Isn’t it curious that some people tend to become more critical, cold, and cruel with the very people who champion them the most? Why would someone treat their admirers worse than their critics?
People who devalue their biggest supporters — often their partner — resent the fact that they feel so dependent on that support. In fact, they may be addicted to their dependency, and for that reason, they simultaneously feel bitter about it.
They don’t like feeling helpless. They don’t like needing support and praise. They don’t like counting on you for their self-esteem.
Yet, they don’t have the fortitude to stop relying on you for services, accolades, and admiration. They belittle you so as not to appear needy. They despise their own weakness and you become the physical manifestation of that weakness.
By devaluing the sources of said supply (his spouse, his employer, his colleague, his friend) he ameliorates the dissonance.
~Sam Vaknin, PhD
Understanding why someone might treat you like a slave does not mean you should continue to act like one, or to accept the treatment. So the real question is why would you continue to be a fan of his if he treats you or anyone like a slave?
Anaïs Nin wisely pointed out that “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” It may be time for you to step back from your role as an admiring slave and to view people as they are in their entirety, to admire those who are more worthy of admiration, and to create your own life-opus.
Like any technological medium, Facebook and other social media can enrich your life, waste your time, or cause damage, even though you are not doing anything illegal, unethical, or immoral.
Facebook time is increasingly contributing to the erosion of real-life loving relationships. Here are two primary ways in which such technological devotion can insidiously take a toll on existing relationships with loved ones: 1. Facebook Overload
There is nothing wrong with keeping in touch with friends and enjoying the entertainment value of Facebook and other social media. Friendship, camaraderie, community, entertainment, and laughter are very healthy human pursuits. For some people, who might be shy, housebound, or isolated from friends, social media provides a wonderful opportunity to communicate with friends and to participate in community. Many people enjoy getting in touch with a variety of people they might not otherwise stay in touch with, sharing photos and status updates.
Yet, for some people, such pastime easily turns into a compulsive addiction. When you start to crave getting online and impulsively logging on without any specific goal, you may find yourself wasting a lot of time.
You only need to ask yourself how honestly proud, pleased, or fulfilled you feel after spending time on Facebook to know whether you are squandering your time. Sometimes you DO feel good about the time spent — that you’ve had some laughs, made some connections with people, found out about a great event, or seen some interesting videos. But other times you might feel empty and dazed as though you’ve been flipping channels between bad TV stations for the past hour.
2. Curiosity, Attractions, and Fantasies
It’s human nature to be curious about what’s happened to old friends and lovers and to be intrigued about people you find interesting or attractive. However, when you start nosing around on Facebook much beyond a one-time glance at people you find attractive, you may be taking that time and intention away from your real relationships and other activities that you may want to pursue to become the best person you can be.
Given the apparent confidentiality of being online, curiosity can slip into voyeurism. When you start repeatedly checking out particular individuals’ photos and entries, it’s easy to project your fantasies on them. After all, they generally post only their most attractive photos. When you don’t have an in-depth relationship with someone, you fill in the unknowns with whatever you most desire.
There’s usually nothing harmful in having momentary fantasies. Being attracted to others is normal and not necessarily damaging. What’s unhealthy and destructive is thinking obsessively about them. Ultimately, directing your energy toward your fantasy will come at the expense of your real relationships.
When you look at the photos and follow the profiles of those people you find attractive repeatedly, you can easily start having obsessive projections and fantasies about them. This can significantly erode the real-life relationship you have, even if your significant other is not aware of the direction of your attention. If much of your energy and focus is directed toward these fantasies, then the lack of attention, openness, love and passion in your real-world relationships will eventually destroy those real-time relationships.
If you’re not in relationship, obsessive fantasies can similarly prevent you from interacting face to face with people and learning how to develop live relationships with people.
Solutions
With self-awareness and a desire to choose the life you want to live and the type of relationships you want to have, you can monitor your habits and change them.
It is very simple to see how much time you spend on Facebook each week, and to think about what else you might have accomplished in that time. Then you can decide if you want to reduce that time spent online.
You can also check out your browser history over the past few months and see how you have been using Facebook and other social media and ask yourself if you are being obsessive about specific people or topics. Think about whether that time looking at others’ photos has inspired and enhanced your real-time relationships and your life, or whether you are eroding your relationships and demeaning yourself by developing a preference for engaging in fantasy over other choices you might make.
Life is a series of experiences and adjustments. To live the life you desire, it helps to look at the choices you’re making and tweak them to best serve the goals you set for yourself. It’s less painful to make those adjustments frequently, before your patterns of behavior wreak havoc on your life and relationships.
To have a fulfilling relationship, you have to learn to speak your truth and become the best person you can be without living in fear of your partner’s reaction. In a reciprocal loving relationship, each partner’s joy and accomplishments should, by love’s definition, make the other happy.
It is important to be considerate of your partner. However, diminishing yourself to cater to your partner’s weaknesses does neither you nor your partner any justice.
The moment you play into the fear that your partner will feel inadequate when you shine, you start down the path of undermining your joy and capabilities in a futile attempt to pander to your partner’s fears. Such pandering will only enhance your partner’s anxieties by accommodating them, and will eventually breed resentment in the both of you. Dependence and predictability
All relationships involve some dependence. As dependence increases, partners fear that change might destabilize the relationship’s security. When people become highly dependent on their partners, they tend to limit intimacy and spontaneity. They try to accommodate the fear of their partner by maintaining the comfort of the status quo.
Yet, the status quo becomes increasingly tedious and tiresome over time. Predictability leads to taking your partner for granted. When partners take each other for granted, romantic desire fades to extinction.
Desire requires tolerating anxiety
It takes courage to grow and change in a long-term relationship. Specifically, you have to deal with the deep-rooted, subtle fear of being rejected or humiliated when stepping out of the confines of your comfort zone.
