back will not help anyone, a person needs his own supports. His locus of control is internal, which means that he sees very well what is in his area of responsibility and what is not. Such a person will not feel deeply guilty in front of all those who suffer because he himself does not suffer. Therefore, his sympathy will be fundamentally different from that of an altruist with an external locus of control who considers himself responsible for the whole world, but does not feel responsible for himself and is therefore ready to feed himself. Altruists with an external locus of control tend to merge, not because of their altruism, but because of their lack of center. They easily identify with the other person, and begin to see them as the center, i.e. the prince, and themselves as the servant. And it is guilt that often triggers this process. Someone beautiful, but unjustly offended, causes in such altruists the desire to protect, to become a wolf, to tear enemies to pieces and ride princes on their backs for happiness. Instead of compensating only the real, self-inflicted harm, gray wolves are given into slavery as a whole, trying to work off the sins of the whole world, out of a sense of some "inner duty". At the same time, they often do not bear responsibility for themselves, do not fulfill their real duty to themselves, their loved ones and those who are firmly bound to them by mutual obligations. And most importantly, the world in the wolves' view is divided into victims and predators, and they include themselves in the latter, feeling remorse and guilt. This division is the main sign of the external locus of control, both in the case of wolves (altruists) and piglets (egoists).

When people say the wise "life is motion," they sometimes envision something like a boat gliding beautifully downstream. In reality, life is not like a stream in which one can completely relax. In some cases, of course, the pumpkin rides, but there is no magic wand in the outside world that would do such a trick. Such a magic wand has to be made within oneself. But in the outside world there are many sharks and crocodiles that can drag you to the bottom. And to avoid collision with these predators, you have to constantly move and bypass obstacles. If you relax, you will be eaten. If you move, you will acquire many life skills that will make you strong and invulnerable.

This is roughly what the picture of life looks like in people's culture. Some people are more self-reliant, some prefer to make friends and helpers, some believe in the invisible and its support, but most people picture life roughly like this. And that's right. I would like only to clarify who and what are real predators and dangerous enemies in this world.

Some people think that the predator is the social system, but everyone draws the contours of this system differently. Whether it is the evil grin of capitalism, or the claws of totalitarianism or nationalism, or the dark underbelly of patriarchy. Existentialists went the furthest, especially the darkest of them, who believe that the bloody war begins at the moment of the emergence of consciousness. Sartre believed that love is the desire to "captivate the freedom" of another, and Freud believed that society is a contract between deeply hostile parties. That is, man is man's enemy, and cooperation is a temporary alliance against a common enemy. Much more positive sounding are the humanists, whom I personally sympathize with more. There is no contradiction between personality and "others". Moreover, the development and existence of both is ensured by the influence of each on the other. What looks like a bloody war arises from each side's rigidity, resistance and inertia. When there is a willingness to grow and develop, the "war" is a healthy competition.

The world personally appears to me as an alchemical cauldron of evolution. Here each element interacts and enriches the other with new properties, and the struggle has a progressive dynamic. In general, angles of looking at the world and interpretations can differ. Someone who looks at an elephant only from behind sees it as rightly and wrongly as someone who looks at it only from the front. It is important to note that the view of the world as a harmonious coexistence easily turns into a willingness to go with the flow and accept everything as it is. And this leads into the jaws of crocodiles, which can deprive a person of his resources and life. Therefore, many people decide that the harmonious picture of the world is very dangerous, because it leads to excessive gullibility and weakness, whereas one should be alert and constantly fight.

According to the law of extremes (Scylla and Charybdis), such people start to over-mobilize themselves for war with possible enemies. They want to know everything about crocodiles and sharks, learn all their habits, prefer to be armed to be ready to meet them. Instead of living, they arm themselves all the time. Unfortunately, such people do not realize that by arming themselves against external predators, they grow predators inside. Distress, a huge consumer of energy, can easily and quickly eat away at a person's insides. Frustration also easily eats a person from inside, when the world seems dull and hostile. In this case, a person closes himself off from the world and stops receiving energy from the outside.

Ideally, a person should be open to the world as fully as possible, but all the time controlling the stress level inside and building up energy resources. This is possible when the locus of control is inside the personality and the feeling self is constantly going beyond its boundaries. It is then that one sympathizes with people, feels love and interest in the world, and receives external energy. It is easiest and most effective to receive energy from the world through love for the world in all its manifestations. However, the exchange is possible only when the locus of control is located inside the person, otherwise the energy captured in the world will not be delivered inside. Now pay attention! The center of a personality is formed only when it takes responsibility for everything (!) that happens inside the personality. Such a responsible person respects the world and does not try to remake it. In this case, the very balanced openness and wholeness is formed and the ego is integrated.

And now a few words about people with an external locus of control. When the locus is strongly shifted to the outside, the controlling self is somewhere outside the personality and the feeling self inside is defenseless. They are tense and frightened, like three little pigs waiting for the evil wolf to come inside. In the extreme form of external locus manifestation you will recognize such "piglets" easily. All their troubles are the fault of specific enemies or systemic enemies, and most often both. They don't have much money because there are thieves around. They have no energy because they are constantly being eaten. Their abilities didn't develop much because their parents are to blame. They have always had a lot of traumas in their childhood, they had bad parents and teachers, they were bullied at school. Often these problems are considered to be the reason for the formation of such a character. In fact, there is no correlation between internal locus of control and childhood and adolescent events. Very often of two people, one of whom tells about an unhappy childhood and evil parents, and the other - about a happy childhood and good parents, the second one had much more negative circumstances. More often, however, the circumstances are roughly similar, as they are for most contemporaries in average social conditions. However, the interpretations are very different because they depend on the locus of control. If a person takes enough responsibility for himself from childhood, but does not try to control the world, the world does not seem hostile to him. The Wolf at the Door is a story about little piglets whose houses (locus of control) in the outside world have long been destroyed.

