Do you remember the story of “The Snow Maiden” by Ostrovsky? The girl does not know how to love, asks Spring to give her love, falls in love and melts. For me at school, this was a plot of unimaginable power. I didn’t suspect that this actually happened. I heard the first confession “I don’t know how to love” while studying at the institute, in a study group. I remember I just suffocated, how can this be, it can’t be! But the man calmly explained: no excitement is born, no warmth, no happy fantasies, nothing. I see and hear others talk about love, but I can’t do it myself. It took me a while to believe that he was telling the truth. At a May seminar about the ban on showing up, a young woman, let’s call her Tatyana, came out for a session in a circle and said that she was “forbidden to love.” I asked again: “You can’t show love or feel it?” She said: “It’s to feel.” I began to ask how long she remembers herself in this state, and whether it was ever different. She said that it started, it seems, when she was ten, and before that she knew how to love. I asked what happened when she was ten years old that could be associated with such a change. She couldn’t remember anything, but she said that the change itself occurred in her relationship with her dad. We agreed that she would show a scene of ordinary communication with her father. Tanya showed that she was sitting on the couch, watching TV. Evening, dad came after work and enters the room. Dad asks her: “How is life?” She answers him: “Fine.” At the same time, when she sees him, she rejoices, she loves him. He asks her the following question: “What news?” I see that the smile leaves Tanya’s face, I ask how she feels. - "Disappointment. I expected that something would change, that he would finally show warmth and love for me, but this does not happen." When Tanya was in the role of a father, she said that she felt emptiness, and this feeling often arises in connection with loss or because the person was not loved. From the role of a father, she explained that there was no time for love in a large family. Then the father started talking about his father, Tanya’s grandfather, who at the age of 17 was taken prisoner by the Germans, ate sawdust there, and barely survived. He returned home, got married, he and his wife had children, and then he died early from cancer. Tanya remembered her grandmother as a woman who suffered all the time. I decided to give Tanya the opportunity to talk with her grandfather, whom she had never seen (interestingly, she cast a woman for the role of grandfather who was forbidden to communicate with men). Tanya imagined it as if she and her grandfather were sitting on a bench next to grandma's house. She told her grandfather that she remembered him, and was very worried about how she and her grandmother suffered, and how early he left. And her grandfather began to tell her that he knew about her and loved her. Wants her to be happy. That if she only suffers, she won’t help anyone. Tatyana felt anger at what happened to her grandfather, her fists clenched, but she didn’t know what to do about it, who to be angry with. There is no one to be angry with! Life just happened that way! I said that when anger is born, it is important to express it. Tanya began beating the air with her fists. I invited the group to join; Usually everyone reacts differently, but this time everyone stood up and punched the air with her. Even the wind in the room rose. Being in her own role, Tanya said that she wanted to hug her grandfather. She hugged the “grandfather” woman, and they sat hugging for a while. I invited the group to touch them, just to feel what it was like to be together. The general movement is very unifying. During the sharing (exchange of feelings), all participants talked about how touched they were. Then there was one exercise left, I suggested that Tanya observe and not participate: everyone showed interaction with their prohibition, they had to find a physical way to wriggle out of the clutches of the prohibition, and everyone laughed a lot. Afterwards everyone shared, and Tanya said that she really loved them at that moment, it seemed to her that some kind of source had opened in her. And there was also one man, let his name be Sergei, to whom.