Marital conflicts: especially dangerous cases

Self-centered behavior and its impact on married life

Experience in advising with divorcing spouses led to the conclusion that the egoistic traits of the spouses' characters, their concentration on their "I" - one of the factors destabilizing the marriage life. Selfishness and self-centeredness of spouses lead to the collapse of the marriage ship. The paradox of the situation is that the spouses, as a rule, see the egoism of their partner, but do not see their own. When advising divorced spouses to a sociologist, psychologist or psychotherapist, the defects of moral development of spouses, excessive concentration of attention and all psychic energy on one's own self are most striking.

If we analyze all of our so-called sultry life, we will notice how much space we give to reflections about ourselves.

As a rule, in such reflections we are engaged in extreme self-praise, self-respect, erecting ourselves on various moral pedestals. Self-aggrandizement is a very terrible moral disease, as we often forget every measure. The path to one's own personality cult is the simplest, ingenuous and primitive, if one unconditionally follows one's desires and desires, if you exclude all volitional efforts.

Our "I" always strives for leadership, seniority, leadership, superiority over other people."I" is almost always a dictator and a ruler, which is one of the main sources of conflict situations.

Concentration on your "I" prevents you from taking the necessary and objective position, analyze your own actions in a somewhat abstract, impartial manner.

"Struggle" with others results from a false life position, from a false opposition between "I" and "They", from a false understanding of moral relations with other people. The egoistic orientation of the person is most often brought up spontaneously, without any conscious intentions of parents or teachers. Selfishness and egocentrism are to a certain extent connected with the formation of an autonomous, independent and independent "I", but here the sense of proportion is not observed, and social norms of responsibility and duty towards other people are not assimilated.

The main defect of moral education of such a person is that she was brought up on bloated, extremely exaggerated claims to all the surrounding people, on the one hand, and extreme moral irresponsibility - on the other. The selfish person demands for itself from others on a maximum, and gives to others on a minimum.

Meanwhile, family life always requires consideration of the interest of other members of the family and the manifestation of their care. However, the egocentrism of one or both spouses excludes such consideration of interests and, even more so, real concern for other close people.

The source of egocentrism is to be found in childhood, when in the parents' family the child, on the one hand, was the center of attention of all its members, and on the other - he was not accustomed to taking care of mom, dad, grandfathers, grandmothers, brothers and sisters. Especially strong egocentrism is characteristic of single children in the family.

Unfortunately, family pedagogy misses the most important aspect of the moral upbringing of the child's personality: the ability to take care of people close to us and dear to us, as well as people in general. For some reason, both in the scientific and in the popular science literature on pedagogy, there is no emphasis on this, frankly speaking, fundamental ability. Without such an ability, cooperation in any social groups is unlikely to be fruitful and effective.

How often in the divorce proceedings for the external accumulation of mutual claims of the former spouses we have to observe the fierce struggle of two egoists who do not want to see or hear anything, unable to think of anything, except for their own selfish interests.

In our opinion, taking care of relatives: children, parents, husband, wife, brother, sister, etc. - the basic moral quality of the person. It is unlikely that a friendly, loving and conjugal relationship can last long without such a quality. Caring for another person first of all assumes that we identify our interests with the interests of a partner, we regard our needs and desires as our own. In such cases, our "I" [is divisible from the "I" of another person. The fusion of the two "I" - the most necessary condition of true friendship, love - the main foundation of marital relations. Maximum interests, desires, intentions, needs and values ​​of the marriage partner is one of the important and essential conditions for marriage and family life. Of course, it is necessary to take into account another condition: is there a feeling of compassion, mercy, sympathy, and the ability to enter the psychic world of another person from childhood. This is the second most important indicator of moral upbringing of a person, his psychological maturity.

There is a so-called linear scale, the extreme pole of which, by the definition of psychiatrists, is "insensible psychopaths," that is, people with a complete lack of feelings of charity, compassion, empathy;at the other extreme of the linear scale are people with unusually developed opposite qualities who perceive other people's pains and sufferings, joy and successes as their own. Feelings of emotional empathy, a way to penetrate into the emotional world of another person are different in their strength and depth for each individual, yet all people can be placed on such a scale and thus determine the level of emotional warmth. Moreover, foreign and domestic psychologists have created special tests-questionnaires, through which one can also reveal the degree of development of a feeling of empathy( syntony) in a particular person.