It is people with an external locus of control who most like to talk about how the world burdens them with unnecessary responsibility. Hearing this, kind others forbid others to blame such people, pity and coddle them, hoping to make up for the world's lack of love. In this way, the external locus of control is only strengthened. If you have ever systematically helped a person with an external locus of control, you can see that very soon you are the person who is considered an enemy. This happens almost always, because from care and help the locus of control shifts not inward, but vice versa. So, the need for care increases, because people easily get used to good things. Helpers lose free resources, for they had hoped to help effectively and see the person stand on his own feet. If they see a bottomless black hole, they begin to shut down little by little. Then they will know for themselves what it is like to feel the anger of rejection of such a "piglet".

Now they begin to guess that perhaps his mother was not so evil, and his ex-wife (husband) did not torture him so badly. But now they are the main tormentors and abusers in his life, and everyone around him starts to hear about it from the victim's mouth. The anger of rejection a person with an external locus of control feels every time people around him do not want to become his mother. This is not so much the fault as the misfortune of such a person. His locus of control is outside of his personality, and so is instantly transferred to anyone who happens to be kind enough to him. A person gives him responsibility for himself. You should not scold such a person for this, it is useless and even dangerous. This does not mean that you should not help people in need. It is absolutely necessary to help people, otherwise you yourself will begin to be distorted by wrong interaction with the world. But you can help others only with respect for the needy person's own responsibility, without turning into a nursing mommy, without treating the other person as a moral invalid, without taking control over him. Your control must be within your(!) personality, otherwise you will suffer.

The topic of sexual objectification is always met with protest and rejection. Over many years of work, it seems that sexuality is perceived by many women outside of corporeality, as a "spiritual" energy. The idea that a partner evaluates their corporeality in itself, as an object, is rather unpleasant for most women. And when reading posts about the importance of sexual objectification for sex, many women feel indignant, as if they were forced to become things and to deal only with their own beauty. The resentment arises, perhaps, because in the modern world the object-sexual function of women is already exaggerated, and every defender of the institution of beauty looks like a misogynist and usurper.

And yet, without attentiveness to one's own corporeality, it is useless for people to think about the harmony of their own personality. This is especially true for women, whose corporeality is overloaded with unnecessary expectations and stays somewhere between total denial and cult, bypassing the phase of adequate acceptance.

Adequate acceptance of one's own corporeality has nothing to do with the cult of beauty and addiction to physical perfection. It is clear that in the latter phenomenon there is more rejection than acceptance, more dissatisfaction with oneself than joy in one's own corporeality. However, in running away from Charybdis, one must not throw oneself into the jaws of Scylla. There is another dangerous extreme, which is that by trying to accept their bodies "body-positively" and unconditionally, women stop taking care of their bodies and deny exercise, food discipline, and the labor of self-care. By denying the body as a separate form, it ceases to receive the attention it needs.

Charybdis and Scylla are the two monsters that lurk in the path of any quest. In mythology, they are the monsters from which Homer's Odysseus escaped with great difficulty after losing several friends in the jaws of Scylla.

From a psychological perspective, it is easy to see two extreme processes in Charybdis and Scylla: addiction and aversion (hostile denial). It is these two processes that disrupt the search for sources and resources. Anyone interested in the growth and integration of his personality needs to avoid both. Charybdis is portrayed as an impersonal black hole, the jaws of the abyss, sucking in as mania, fanaticism and morbid passion, in a word, addiction. Addiction leads to absorption and dissolution, that is "cannibalism". But the person who fears Charybdis (with cannibals) and avoids it is always awaiting Scylla, another monster, which is depicted as a dragon with barking dog heads. This pictorial metaphor is very accurate because the way out of addiction and dependence is often to the other extreme - denial and devaluation. Just as Scylla scares away with its grin, so any undeveloped resource can inspire fear or disgust, making it difficult to approach and connect with.

In order to master new resources and effectively use existing ones, it is very important to learn how to circumvent both Charybdis and Scylla, equally, finding the golden mean between them. How this is possible is a separate topic, but I will write a few words about it on the example of sexuality and corporeality.

Each person's sexuality consists of an object and a subject part. A person is a subject when he is the center of perception of the process (the sexual process includes not only the act itself, but also fantasies, attraction, romantic communication). A man is an object when he moves the center of perception to his own partner, as if he stands in his place and looks at himself. Simply put, the subject is the one who admires and desires another body, the object is the one who is admired and desired, and who feels it. The lack of the subject part results in the loss of one's own self. This is what feminists frighten women with, and they are quite right, because the loss of one's own subjectivity starts destructive processes in the personality. In this sense, sexuality can even seem evil, because it appears to deprive the subject of subjectivity.

