Ex: why can’t I do without it?

Formerwe’ve all been there. You had a story, in which you were fine: he was attractive, brilliant, funny, an exceptional lover and maybe even a model husband and father. You had big plans for the future, until the present came along to take the bill. Of the unsaid, of the misunderstandings, of the neglect of the relationship, of the resentments, of the things that sediment. And they calcify the feeling.

And you become former. That is, one leaves the life of the other, or rather, if not from life (in some situations it is difficult, for example when there are middle children), from the heart. This leads sadnessalso anger (Shakira docet), because the sense that is felt inside is that of have lost something: a piece of oneself, of one’s certainties, of one’s certainties.

They snap requests who go to dig inside: « What did I do wrong? Why do I feel so helpless? Why do I still think about it, if it’s over? Why do I still talk about it, even if badly?». The feeling is that of not work without the other person, even if it was dysfunctional in the relationship. And this might have to do with the addiction.

Let’s take a close look at what this concept consists of, explored by the doctor Elinor Greenberga Gestalt therapist, in his item Published on PsychologyToday.

How is it possible to become dependent on another person?

Here we enter the realm of diagnosis and treatment of personality disordersgoing to explore the concept of «self-object’ introduced in the seventies by the Austro-American psychiatrist Heinz Kohut.

The subject of his treatises was the mechanism by which humans use other people to self-regulateconcept that could be used to understand and help people with narcissistic personality disorder.

What is a selfobject?

A self-object is a person we take as reference to perform psychological or other functions for us that, in theory, we could learn to perform on our own, such as calming down when we feel hurt or regulating our self-esteem. Let’s take this self-object as an extension or part of our self, creating some kind of fusion.

The function of the selfobject in each stage of life

It is good to take other people as self-objects, and usually this need decreases as one gets older, because the function of the self-object is to keep us emotionally stable, therefore it is assumed that as a person grows up, he has the tools to stabilize himself. Here is how the function of the selfobject changes in each stage of life:

• Infants: when we are born, we are quite helpless and totally dependent on other people, especially our main caretakers, the parents, who are in charge of keeping us safe, fed, warmed and pampered. At this stage we cannot survive without self-objects.
• Children: if we are healthy as children, we no longer need our parents as we did when we were babies. For example, we can go to the bathroom, get dressed, feed ourselves… However, we still depend on our parents – our self-objects – to calm us when we are hurt, take care of us when we are sick, tell us we are loved, make sure we have all that is needed for our livelihood.
• teenagers: as a teenager you prepare for the future of independent adults. It is at this stage that we usually begin to look at peers for some selfobject function that parents previously performed (for example, in the way they dress or behave). It is at this age that one begins to seek love, comfort and approval from friends.
• Adults: it is around the age of 20 that one begins to lose part of the dependence on peers. Many are beginning to stop giving weight to what others do or think and give more credence to their own opinions.

Relationships and selfobjects: how do they influence each other?

Falling in love also means enjoying the other person’s appreciation. It happens that we feel more beautiful, brilliant, fitter, precisely because we feel loved. Being treated as unique and precious generates in our head the addiction mechanism: We begin to rely on that feedback. Which isn’t a bad thing, if we have a good foundation behind us, though.

And if the other becomes ex?

If the relationship doesn’t work out and the other person becomes exthat’s it loses its selfobject function. Thus a void remains. Because we had stopped taking care of our emotional needs: he was the one who supported us when we had to raise our voice in the office, he was the one who told us how beautiful and intelligent we were, he was the one who pampered us when we were sad. Our emotional stability depended on each other. And now that it’s gone, we’re destabilized. We have delegated to the other some internal functions that we had to carry out on our own. We sat comfortably on a chair, which has now been suddenly pulled out from under us. And we fell.

When does lack of selfobject become addiction?

Think of drugs or narcotics: we become addicted to them when our body and mind are no longer able to feel good without relying on them. To re-educate them to function independently, you need to do a detox from addictive substances. And this involves a long journey, even of pain, in which those functions anesthetized by external input are found. Because becoming aware that the remedy for feeling good is already within us is not easy.

The same thing happens with people: if we have relied on another person, a self-object – which can be a child, a partner, a parent, a friend – to find balance after the storms, to feeling capable and worthy of love, to feel useful in this world, here it becomes alienating and heartbreaking if this person should no longer be in our lives.

That’s even then what it becomes easier to fantasize about getting them back in our lives instead of accepting that now we need to get back to doing those things for ourselves on our own. Return or learn from scratch, going to heal those gaps that we have brought with us from the previous stages of life. We are all already equipped with wings to fly high: the other is not the missing wing, but a travel companion. It can stay next to us or, at a certain point, detach itself. But he cannot replace us. To love ourselves we must learn from ourselves.

Ambra Angiolini: «After my last ex I did 12 months of therapy»

Broken Hearts: How to Get Through a Breakup With Mindfulness