From the author: First published in the magazine "Clepsydra" This terrible picture is probably in the memory or imagination of every person... A city destroyed to the ground. The streets are covered in dust and dirt. Remains of houses. Not a single sign of life - no water, no greenery. And only the wind blows through broken windows, destroyed walls, picks up garbage, dust and, in hope, drives them somewhere into the distance... This is how a city can look after a war or fierce battles, after a bombing or massive artillery shelling - in a word, after its complete destruction... Similar My generation remembers the footage from war newsreels, sees it in nightmares of post-stress syndrome, afraid to imagine them in reality. I'm lucky. I didn't see this horror in reality. I thought I didn’t see it...What do you think? What does this picture have to do with man? And does it have? Does it really have? Today I want to talk about how a person’s inner world can look like this. A person with broken boundaries, a destroyed self, trampled internal psychological space. “What have you put on yourself? - the enraged mother shouts to her daughter, a junior schoolgirl. - Look at you, cow! Change your clothes quickly! Otherwise you won’t even leave the house!..” “So that when I come home from work there won’t be a single toy on the carpet! Otherwise they will all fly out the window!” - the father threatens his four-year-old son, throwing small cars, cubes, multi-colored pieces of Lego around the room... “I’ll show you long hair!!! You will now have your head shaved!!!” - the father breaks down, wrapping his teenage son’s overgrown hair in one hand, and taking out a hair clipper with the other... What unites all these and similar situations? Is it only the screams and anger of parents, the tears and grief of children? What is common in all similar cases is the process of destruction of the psychological space of the child’s personality. By destroying the interests of the child, replacing his personal needs with their own, parents gradually, day after day, destroy the Ego of their children. This action can be noisy and menacing, as described above, it can be quiet and unnoticeable, it can be disguised as care and parental love. A schoolgirl’s grandmother does not allow her to go to school after lunch. You can’t go to clubs and sports clubs, you can’t go for walks with your girlfriends, you can’t go skiing in the park - this is how a grandmother takes care of her granddaughter, protects her from the dangers that await her. "What is allowed?" - asks the girl. “Sit on the sofa with me! Now we will watch TV. Episode 125 “The rich also cry.” The grandmother takes out a bag of seeds and places it in front of her crying granddaughter along with the rich ones. “Do you want to go skiing? Go for a ride around the garden! It's dangerous outside. You might lose your skis or break them! God forbid, they might take your skis away!” “Mishenka! Get up! It’s time for you to go to kindergarten!... To school!... To work!..." - with these words, for more than twenty years, a loving grandmother has been waking up her grandson. But the grandson doesn’t want to get up! He hides under the blanket, covers his face with a pillow, then pretends to be dead asleep, then snaps and shouts at the old woman. He has not yet had time to wash his face, and the grandmother is already knocking on the bathroom, announcing that breakfast is on the table, that the boy needs to eat, that he needs to dress warmly, because... It's cool outside today, etc. etc. This boy, now an old man, never wanted to return home - neither after kindergarten, nor after school, nor after work. After all, his grandmother was waiting for him at home, controlling his life, satisfying, like a sorceress, any of his needs, even those that he only had time to think about. True, grandma always did it the way she wanted. Soft destruction. But this does not stop it from being DESTRUCTION. This method of building relationships through the destruction of the partner’s psychological space belongs to one of the types of CODEPENDENT behavior. Elena Emelyanova describes in detail four types of codependency in her book “Crisis in Codependent Relationships.” All these types of relationships have one thing in common - there is no place in themto a real living person: neither a spouse nor a child. The real person, with his strengths and weaknesses, is rejected. Instead, an illusion about the partner is cultivated, filled with other people’s ideas about him, sometimes completely inconsistent with reality. This is how marital relationships are built. As for child-parents, it is common for them to destroy the self of their own child. “He is my property. I can do whatever I want with it. I know better who and how he should be. I am its lord. He is my slave. He must do what I tell him, order him, force him. Because only I know how and what he needs to do.” What's the truth? Such thoughts are common to many parents, regardless of their age. I have heard similar phrases from older people, from my peers, and from peers of my own children. Behind these terrible words are destroyed personalities, crippled destinies, trampled abilities and talents of our own children. Destroying the child’s inner world with words and actions, physical punishment and verbal insults, such a parent tries to fill it with the Ego or with his own needs (“How is it that you don’t want this???!!! I want it! So you should want it too!!! "), or your own ideas about your ideal self (“You must achieve what I couldn’t achieve! You have no right not