But to perceive the sphere of life as evil is the jaws of Scylla, which is no less dangerous than Charybdis. Harmonious sexuality requires a combination of both subjectivity and objectivity, a movement in the flow between the two extremes, a transition from one state to the other. As soon as sexual subjectivity becomes too much and enters an inert phase, energy becomes scarce, frustration appears, sexual interest ends, attraction disappears. If Scylla is allowed to continue working, denial and aversion can begin to set in. The person in this case goes into a self-centered, cold, withdrawn state and may become irritated by the idea that someone perceives him as an object, wants to "use him as meat", evaluates his forms. Other people's corporeality is uninteresting, and one's own is unpleasant. Curiously, despite the aversion to one's own corporeality, this phase often results in "body-positivity," because the body is perceived as part of subjectivity, felt in a non-bodily, non-physical way, not separated from oneself. There is a feeling of "complete acceptance", "love for oneself as it is", but this is not love, because the body is deprived of its own significance, corporeality dissolves into subjectivity and no longer exists as such. On the physical level, it can be expressed as neglect and physical decay, the body decays, becomes fat, loses tone and gloss. Health may also suffer, but the person assures that he loves himself as he is, and everything suits him. Attempts of others to interfere and to convey to him that he is bodily decaying such a person can perceive very aggressively, literally with Scylla barking. He is indignant that someone else's standards are imposed on him, he is disgusted by "model" aesthetics, he despises everyone who devotes a lot of effort to corporeality, considering such people pointless. And yes, he is often right, because among those who attack him there are indeed many bodily addicts, i.e. those who have gone to the other extreme, i.e. who have lost their subjectivity in the perception of corporeality.

Those who have lost the pole of subjectivity perceive their body as separate from the personality, more important than the personality, and in later stages identify the body as the personality. Note, both extremes eventually converge to a single point, destroying healthy connections between the ego and the ego's resources, in this case between the ego and corporeality. In the case of beauty addiction, corporeality consumes the ego, and the person becomes a "thing" that lives only to seek the attention of admirers or masters. In the case of the opposite extreme, i.e. denial of corporeality, the Ego absorbs corporeality, and the person loses vital energy, loses sensuality and taste for life, mopes, develops apathy and negativism, sees everything in a gloomy light. Brith and positive perception requires energy, and the person has a light economy mode. It must be understood that both subjectivity and objectivity are necessary, neither must be denied. Sexuality is important because it allows us to regulate the process of interaction between the two. Healthy corporeality without sexuality is possible, but even in this case objectivity must retain a share of erotic appeal. That is, a person should feel the tactile attraction of other bodies to his or her body, not rejection, otherwise corporeality suffers, cuts off connections with the world, loses objectivity. Sexual partners help to activate subjectivity and objectivity in each other, and if there is love or at least sexual attraction between people, all these processes are harmonized. The person feels very attractive, but also perceives the partner as an attractive object. The same thing happens during flirting, the sexual act itself is not important for energy, the exchange of energy is not physical, but mental. The physical act is useful if there is harmony between the partners, and useless or harmful if there is no harmony. But the very interest in the erotic side of life is useful almost always, because it stimulates sensual energy. Such interest is harmful when it turns into excessive and subordinates other aspects of life, losing balance. Neither Scylla nor Charybdis never slumber, and are always ready to devour your resource if you treat it badly.

So what gives sexual objecthood? When a person feels himself as an object, he evaluates himself through the eyes of another subject, perceives himself as an image and a sensual form. Ideally this evaluation should be positive, he should admire himself and feel sympathetic to others. Through objectivity, sensual energy is energized. Dissatisfaction with one's physicality due to non-compliance with the chosen standards (standards provide some choice, and it is very important to understand this) can be useful, as long as it generates motivation to engage in one's health and develop one's bodily resource, as long as objectivity retains a part of subjectivity. In this case, all shortcomings are trifles that do not disturb the overall balance, but at the same time there is a desire for perfection and development. When shortcomings seem grandiose and there is no strength to eliminate them, and the mood is spoiled by this, it means that one's own objectivity is not nourished either by one's own love or by the love of others. The person perceives himself as a thing, but an unwanted, cumbersome or ridiculous thing, and suffers from this. In this case, there is a great temptation to get rid of corporeality and to deny sexuality, because it is not possible to establish a healthy relationship with it.

Why do you think the sexual objectification mirror doesn't work?

If you don't know what it is, let me explain.

There is a perception that sexual objectification offends women. For example, women are offended by advertisements that portray them as sexual objects. Some women are so offended that they describe in the crudest terms what disgusting pieces of meat are depicted. Although it's not the pieces that are depicted, it's the women. In general, some women really dislike it when women are portrayed as if their primary function is sexuality and their personality is secondary.

This irritation is, on the one hand, very understandable. To this day, some school textbooks still depict girls with cookstoves and aprons, while boys with telescopes and books. This situation cannot please any normal parent of girls, whether he or she is a mom or a dad. While growing boys look at images of male businessmen and scientists, girls mostly see sexualized images of housewives. That's probably why it reaches the point of absurdity. Take for example the sensational story about the shirt of an honored scientist who had to apologize to angry feminists who devalued his work, like: "it doesn't matter what you've discovered if you have a shirt objectifying women".

So why doesn't the mirror of sexual objectification work? That is, if sexual objectification itself is so offensive, why does the mirror situation give men so much joy? As a woman, try winking at men and giving them sexual compliments, and you will see how men will perk up. Of course, not all men will be happy, some will be surprised, but no one will be offended, and most will be happy. Men also want to be sexy and even pretty, they willingly buy perfume and, if not bald, often grow long hair. Men's cosmetics are becoming more and more popular, and clothes for men are becoming more colorful and provocative. As for fitness for body beauty, there are even more men in such gyms than women. That is, men are open to sexual objectification from all sides. What is the mystery?

