Articles
Narcissism, Relationships, Love, Infidelity
The impaired capacity for empathy and intimacy is the main cause for the narcissist's difficulties with relationships. A narcissist's capacity for investment in love is either significantly impaired or non-existent, disabling them from leading a long-lasting loving relationship or causing relationships devoid of love, intimacy, and sexuality. Their relationships may be filled with infidelity, which serves the narcissist's need to escape boredom, mediocrity, and emptiness, and is a response to their inability to combine love, passion, and sexuality.
How Unconscious Fantasies Influence Romantic Relationships
Unconscious fantasies guide, colour, and shape our romantic relationships. But because they are unconscious, we usually remain oblivious to their impact. When, through psychotherapy, we are allowed to see how our internal and external worlds are governed by our unconscious fantasies, the process of our change has passed the point of no return.
The Loneliness and Pain of the Parentified Child
Emotional or practical role reversal between the parent and the child, also known as parentification, can have devastating consequences on the child’s psychological wellbeing, the development of their identity, and their relationships later in life. As a form of childhood trauma, it may leave the child with an internal experience of loneliness, solitude, isolation, and emptiness.
Effects of Childhood Trauma on Adult Romantic Relationships
Relationship issues are amongst the most common presenting issues in psychotherapy. They usually originate from our unconscious perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world. These perceptions develop during our childhood and may be underpinned by adverse experiences and childhood trauma.
Parentification and the Childhood Trauma of the Parentified Child
Parentification is characterised by role reversal between the parent and the child. This means that the child may take on a role of meeting the parent’s needs and practically or emotionally taking care of the parent. This may result in the child’s disavowal of their own needs and may result in mental health and relationship issues for the affected individual in adulthood. Parentification often causes dependency and codependent relationships.
The Sense of Meaning and Purpose
Experiences of meaninglessness and purposelessness are often underpinned by other emotions or beliefs. These include a sense of internal confusion, directionlessness, incompleteness, subjective experience of emptiness, despair, a sense of boredom or mediocrity, or just a sense of something missing or a general dissatisfaction or resignation with life.
The Hidden Faces of Dependency
Dependency is embedded deep within the personality. It has far-reaching unconscious manifestations and is associated with depression, physical illness, eating disorders, addiction, unfulfilled relationships, a sense of aloneness, issues with commitment, or an experience of emptiness, purposelessness, and confusion.
Spiritual Bypass: Escapism and Resistance to Change
Spiritual bypass is a form of unconscious avoidance in working through unresolved trauma and is often used as a form of resistance to change and sabotage of therapy.