When Relationships Go Wrong
One sure way to damage to damage a relationship - whether romantic, or, perhaps, family - is to be the victim of a “stress force” such as fear
or anger.
Fear
makes us avoidant - undermining our ability to confront someone with the truth about how we feel, or about something the other person might need to know.
When led by fear, we might end up dependent on someone in the sense that we stay with them out of a fear of being alone. Yet our trust is eroded - perhaps our trust in all our relationships - meaning that we’re always fundamentally suspicious other people’s intentions, and struggle to “let people in”.
Anger, on the other hand, makes us deeply annoyed with others, intolerant of them, and quick to judge. Anger
makes us lose patience, so that we struggle to give others a chance, “cut them some slack”, or forgive them.
Then there’s compulsive desire
- the kind of desire that bosses us about and makes us greedy, or addicted. Now, it’s not enough for us to win the confidence of some person we like or desire: we feel the need to “own” or control them. Moreover, to be ruled by this kind of desire only weakens us, because it makes us just as dependent on the “object” of our desire as does fear, even if it dominates us from the other direction.
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When they take us for a ride, “stress forces” set the rules and hand us all our roles and parts. To make us stick to their tasks, these forces rule us through compulsion, shame and shock. Compulsive desire, for instance, gives us our taste, in any power struggle, for coming out on top. Meanwhile, outwardly-expressed anger
and aggression (whether overt or not) can spur us on to become leapfrog merchants who hog the best jobs.
On the other hand, fear, gloom
and inwardly-turned anger
intimidate, deflate and humiliate us, and compel us to see ourselves as a “bad ’un” and a “flop”. Now, we can find ourselves down with the Cinderellas, and consigned to riding third class where we sell ourselves short. When this has us trapped, we sooner stew in our pain than protest or demonstrate... unless, like Othello, we self-destruct through bitterness and hate.
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The “diagnosis”, here, is one of “stress forces” getting “inside our head” and making us “dance to their
tune”, to everyone’s disadvantage.
Take compulsive desire, for instance. This can fabricate such rave reviews for given “desire objects” that these start to seem the answer for our every need.
When it turns its rose-tinting inwards, this “stress force” gets to raving about us. Now, compulsive desire
dabs touch-up paint onto our self-portrait, exaggerating our plus points and airbrushing away our flaws. The effect is to render us so much the apple of our own eye that we’re oversupplied with entitlement and self-praise. Our head swells and we end up as a “Prima Donna”.
Another of the self-representations by which stress can delude us is the exact mirror image, namely the “Cinderella”. Here, we see the opposite effect, where compulsive desire
takes back its praise, and our self-image is subjected to a downgrade, like we were a waste of space.