What helps is a shift in perspectives.
Dear friends,
this is another little titbit of the book we're writing here at Creative.Co-housing Leipzig.
It casts a light on the very dubios idea of "Relationship addiction".
As we have mentioned before, currently most of our energy floows into said book and the preparation of NEXT.STEP-Summit, so not all posts are immediately translated.
Yet this one is, though we may apologize for the crudeness of the translation.
(Volunteers to render any of our Denglish texts into proper English are warmly welcome.)
Sincerely yours
On behalf of the King...
...
When someone, as can be observed so frequently, stumbles from one relationship into the next, we usually can attest a romantic exaggeration. Following Hollywood’s fairy-tale image one now has finally found the person one was destined to meet.
Among eight billion people. A childish-naïve misconception.
In an earlier section we have laid out, how this unrealistic fairy-tale projection than successively crumbles against the onslaught of reality, to then cast the very same projection onto another person. In doing so, the projector has to then suppress the previous story, that he actually had already found the one he was meant to find, and thus the dramatic development takes it’s replay course.
In modern psychology such repetitive behaviour is then quickly diagnosed as “relationship-addiction” or “emotionally dependend personality disorder”, the mill’s wheel grinds down the projecting person, because the suppression of previous experiences consumes more and more of his strength. Compulsiveness increases with every turn of the wheel. So one attempts to bring the affected to reason, to understand his “addiction”, and the recommended course usually is that of sober abstinence.
In a similar fashion, psychology interprets “sex-addiction”, whether be it compulsive masturbation or superficial, often risky sexual contacts. Likewese, the afflicted is supposed to become abstinent, because the necessary efforts and the compulsion rule his life and may ruin it.
Yet, to us, this viewpoint is a short-sighted perspective, because the assumptions that constitute its base are not questioned. We have already explained how the dependent behaviour, the controlling occupation of one’s partner stems from the instance of the needy child that has been traumatized by the emotional scarcity within the nucleoid family, precisely because the species appropriate life for humans is the life within a tribe, and not within the emotional dependency on the attention of one or very few attachment figures.
To suggest abstinence is comparable to teach a bird in a cage not to flap its wings. And if it does not surrender, wings will soon be medically clipped to avoid harm. Yet life in a tribe is what would be natural to man as life outside is for a bird. That there’s almost always someone present to satisfy the fundamental need for emotional and physical closeness. Someone who at that moment is truly capable and willing, without deals and obligations, so that emotional dependency cannot occur.
Likewise, questionable is the idea that the human animal could live without sexual contacts, or be content with the almost scary rarity with which this averagely happens within closed relationships. Within a certain range of variation, isn’t it far more likely that the human as a social animal frequently needs, perhaps even daily, nurturing physical contact to its kin, and that at least for some, one (or even more) copulation per day is simply totally normal?
If one dares to cast aside the inherent basic assumption of psychology that isolated life within nucleoid families constitutes the natural order of things, which is by no means justified for all we actually know about the biological origins of our species, and therefore assumes a correct scientific perspective, which is an opposite assumption, we arrive at a quite different picture:
Then what remains is that the alleged addiction is nothing but the desperate, and necessarily futile, attempt to satisfy what remains alive of the original need within the unquestioned rules of the system, to fly within the cage so to speak. That this destitute attempt must lead to neurotic aberrations seems obvious, for the solution lies solely in changing the conditions of the system, ultimately in the establishing of a solidary community as we are trying to bring forth by conscious evolution.
If one further takes into account the traumatization of the child, and does not fade out the catastrophic start of many young people into genital sexuality, more and more governed by dominance oriented pornographic images (that in themselves are part and parcel of the excrescence of increasing neuroticism), the pressure built up with which many people fall for said addictions becomes palpable with ease.
And whoever may not be able or willing to step into these finds surrogate satisfactions that usually similarly develop into addictive behaviours. That, for instance, four hours of daily television consumption of the average European could be termed anything other but addiction that actually is far more alienated from the original libidinous impulse, for us, is inconceivable.
Therefore, we hereby explicitly position ourselves contrary to the puritan and system inherent perspective of the so called Twelve-Steps-Movement as well as against current ponography.
=> See also late Marshall Rosenberg on the very same topic of the average relationship-design, yet with a different approach.
Hail Discordia
On behalf of the King