to achieve it! You have no right not to want it! Because you are MINE! Which means you have to do what what I command!”) Oh, how it hurts! How painful it is when your psychological space is trampled on! How painful... Your creative abilities have been crushed: “Only fools and prostitutes perform on stage! Stay off the stage, I said!” “What school play??? Quickly go to the store and buy some potatoes!” “Shut up, who am I telling you!” No need to tear your throat out! Are you singing??? Yes, you are screaming like a slaughtered pig! The singer sucks!” “Do you want to dance? Your hands are like a rake!” “What do you have? Rhymes??? So my father and I laughed!” Here lies your first love, crushed by constant suspicions and incessant shame. “Yes, you will have a million more sashas like this!” “Where did you go? Did you run to your Sashka again? So that I don’t see him here again!” But here lie your first erotic feelings, covered with dirt... “How can you read this???!!! It’s just pure dirt!” “Oh, you brute! I saw you kissing him at the entrance! A prostitute! I’ll kill you if you bring it in your lap!” And mixed with all this, your social activity is trampled (“Don’t appoint her Chairman of the Council of the squad, she has no business! Let her take care of the house better!”), your idea of ​​yourself as a pretty girl (“What difference does it make?” , what are you wearing?! Who’s looking at you?!”), your taste and style (“You’re always buying some nonsense! You’ve never chosen a single decent thing!”), your interests and inclinations (“ Why do you need this? What university? Better go to a pedagogical institute! It’s closer to home, and it’s easier to study there!”) Here they are! The ruins of your Self. An empty, destroyed city in which not a single living soul remains. Or rather, there is no living soul of your own left in it... If no one settles in this city, the person will die. A person cannot live without the Ego, whose main function is to ensure our functioning in society. But who can live in such a city? You can, of course, as in the Potemkin villages, cover up the destroyed facades with colorful pictures depicting a well-fed and happy life. This is what usually happens in life. Surely, you have met people who present themselves as deep and intellectual, filled with interests and talents. But this is the first impression. Even upon closer examination, it turns out that in fact these people have nothing behind their souls. Their main life activities are to ensure that their needs are met. To do this, they usually need partners. In such cases, very soon the partners begin to feel that they are being used a lot and given little value. The relationship lacks warmth, recognition, love, and support. And what can you get from this?broken EGO?! How can a beggar give another person money, success, love of life?! Emerging life problems easily, like a strong east wind, tear colorful posters from the destroyed walls. It is then that the entire inner emptiness of the human personality is exposed. Bottomless, like a deep well. In order not to see the devastation, you can wear special glasses that distort reality. Such “magic glasses” for a person become his addictions, primarily chemical ones. I drank alcohol, smoked weed, injected myself with a dose of drugs - and the world immediately changes color, volume, texture. What seemed gray and scary becomes bright and joyful. The fear of living, which is impossible to cope with, disappears. Cowardice turns into courage and bravado. Habitual depression and melancholy are transformed into unfounded happiness and bliss - unreal, false, perverted. To keep such “glasses” on the eyes, a new dose of the chemical is required again and again. And now this substance becomes the master of the personality, and she is its slave. From now on, the “owner” determines how a person should live, what he should do, what is important for him in life, and what is minor and secondary. First of all, the closest and dearest people become these small and of little value. The fates of children and parents, wives and husbands, friends and loved ones are broken. A person dies without understanding why he came into this world, what mission he had to fulfill. You can use a trick! Take and resettle the inhabitants of a destroyed city to another - whole! In that other city, the houses can be dry and warm, the smell of borscht and pies is delicious, in the evenings the lights come on in the windows, and mothers read good bedtime stories to their children. There's just one problem! There is NO WHERE for new residents to live in this city! Where should they settle? Firstly, you can push out the old tenants. Remember how in Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog”? The number of rooms should not exceed the number of residents. "It's OK! - many will think. “They’ll make room, they’ll survive.” Yes, indeed, many people experience such discomfort. They learn to react to it in different ways: they endure, get used to it, reconcile, or resist, fight, go to war. And they become embittered inside themselves at everything - life, people, fate, God. And their increasing malice, day by day, gradually turns them into the same destroyers of foreign cities that came, settled in their hometown and drove the residents out of their “home” - from their own psychological space. Secondly, this technique is also very common, You can simply liberate this still alien, but not destroyed city for yourself in different ways. “Kick out the city residents! Let them go wherever they look!” And this is the most humane way