Try another variant of objectification - paying for men in cafes. Say, I invited you, baby, so give me hope for sex, and I pay for everything. Can you imagine that? Any man will take it as a compliment if a woman calls him out on a date and insists that she is paying, hinting at sex. Some will feel uncomfortable out of habit, but will still decide that the woman likes them so much that she's literally out of her mind. No one will think that the woman despises him and that's why she's pulling him on a date. Even better is objectification in sex. If a woman objectifies a man to the point where she pounces on him and tries to "use him sexually," he will feel like a prize and will brag to his buddy.

The woman herself will be humiliated in the case of such sexist flip-flopping. She will feel several times more used if she makes a date with a man she doesn't know, pays for it, floods him with sexual compliments, and then pounces and uses him for sex, demonstrating animal passion. If the man gets dressed afterward and leaves without making a peep about another date, the woman will feel bad. Perhaps some women will feel ok in this situation, but most are unlikely. Women prefer that the initiative belonged to men, paid by them, compliments were said by them, and pounced too themselves. In this traditional arrangement, most women feel much better about themselves. And it's not that women have a "psychology of clubs and slaves", oh no, it's not that at all. Most men would gladly trade places with women in terms of sexual objectification. And in pickup courses they teach you exactly that: how to drive a woman crazy enough that she starts to look at you as a sexual object and seeks to win you over. This is what is considered to be the highest pilotage.

The secret is that the horrible "objectification" itself does not humiliate anyone, but exactly the opposite. The stronger the focus of sexual objectification, the more energy flows to whoever is wanted. Amazing thought, isn't it? But banal. The more a person is wanted, the greater his importance. It's all a question of what they want him for. If they want to work as a specialist - higher professional importance, if they want to have sex - higher sexual importance. Sexual importance does not cancel professional importance, it is just importance in different areas, not equally important, but important. It is bad when a person has no importance in the professional field, but it is not his sexual importance that is to blame, because if you deprive him of sexual importance, he will not become a professional. But he can become depressed if there is nothing left.

Traditional sexual objectification of women is a cultural privilege for women. Privilege can look outrageous when it is tried to be bought off and not given more importantly. For example, if a boss gives a bouquet of flowers instead of paying for overwork, that's an outrageous excuse because he owes money. But if the boss pays for overtime and gives a bouquet on top of that, that's heartwarming behavior. That is, a bouquet is not humiliating in itself, it is a pleasant sign of attention, and any person is happy to receive this sign. But not in lieu of what they have earned, but as a plus.

This is roughly how sexual objectification works. There is nothing terrible in the fact that a person, man or woman, is considered beautiful and admired as a sexual object. It is bad when a person is denied that he or she is good for something else besides sex, and that he or she has something else besides beauty. But in demanding that women be recognized as persons and not just bodies, the emphasis should not be shifted to the point where the mere admiration of a woman's body is made a crime. This will lead to nothing but apathy and hostility.

It's not the bouquet's fault that the boss doesn't appreciate the work. You can ban the sale of flowers, images of flowers, curse florists and declare flowers to be the cause of evil, it won't affect wages. It would just take away the flowers. Similarly, a taboo on admiring women's corporeality will not make women economically equal. There is no need to turn against something that is not evil in and of itself. Imagine a world in which women have as little economic and political power as they do now, but now still don't have the privilege of being beautiful, sexy, and being courted, all of which men get from them. Men dress up, admire themselves in mirrors, make them beg for kisses, and women kiss their hands, open doors and admire their beauty, being modestly and ascetically dressed themselves. Tough bdsm, hellish master and slave, isn't it?

I want to tell you how a couple in love, with a full balance of feelings, into an aggressor-victim or two aggressors.

Now I will not look in detail at couples in which balance is initially lacking, but I will say a few words.

In a fully balanced couple, one partner is not trying to get the other to go to church or waiting agonizingly for a marriage proposal or jealous or worried that things are moving too slowly. In a couple with balance, either both partners are equally slow to formalize the relationship (if the attachment is insufficient), or both want it literally synchronously and with equal fervor (when the attachment is great). Balance is different in that both feel equal intimacy and therefore want the same steps. Don't fool yourself with conclusions like "he's even more in love than I am, but he has problems and that's why he can't get married". If there are problems, it is these problems that distort the balance of feelings. Yes, his passion can sometimes blaze and sometimes fade away, encountering obstacles (having a wife and children, for example, or not being ready for marriage) and it is these obstacles that give less feeling than the one who is waiting for them to be together. Even if her momentary bursts of passion are not as great as his during dating, in general her attraction to him is more stable and stronger than his, if she is the one who wants more intimacy, not him. And it does not matter what this attraction consists of: desire for economic support, jealousy of a wife, ambition, desire to finally give birth, it is just the fuel from which the attraction has arisen. The fuel of attraction can be different, because different reasons make different people want something, including another person. To measure balance, only the strength and stability of the attraction itself matters. And so if people's attraction to each other is the same, they equally want to get closer. Both want to vacation together, both want to get married, and so on. If one wants, and the other doubts, it means that the second is less attracted, even if in his personal coordinate system it is the most serious feeling in a lifetime. Doesn’t matter.