Desire requires appreciation for the partner AND the ability to withstand the tension in continuing to grow and flourish. People who tolerate little anxiety have a small window through which to experience desire. Routine and predictability become ways of avoiding anxiety. Unfortunately, they also become ways of stifling vitality, excitement, and desire. Uncertainty and novelty
A healthy level of anxiety enhances desire by increasing receptivity, awareness, and focus. Notice how you are more alive and alert when you travel to exotic places. The new smells, sights and experiences enhance a traveler’s awareness. Uncertainty and novelty cause low-level anxiety, which increases anticipation and exhilaration.
You don’t have to travel to enhance the awareness and excitement in your relationship. Yet, you need to engage your creativity and change what you do on occasion. For example, make a special meal, have a picnic in a new place, invite different friends over for dinner, try a new sport or hobby, take classes on your own, plan a trip, or take dance classes. It doesn’t matter if any of these unfamiliar events turn into a disaster. You will feel alive, and you will have something to talk and laugh about.
You simply have to have the courage to risk following your own dreams, as well as doing new things together and with others. It helps if you can do so with an irresistible sense of adventure, humor, and delight.
When you can handle facing the unknown and the possibility of getting hurt, then falling in love can be one of the best times in your life — full of intense feelings, desire, and vitality.
However, people who drop everything in their lives in order to be with the person they’re in love with tend to get hurt repeatedly in their love relationships. They think they are driven by love, but in fact they are overly-impetuous and short-sighted, and are doing the very thing that is likely to put out the flames of desire.
Merging with another person too quickly or too completely is a big mistake for several reasons:
1. Being together constantly can take away the magic of mystery between two people. Long-term desire requires imagination and some time apart. It’s difficult to desire someone who is with you all the time. In fact, when there’s too much togetherness the contradictory desires for separation and possessiveness kick in.
2. Extreme merging leads to dropping everything else — other friendships, family relationships, community activities, time alone, and hobbies. You stop feeding your soul through the multifaceted ways your soul likes to be nourished. Eventually this makes you lose your sense of self and your passion, which makes you less interesting to yourself and the person you’re in love with.
3. If you spend all your time with one person, you start defining yourself according to that person’s terms and reactions, which causes you to lose objectivity. This can lead to the gradual descent into an unhappy and even abusive relationship.
4. Worst of all, you become dependent upon the person you spend all your time with. Dependence promotes need, which is based on fear rather than love, while love is based on abundance and free choice. Dependence also feeds resentment and fear of abandonment. Both are a cause for conflict, which leads to falling out of love and hurt.
For those who tend toward extreme merging, here are some ways to minimize the probability of being devastated, without closing your heart and shutting down desire.
Retain your relationships with friends, family and the community. Continue to follow your passions and pursue your hobbies and sports. This will help you maintain your passion for life, your sense of self, and your confidence that you’ll survive even if the relationship doesn’t goes forward. It is always painful to have a relationship end, but you’ll still have many parts of your life intact even without the other person.
When you go slowly, take your time and relish falling in love, you can enjoy the mystery of the other person longer. You also retain objectivity, that is, an ability to see red flags without turning them into red hearts. When you get emotionally involved too quickly and deeply, brain chemicals similar to those of a drug addict get activated and overpower more rational, forward-looking parts of the brain. While there’s nothing wrong with a love-buzz, getting drunk can lead to stupidity and great regret.
For example, it helps not to call the other person five times a day, see them every night at the expense of your other interests and friends, or to move in together too quickly.
As paradoxical as it may seem regarding the intense emotions of falling in love, moderation seems to be crucial here. While you can’t control how hard you fall for someone, you can usually avoid falling down too hard by keeping the rest of your life in motion while enjoying the thrilling ride of falling in love.
Romantic passion calls forth intensity, excitement, and focus of desire.
Intense emotions are generally fueled by psychological “complexes,” that is, heated reactions (positive or negative) to a person or situation reminiscent of a past experience that left a mark on the unconscious. A “complex” is a core pattern of emotions, perceptions, memories, and desires in the personal unconscious triggered by a common theme evoking past emotional experiences.
For instance, being in love with a smart and cold woman, who by coincidence is like your mother, may be driven by a projection of certain characteristics of your mother. Unconsciously, you hope to resolve your disappointment with that initial relationship by finally having someone similarly smart and cold be responsive and appreciative of you.
Does the fact that desire and even falling in love are possibly the result of a psychological complex taint their authenticity and beauty? Does one’s past experience of hope and disappointment with a similar type of person make a current love affair less authentic and meaningful?
Even if infatuation and love are complex-driven, they are no less real and important. The very fascination with the beloved reflects the entanglement of unconscious processes with falling in love. Falling in love involves projection, which is loaded with powerful affect.
Projection, however, is fraught with dangers. Consider the repeated disappointment a person will feel when the beloved becomes withholding or neglectful, just like his mother. What’s important in this case is that we don’t repeat our same ineffective ways of dealing with those who bring forth our complexes.
Emotionally-committed relationships are one of the best vehicles that can assist us in becoming aware of our unconscious and our complexes. They give us the opportunity NOT to repeat the past. But this takes awareness and effort.
Does passion driven by a complex fade when we become more integrated and whole? Does the fantasy of the “Magical Other” subside when we become more grounded and less neurotic? Perhaps.
If so, is it worth the cost?
We can hope for some progress toward wholeness, but few of us need to worry about losing our passion because we’ve become wholly-integrated and enlightened. So, we might as well enjoy the intensity of falling in love on our path to insight and understanding.
Even with great strides toward increased consciousness, the crazy feeling of infatuation might be replaced by the mindful intention to love — not a great cost after all for such a transformation.
