Trust-friendly communication in the family
With the in-depth analysis of the friendly and loving relationships of people, a whole series of questions arise: what is the need, what natural psychological need leads a person to the fact that he feels the need for a friend, companion, associate? It would seem, why they are needed? What is their use?
It seems to us that a person really needs, that is, he feels the strongest need, in the free and spontaneous expression of his feelings, emotion, emotions. Each person has a desire and desire for a free, unrelated expression of his thoughts, thoughts. For the modern person there is nothing more difficult, if not with whom to share the most secret feelings.
In conditions of regulated relations and forms of behavior, imposed rules and conventions, a person wishes to express his innermost thoughts, emotions and emotions easily and at ease. He does not want to constantly be in the moral and spiritual underground, that is, subject himself to rigid self-control and self-censorship.
So, we believe that a person needs an intimate, emotionally positive, confidential communication. It requires from the partner sympathy, compassion, understanding, "entry" into the psychic world of another person. The main thing in such communication is that we are "accepted" as we are in reality. A partner must have a corresponding psychological resonance with our psychic world.
Another partner should show sincere and genuine interest to us. As a result of this communication, partners should be "warm".
Marriage and family give the person just such a communication, which is as open and confidential as possible. In family communication, a person as it were discards social masks, removing those social roles that he performs in the public, political or professional spheres. Personality begins to feel completely its identity and unique personality.
Thus, family communication performs completely different functions compared to other types of human communication described in social psychology. To family communication, in terms of their functions, qualities and properties, only friendly communication approaches. In a happy marriage, family communication is exactly friendly.
A mentally developed person can not live and act normally without sharing information, feelings, experiences, reflections with other people.
The ability to communicate can develop only when the person himself is active in the sphere of communication with other people.
We often do not pay enough attention to the fact that it is friendship and love that perform the most important psychotherapeutic functions, the essence of which is emotional and psychic support, security, comfort, caring. If marriage and family do not give the person exactly this, then ONE or both spouses feel mutual estrangement, and marital cohabitation loses its meaning, its special significance and value for the person.
To ensure the sustainability of mental life, an individual is in dire need of positive emotions, experiences. Everyone should receive a feeling of joy and pleasure, interest, first of all in the family. Marriage life as a whole should give the individual a charge of positive feelings and emotions that have a very tangible effect on the stability of the psyche, on satisfaction with life in general.
The Soviet teacher VA Sukhomlinsky wrote that children should experience joy, a complex of all positive feelings and emotions. It is positive feelings and emotions that are extremely important for the child. His preparatory class for six-year-olds, he called it "school of joy."The great teacher constantly paid attention to the importance of positive assessments, feedback and encouragement in all educational practice.
The ideas of VA Sukhomlinsky are quite applicable for marriage life. Moreover, the conditions of a person's professional activity can sometimes be so heavy and burdened by unfavorable factors that only the marriage and family can be the only source of positive feelings and emotions. In such circumstances, the importance of family life is even greater.
There is no doubt that the satisfaction with marital relationships largely depends on the extent to which each of the spouses feels a sense of joy, pleasure from living together.
In crisis marriages, on the contrary, a situation is created that spouses constantly experience extremely negative emotions, at least the ratio between positive and negative emotions is always in favor of the latter.
Quite naturally, quarrels, disagreements, mutual insults are somehow connected with negative emotions. Ultimately, negative emotions cause anxiety, tension, depression, and, in cases where they are regular and constant, a state of depression in which the depressed mood becomes chronic.
Such processes are typical for dysfunctional marriages, a significant part of which ends in divorce.
The feeling of psychic support of the closest people gives the person confidence and stability in other, so to speak, extra-family affairs, for example, in the relationships that develop in the work collective.
It is in psychic support, mutual understanding, in a friendly, loving, respectful respect lies the so-called "psychotherapeutic" function of the family. Only in family communication a person restores mental balance, self-confidence in general.
The vitality of a married couple, in our opinion, is primarily associated with a sense of support, mutual understanding and mental comfort. So, the need for confidential and friendly communication, in mental support and protection, as well as the person's need for positive emotions, we refer to the so-called emotional and psychological needs.
The whole set of such needs is in dynamic mobility, interaction, i.e. One or two sufficiently satisfied needs can compensate for the lack of other needs. We see similar things in middle-aged and elderly marriages, where the need to love and be loved is compensated by marital friendship and a settled stereotype of a joint way of life.
I would like to note that our concept of emotional and psychological needs in this sense is only a convenient theoretical construction that tries to explain the reasons for the stability or instability of the marriage life.
Dissatisfaction with basic emotional and psychological needs can very often lead to mental instability and imbalance. Medical workers testify that the main causes of depressive conditions, especially in women, are primarily related to family circumstances.
If a woman feels that she is disliked, that she is not appreciated and respected, she has a very complex psychotraumatic complex.
We believe that conflictual and, moreover, crisis situations in the marriage life occur precisely when the basic emotional-psychological needs of the individual are not satisfied. Satisfaction of such needs makes it possible for a person to withstand the numerous life difficulties that inevitably occur in life in general and in family life in particular. We have in mind primarily housing and financial difficulties, problems associated with professional activities, with diseases, and the state of health in general.