Whether it is worth starting a relationship without balance is not a rhetorical question. On the one hand, balance is always better than imbalance. On the other hand, a small imbalance quite easily turns into a balance if the person in the relationship develops supports. Very often couples get married with an imbalance (-) in the husband, and then the wife gives birth to a child, her dependence increases and the balance is restored, or even goes the other way. Sometimes the opposite happens. The wife "dragged" her husband to church, and then he became attached to her and the child, tasted the joys of married life, and began to circle around her, afraid of losing the treasure. Thus, there are no rules here. However, one should pay attention to what exactly screws up or corrects the balance. Therefore, I propose to consider a couple with perfect balance who have entered into a close relationship.

If there is balance in a couple, it means that both of them consider each other to be almost perfect for themselves. They like each other outwardly, they like each other's mind, social status and character. Balance does not mean objective equality in all these categories, it is the combination of priorities, self-esteem and experience that matters. That is, an ugly man may think that he is well worth a very beautiful wife, because "beauty for a man is not the main thing, he has something to offer her instead, and he has always liked beautiful women". That is, for such a man, a beautiful partner is not unheard of impertinence, but quite realistic luck. If he considers it super luck, most likely the imbalance (-) is detekted, and the man thinks he is not worth a wife.

But let's assume that there is a balance in the couple, and both believe that they are 100% worthy of each other.

How does it happen that after some time one feels disappointed and his attraction imperceptibly passes? Usually it is very difficult for the partner to come to terms with this fact and he prefers to think that he was deceived from the beginning. However, if the partner is not a marriage scammer for profit, it is unlikely that he would deliberately pretend to be in love. Most likely, the love was there and has drifted away.

Nowadays there is a lot of talk about whether a woman has the right to choose the "profession of housewife and mother". Undoubtedly, a woman has the right to make any choice. But on the condition that this choice will not harm her and her loved ones. People have only a conditional right to make mistakes. If they have to pay for their mistakes not only for them but also for their loved ones, this right cannot be considered complete. That is, they have the right to make a choice, but it is important to make this choice with full responsibility, i.e. to foresee what this choice will inevitably entail.

The decreasing importance in a couple of a woman who has chosen the profession of housewife is not a force majeure, but an almost inevitable consequence of such a choice. This does not mean that there are no exceptions. There are exceptions, because there are special circumstances. More often, however, the importance of women is significantly reduced, and it is not only the "undervaluation of women's labor" that affects it.

No matter how much society values the labor of housewives, such women's access to energy will be very limited. Energy is provided by a certain number of spheres in which a person feels relevant. Relevance consists of objective utility and the level of uniqueness of one's role. Nowadays, most housewives do not feel relevant (and therefore receive little energy). They do not feel objectively useful and do not feel any uniqueness. Even if for their own children they are unique, for the society their labor is equated to the most primitive level of service that everyone can cope with. It takes a lot of illusions to feel happy in this state of affairs. Illusions relieve stress, but they do not provide energy. As a result, housewives often have low self-esteem and feelings of helplessness and anxiety.

That's not to say that childfree people have the upper hand. It also happens in different ways. If a woman is very passionate about an activity and is fully realized in it, she may not feel the lack of children. If there are voids and holes in her life, the lack of children can cause stress, even if she is a conscious childfree. Such a conscious childfree may feel stress as "societal pressure" and annoying oppression from child women, as discrimination. This is not to say that there is no pressure on a childfree woman at all, but stress turns that pressure into an unbearable, agonizing and total circumstance. If, on the other hand, a woman is not such a convinced childfree and the voids in her life are many, she may feel attacks of her own fear and despair at the thought of not having children. In this sense, mothers find themselves in an advantageous position. In addition, children provide a certain source of energy. This source is there, it cannot be underestimated, but it cannot be overestimated, it is not enough.

Most mothers are really happy to be mothers, and getting energy from motherhood is normal. Besides, giving birth, feeding and bringing up children is a very useful labor for society. However, such labor cannot claim to be unique, and therefore is not a sufficient source of energy, even if there were material guarantees. It is just one of the sources, valuable but insufficient. To have support, a woman cannot be only a wife and mother, even a mother of many children, she must also have other social roles. Please note that she "owes" not to some master, she owes herself for the sake of securing a stable and happy state for herself in the future. If this "debt" is ignored, it may soon turn out that a woman owes everyone else. Everyone owes her because she is suffering and in need. And material debt is not the most important circumstance. After all, in civilized countries it is quite realistic to solve the issue with sufficient maternity capital and monthly payments. This is not the main problem that arises in this case. It is not enough for a professional mother to get money, she also wants a high enough status in society. She is painfully sensitive to the fact that her work is considered insufficiently intellectual, when her opinion in other social areas is perceived as incompetent, when her work does not arouse sincere admiration in anyone, because "who didn't have the intelligence to have children?"

It is even easier to look at this distortion within the couple. Suppose that the husband of such a woman has great respect for her labor and considers having children to be extremely important. This is how society should ideally treat maternal labor. The husband's respect is also manifested in the fact that he gives his wife a substantial part of his salary and considers this money not as his gift, but as a sacred duty. That is, the woman does not have to ask or feel special gratitude and anxiety. At first glance, everything is ok and nothing else is required. Unfortunately, this is only at first glance.

