More often this happens to women, but it happens to men: they stay with partners who use them, humiliate and even beat them. And if they still find the strength to terminate this relationship, it is likely that their next chosen one will be the owner of sadistic inclinations. How this vicious circle is formed?
We bring behaviors with a partner from childhood. Extremely simplifying, we can say that we reproduce in pairs of the relationship that we have with our parents.
Exploring the attitude of children to parents who beat them, left alone or humiliated them, American psychologist David P. Selani found out that these children — contrary to what common sense suggests — were very attached to these parents. Why?
The origins of addiction
Communicating with the parent, the child gradually “introaches”, that is, he absorbs, assimilates his methods of behavior, reaction, answers to different situations. If the parent comforts the child, then the child will learn to console himself over time. And he will cease to need the parent — or, in any case, need so much.
Actually, this is how, step by step, children gain independence in order to eventually begin their separate adult life and build equal relations with other people.
But what if the parent treats the child badly? The child will be bad to handle himself. Paradoxically, this ties him even more to his parent. Without creating internal resources due to the lack of material, such a child will always be dependent on external.
“Having matured, these people previously deprived of love will very likely cling to anyone, not particularly caring about the human qualities of their partners. Because the fear of being abandoned is too great, ”the psychologist writes.
Why an adult makes such a choice? After all, the child does not have another family, he cannot turn away from a bad parent. And an adult can choose among many other people. However, the possibility of choosing for such a person is only visibility. To choose, you need a criterion, an idea of the desired. But such a performance from the one who has grown with insufficiently good parents is hopelessly distorted.
Search for love
The reason for returning to someone who treats us is not at all a thirst for suffering, but the result of a kind of idea of love that has developed in childhood. The child does not know anything about how parents «should» relate to children. He only knows how his parent relates to him. This attitude becomes for him the standard of love
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“Love for a depressed child seems to be a complex combination of conflicting feelings, and not at all a direct feeling that a loving person accepts and appreciates you. On the contrary, love received “free of charge” from a normally developed personality is not perceived as such, it seems to be something alien, having nothing to do with what in his mind means “love,” explains Selani.