out! As a rule, the inhabitants begin to be destroyed. Destroy... Listen, look closely at this word! Fully understand its meaning! Systematically, hourly, they kill other people’s needs, replacing them with their own. They trample on other people's desires. They devalue other people's interests and abilities, placing in their place their own glossy, lifeless pictures - a drawn delicious dinner and light in the window, a mother bending over a cradle on a paper poster and a loving husband hugging her. And these pictures can hang for a long time! Until the first strong east wind. And then... The wind tears them off, crumples them, drives them through the streets, and carries them away into the distance. And this City also becomes destroyed, dead, empty... Until the arrival of new invaders. A sad and funny order. Someone destroyed me. In order to survive, I must find a place to live for my Self. I am looking for Another, preferably empty, in order to settle in his psychological space, fill it with myself, giving space to my desires, interests, and needs. At the same time, I can either become the external boundaries of this Other, “devouring” him, filling my own emptiness with him, or allow him to “eat” me, filling his inner world with myself, while providing myself with external security, or rather the illusion of security. This is how dependent spouses or partners build relationships. The one whose space is filled with the Other first endures, accepting this orderthings for true love, genuine care, sincerely believing that this is how it should be. When the strength to live like this runs out, he tries to break out of this pathological merger. It's great if it works out. And if not, the person begins to get sick, becomes depressed, and may even die. It’s scary... It’s scary for a sober person to see how, day after day, talented people again and again try to fill their inner emptiness with alcohol or drugs, emotional or sexual addictions, unnecessary false concern for others and someone else’s life, instead of starting to live their own. But the worst thing for me is that there are too many such destroyed selves around us! Too much! It is more difficult to find a person with built-in boundaries, a person with a truly rich inner world, a reflective and aware person, a person who understands his own needs, interests, goals, meanings. - What to do? - my clients ask me again and again when I tell them these terrible but true stories. — How to return residents to your city? How to live in such a destroyed city? What to do with this trouble? - There is only one way out! - I answer. - Your city, read your personality, must be restored! What do you know about how, after the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet people restored cities and villages that were destroyed, and sometimes simply wiped off the face of the earth? A huge amount of human effort, energy, and resources were devoted to restoring the national economy. People cleared away rubble, cleared away construction debris, built something anew, and used photographs to restore houses, architectural monuments, and shrines. Of course, such a restoration requires enormous effort. But it’s worth it! When visiting local history museums in cities affected by the war, I always looked with horror, admiration and surprise at photographs in which the same place was photographed immediately after the war and after restoration. What a huge difference! And it can always be eliminated only through human efforts, the human desire for peace and tranquility, the desire for order and harmony. If you discover that your Self is destroyed, that you are not living your own life, that instead of your own desires and needs, you are forced to satisfy those of others, let even someone close to you - stop! Imagine this terrible picture - a city destroyed to the ground - inside yourself. Be scared! And start restoring yourself! Slowly, little by little, at the speed that is comfortable for you. Remember - people get used to living poorly, and habit is second nature. Believe that man was born for happiness, not suffering! That a person is called to live his own life, and not someone else’s! That each of us is unique and inimitable, and the responsibility for realizing this uniqueness on Earth is assigned by God only to us! Do not waste your life searching for the destroyer of your Self, do not take revenge on him - this takes a lot of strength and energy. Better use them to restore yourself: to realize your own needs, understand your interests and inclinations, understand your values, comprehend your personal mission, find the meaning of life. Psychotherapy will help you restore your personal boundaries, understand your needs, search for meaning, and cultivate values. I also wanted to write about how people die who were unable to restore their destroyed city, how slowly, and sometimes with lightning speed, its ruins are destroyed to the very foundation , not even suspecting that the city can be rebuilt anew, how they live their whole lives in ruins, covered with paper pictures with a fake life drawn, how this suicide is watched by relatives and friends, unable to either stop it or stop it... I wanted to write, but I changed my mind. In case they think I'm scaring them. And I don't want to scare anyone. The responsibility for realizing our lives lies with each of us, and only us. And let everyone think for themselves - did he take it upon himself? Does it carry? Doesn't it shift it onto the shoulders of parents or children? Spouse or partner? Relatives or loved ones? Friends??..