The more separated the spheres of employment of people living together in close housing, the less mutual understanding and more conflicts. From 8 to 8 the husband is absent at work, all this time his head is occupied with certain problems that form his priorities and goals, but are incomprehensible and uninteresting to his wife. He would like to spend his leisure time the way his colleagues do, because they are the ones who fuel his leisure motivation by telling him where they have been, what they have seen, how they have rested and what they have gained. Motivation for leisure is born during activity, not during leisure. That is why the husband already at work dreams of going to a bar after work, or to a new movie, or playing a new game. He wouldn't mind discussing work conflicts and successes, but at home he has no one to talk to.

The wife's life is quite different. She is busy with the household and the children, and not only does she not get enough social approval, but her head is occupied only with that. She wants to spend her leisure time in a different way than her husband. Most likely, she does not want to be away from her children during her leisure time, and if she does, it is only to feed herself with positive emotions, to receive her husband's love and admiration, and not to listen to his colleagues' dirty jokes in the bar. She feels that it is stealing her energy to impose unnecessary problems on her when there are much more important problems. What is extremely important for him is not important for her, and this is the problem of the gradually emerging distance. And the emotional attitude to each other (mutual empathy, existence in a common field) goes away, but the dependence on each other and the need for understanding remain, because people have formed a family, produced a child and no one agrees to recognize the complete collapse of this idea. Everyone wants to stay in the relationship, but to provide themselves with little comfort or at least the absence of severe stress. In the wife's opinion, after work, her husband should take care of the children and help her with household chores. However, he thinks otherwise and says that he needs a full vacation, not a second shift. That's also what his mom thinks. Both the mother-in-law and the husband usually believe that the wife has the opportunity to rest during the day in between taking care of the child, while the husband works all day without rest and has the right to relax in the evening, to get care or at least peace. The wife, on the one hand, does not agree that her work is less complicated and important, and on the other hand, does not understand why her husband does not want to take care of the child, why he does not miss her and does not want to cook dinner together and coo about everyday life, and even better - to rush to cook dinner himself, ordering her to rest, as once, during their dates. That is, there is a problem of mutual non-involvement in each other's spaces. The wife does not understand and is not interested in her husband's life, although she can pretend to be interested and listen attentively, but she cannot say anything of value because she is not aware of it. The husband does not understand and is not interested in what the wife lives, stories about the child seem monotonous, fears far-fetched, ideas boring. Alas, he has to admit that the child, no matter how important, is a burden for him, because he does not know what to do with it, does everything wrong, and is constantly forced to follow his wife's instructions.

For involvement and self-motivation to emerge, it is necessary for a person to devote at least a third of his or her time per week to this area. Not half an hour in the evening under convoy and accusations, but a third, or at least a quarter, with their own motivation. In this case he gets involved, he has a place in his mental field for this sphere, thoughts about it, his own ideas, feelings and strong emotions. If the sphere remains very insignificant, there is rejection.

As a result, the husband usually goes to get another job to justify himself and save himself from stressful evenings. And the wife has a second child to fill the resulting emotional void. One child is not enough to give her life meaning, and she feels that a second child will solve the problem. It is clear that the gulf between spouses in such a case can become even greater. And if the gap is bigger, it means less understanding and more mutual claims. Not necessarily, but most often. At the same time, the dependence grows even stronger.

So how does violence arise in such well-off but disconnected couples? Unfortunately, violence is optionally attached to any relationship in which people are bound by circumstances and are both very dissatisfied with each other. As long as the dissatisfaction is not so strong, there will be no violence. If the attachment is weak, in the case of dissatisfaction, people break up. But when both attachment and dissatisfaction are strong, violence is almost certain to result. The one who "provokes" violence is usually the one who has more resentment and more deterrents to violence. The one who has fewer deterrents to violence and a lot of resentment is the one who starts the violence. Undoubtedly, men are more often in the role of the latter, because the male gender removes the taboo on physical aggression, preparing a man to defend his dignity physically from early childhood. However, the frequency of men's violence initiation correlates with their level of education. The more educated a man is, the less risk he has of escalating to physical violence. This does not mean that he will suppress aggression completely. Rather, he will tend to use more subtle emotional violence. It is not uncommon for women to be the first to initiate violence. This is the case when a man has more constraints, such as the principle that women should never be touched under any circumstances. In this case, the woman has less fear, and she can easily slap him or throw something at him, hoping that he will not dare to overstep the taboo in response. It should be understood that the manifestation of such aggression is never rational. Less fear does not mean that a woman cold-bloodedly decides to throw a stool at a man. Not at all. She is indeed torn by affect and cannot control herself, but a strong fear of an aggressive man can suppress her aggression, and the aggression will be channeled inside her or spilled out onto the children. If the fear is less, the woman may become violent towards the man first.

In any case, whoever started the violence first is in trouble. Logically, if the violence is started by a man, the trouble is much bigger and more dangerous, because women are usually more dependent and much weaker physically. Such violence can end in disaster. If the violence was initiated by a woman and the man only evaded or bravely endured a hail of slaps, the situation does not seem so dire. It is hard to imagine that a woman would mutilate a man or inflict indelible moral trauma on him, and scare to death the children watching. However, there is a bad thing about condoning violence - it is repetitive and escalating. Therefore, in combating violence, it is necessary not only to actively create and strengthen taboos on men's aggression against women, but also to eradicate the very causes of violence, including emotional violence. Insults and humiliation are a form of violence for which both genders are about equally famous. This proves that in a situation of acute conflict and moral stalemate, gender does not matter, but only the possibility or impossibility to get out of this conflict (or better to prevent it). If it is impossible to get out (because of dependence), and the conflict escalates, there is an affect, hatred and a desire to destroy the partner's field morally or physically.

