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