Hobbes said that "a flawed man is a child who has gained power."

Narcissism, egocentrism, infantilism, and even the so-called psychopathic character are developmental defects if the person is an adult and normal developmental stages for a child and adolescent.

Many of the things that we admire in children look scary in adults.

At the same time, there are things in children that it is desirable to preserve forever. What the plasticity of the psyche, creativity and the ability to grow actively are based on: curiosity, ease, spontaneity, openness to new experiences and an uncluttered view of the world.

Thus, here is the difficult task of separating the wheat from the tares: useful childlike qualities from harmful infantilism. It is not easy for everyone to understand what in an adult is desirable "childishness" and what is undesirable egocentrism.

That's Peter Pan, for example. He combines beautiful qualities with unbearable ones. He is a universal idol and an eternal problem for people who love him. Sergei Mikhalkov has a fairy tale "The Feast of Disobedience", where the adults left the city to give the children long-awaited freedom, and the city for a while turned into a plague feast, where dinners consisted of ice cream and chocolate, and there were no rules in the games.

The difference between an infantile person and an adult is that the former has no support within himself and therefore tries to rely on something outside, to shift responsibility for his well-being to others. It can be rationalized in many different ways, and it is always rationalized. A problem that we do not want to solve is always hidden in a dressed-up wrapper to avoid stress. Such a wrapper for infantilism can be, for example, religiosity, and under the guise of this trust in the manna of heaven and the finger of God. Mature religiosity emphasizes man's responsibility and duty to God. Infantile religiosity, on the contrary, focuses on the denial of one's own will under the guise of humility before the will of God, that is, in essence, on God's duty to take care of man. Sometimes infantilism is rationalized as political activism. Such people like to accuse others of infantilization and "passive life stance". In reality, the political aspirations of activists often have only one goal: to change the bad Parent into a good one, to take away the parental rights of the former, and to place the responsibility for their lives on the latter.

Downshifting is often a rationalization of infantilism. This phenomenon, as nowhere else, mixes positive and negative traits of Peter Pan. On the one hand, there is a thirst for adventure, exploratory activity, refusal to blindly submit to the will of others and rejection of routine. These are important qualities worthy of all admiration and imitation. On the other hand, the positive aspects of downshifting often hide the negative ones, and the former are often just a wrapper for the latter. The "thirst for adventure" is wrapped up in an inability to bear responsibility for one's life and a readiness to "surrender to the will of fate" as in children's romantic stories. Such "readiness" is truly infantile, because "surrendering to the will of fate" a person is not ready to accept any difficulties from this will, but expects that this very "fate" will be a caring mother to him, as Wendy is to Peter. If the will of fate suddenly turns out to be evil or indifferent, such an adventurer starts to roar loudly and break toys. Under the "research activity" often hides an inability to work. Very many people imagine themselves creative individuals only on the basis that they do not like monotonous hard work. As a rule, this attribute indicates the opposite, because creativity includes monotonous work too.

In this regard, I would like to recall two passages from the articles of two great psychologists, Carl Jung and Gordon Allport. The former wrote that when Westerners try to imitate Easterners, escape from society, try to "take energy from nature" and meditate, waiting for development, they miss an important point. What is "earth" to a person formed in one culture and nourishes their muladhara chakra is different from what nourishes a person in another culture. What does this mean? The land nourishes the pagan because he knows how to work the land, he gets a harvest from it, he gets recognition and respect from his tribesmen for the harvest, and this is his main material support - resource. For the Western man, this "land" is society and the opportunity to work for money, receiving recognition and forming a reputation. This is his main support. If a Westerner wants to get energy from the land and nature, he should become a farmer, reorganize his life, learn to work on the land. If he is a vacationing tourist looking for eternal holiday and entertainment, he will take his energy from the same society as his fellows. That is, from his bank account, if he has managed to earn money, or to beg from his parents and friends, if he has not managed to earn money. In the latter case, he will be scolded and shamed, and then he will take out all his childish offenses in a childish way - with scolding and fists.

After I mentioned at one of the conferences that non-resource people can't do BDSM, but resource people can, I got a flood of questions in the mail. Since there are so many questions, I'm writing a post about it.

Yes. Very well integrated personality’s can drink alcohol, attend dubious trainings, play roulette, engage in BDSM and even have relationships with abusers (!!111). No harm will come to them. Only new impressions, self-observation experience and a specific high.

What is a well-integrated personality?

It is a personality whose structure is both fluid and centralized. Such a personality is capable of creative development and active growth, while maintaining integrity and not falling apart due to internal contradictions. Because of good integration, such a person has a single will center, is not swept away by the flow of other people's affects, is not influenced and brainwashed, is able to think critically, maintain pluralism, and look at things soberly. Integration allows the personality to organize needs into a strict hierarchy, maintaining an optimal energy regime, that is, a regime that avoids prolonged stress, avoids frustration and stores energy for spontaneous states. And yes, such a personality has what is called "good boundaries." And the balance in close relationships is established by itself. Like the emergency mode in a premium car.

What it is necessary to do to achieve integration, I will definitely tell you gradually. At a minimum, it requires resources, i.e. such an organization of the surrounding space that would allow an individual to receive energy in sufficient quantity. That is, resources are the sources of receiving energy, and integration is the way of its rational distribution and multiplication. Without resources, integration will not take shape, because there will be nothing to distribute. But when integration is already formed, it helps to find and maintain resources. And without resources it can also keep a person for some time. Literally on air. About all these interesting things - a separate series of posts, but for now - about BDSM.

Some people think that the need for BDSM practices in and of itself signifies some kind of problem. This is true and false at the same time. It depends on what the need is. We can say that any need that a person cannot control and satisfy safely means a problem. The essence of personal integration is that a person is able to control everything that happens to him from the inside and successfully compensate for what happens on the outside. This does not require any special effort, it happens by itself. It is like a well-adjusted diet. When the eating regimen is perfectly adjusted, the body takes control by itself. It is possible not to count calories, not to limit yourself in products, not to monitor the time of eating and the size of portions, the body does it all by itself. But woe to the one who tries to trust his own desires without having such a well-established system. Desires can be healthy and unhealthy. Healthy desires are a consequence of good integration.

This is also how the need for BDSM of an integrated personality looks like. Such a personality may want such practices for the sake of some sensations and impressions, but this need will always remain under the control of its integration. Attention! Under the control of integration does not mean under the control of the intellect. The intellect controls only those processes that are poorly integrated. A person thinks about the process of driving an automobile until he has mastered the technique of driving. Once mastered, control becomes almost unconscious and consciousness is activated only in special situations. The same thing happens with other processes. Reasoning and conscious control require quite a lot of energy. Spontaneity and the flow of pleasure are not possible at this time. Integration replaces the intellect and controls processes without energy expenditure. Therefore, a person can act in a relaxed mode, and integration only maintains a framework within which he acts safely for himself.

The mechanism of such built-in self-control and self-restraint without any conscious effort can be described by the example of the chemical propensity of some peoples to alcoholism and the disinclination of others. In the process of evolutionary selection, those peoples whose territories have been inhabited by wine since antiquity have acquired a special genetic pattern that produces a special enzyme in their bodies and makes them resistant to the effects of alcohol. This resistance manifests itself in the fact that such people do not feel the specific euphoria from large doses of alcohol, which is felt by peoples who do not have such genes. In their bodies, alcohol is broken down differently and does not affect opiate receptors. "Protective" genes allow to control the dose of alcohol: excess alcohol causes unpleasant sensations instead of euphoria, due to which alcohol consumption is stopped in time. This does not mean that it is impossible for such people to develop alcoholism. It is possible, but it requires much more time of systematic intake and special situations. While peoples without such evolutionary selected genes get drunk very quickly. Sometimes fantastically quickly.

Personality integration has no hereditary nature, each personality must develop it individually (memes partially replace genes, but this is a separate topic). However, once formed, it is just as capable of causing aversion in response to anything destructive and thus protects the person from dangerous influences.

The unintegrated human is characterized by the fact that it has no single center, it consists of many separate parts, and the needs of these parts do not coincide or even contradict each other. The center of such a human is easily displaced beyond his boundaries and he identifies with anyone or anything as long as he arouses its affect. Because his own energy is chronically lacking, it is always leaking into all sorts of holes and getting lost in the pits of addiction, as well as being depleted by frustration. Another person's affect easily takes over, and he is drawn toward and infected by it. This is the only way for his to be in the flow and experience life. People around may wonder why a that human destroys himself, but for such a person the word "self" does not have an unambiguous meaning. Such a human can find himself in everything that gives him pleasure, and it does not matter at all that this pleasure will bring harm. A non-integrated human behaves like a decaying economy. Everyone tries to steal more, exchanges long-term benefits for quick profit, acts unecologically, because tomorrow there may be nothing at all. Parts of non-integrated human act the same way, because they do not feel themselves as a whole and have no resources for integration and reasonable planning. Everyone drags what they can and destroys their organism and life.

It is not necessary to explain how dangerous BDSM is for such a person. By and large, many things are dangerous for such a personality, but BDSM is one of the most dangerous. BDSM is a sexual-psychological endogenous drug and many non-integrated persons are fortunately protected from it by disgust and fear. However, if the aversion recedes for some reason, if the person is influenced by a specific environment or authority figure, the person is defenseless against the powerful effects of these practices.

I chose the study of sexual perversions and addictions as my thesis at university. Back then I explained that the concept of good will in BDSM is extremely relative. Will requires personal stability, and people in a poor resource state very often take someone else's will for their own will. It can be said that in order to comply with the principle of SSC (safe, sane, consensual) a person must first mentally mature, only then he can really be fully responsible for his choice. Otherwise, his choice is like that of a child, even if the age of such a person has long since passed the age of majority.

Banning all potentially dangerous practices is not the answer. Almost any practice can be dangerous. Addiction can form from anything that can capture attention and get you high. The internet is a powerful drug. Religion is very. There are few things that can compare to love in this sense, except heroin. Sex is addictive. Food is a popular and strong addictin. Even physical education can become addictive and drive a non-integrated person crazy and then destroy their body with immoderate sports fanaticism.

However, BDSM as well as occultism has a bad reputation for a reason, and it is better to keep children away from it. In these spaces there are a lot of ambiguous entities. However, for adults and established personalities, there can be no prohibitions. All secret doors of the world are open before them, and from any chaos such personalities can extract the energy for the birth of a "dancing star" inside them.