The attitude of a person to a person is one of the central problems of psychology, ethics and moral philosophy. So, in this case, we have the bridge that connects the purely ethical problems of one person's relationship to another with psychological problems, that is, how much the universal human ethical values, norms, rules have become the internal property of man, have entered the organic partin his inner psychic world.

In interpersonal family relationships, a great deal depends on the kind of moral, cultural, spiritual and psychological experience a person has entered into marriage. It is important here to what extent and to what extent the individual has learned the universal ethical norms and rules, that is, it is important analytically to know how the personality was raised, how the process of its socialization developed under the influence of the family, the school and the entire social environment.

Each person in the process of its formation experiences a lot of negative influences, many of which are real psychic traumas. There will be a few lucky people who were brought up in fairly harmonious social conditions.

In addition, it should be borne in mind that a person is a purely contradictory being, in nature which is mixed in the most bizarre form with positive and negative qualities: morality and immorality, honor and dishonor, generosity and greed, and so on ad infinitum. In European thought, the contradictoriness of human nature was beautifully described by Blaise Pascal: "We are not satisfied with our true life and our true being - we need to create in imagining groups of people an imaginary image, and for this we try to seem. Not sparing our strength, we constantly embellish and groom this imaginary "I" at the expense of the "I" of the present. If we are characterized by generosity, or calmness, or the ability to remain faithful, we are in a hurry to inform the whole world of these properties, and in order to decorate them with us imaginary, are ready to take them away from us genuine;we do not even mind to become cowards, just to be known as brave. The indisputable sign of the insignificance of our "I" is that it is not satisfied with itself or with its invented counterpart and often changes their places!. . We are so vain that we would like to become famous among all people who inhabit the land - even amongthose that will appear when we are already gone;we are so vain that we are amused and content with the good glory of five or six people close to us. "

Unfortunately, the nature of man is such that he really does not want to know the truth about himself, and there is hardly any exaggeration in the perceptive and profound thoughts of Blaise Pascal.

Unfortunately, in the nature of almost all people there are some or other disadvantages affecting the marital relationship. For example, the desire for cleanliness and order in the apartment is a very laudable quality of every woman, but even such a trait, brought to an extreme extreme, becomes a literally obsession and complicates the life of all family members.

The known strictness of the father to the misdeeds of children is natural And necessary, however, in some cases it can reach BEFORE cold cruelty and constant physical punishment of children. One could still give examples of how the most seemingly completely positive character traits of their behavior can pour into their opposite. In the last two decades, medical psychology has introduced such concepts as "accentuated personality", "accentuated character." "Character accentuation is extreme variants of the norm in which certain traits of character are excessively amplified, thereby revealing the selective vulnerability of a certain kind of psychogenic influences atgood and even increased resistance to others. "With a greater emphasis on accentuated character traits, they can leave an imprint on the entire personality and, to a large extent, In a close study, it turned out that persons with accented character traits make up a rather large contingent, Prof. C. Leonhard( GDR) notes the following circumstance: "... the population of our country, at any rate the population of Berlin, is on50% of the accented person and 50% of the standard type of people. "With regard to the population of a state, the data can be completely different."

In real life, it is not uncommon to meet people for whomon the false notion of pride. She presents an excessively high opinion of herself, on anything based on arrogance, haughty arrogance. For such people is characterized by the desire to mean more than they really are. They often tend to stand out among others, attract attention, something "flash" and something to boast about. Such character traits certainly hamper effective and fruitful cooperation with other people.

Establishing normal relations with other people is also difficult when we are extremely intolerant of other people's opinions and judgments.

Of course, in this case, our reasoning about human weaknesses and shortcomings is very abstract, because for each specific person is characterized by a unique set of certain imperfections. It is clear only that we should long ago abandon the primitive scheme that there are "good" people and there are "bad" people. The first group of people are characterized only by positive features, and the second - only negative. Classics of world literature perfectly understood the complex dialectics of combination of both positive and negative in one person. For example, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy wrote in his diaries for 1898: "One of the greatest misconceptions in judgments about man in what we call, we define: a man intelligent, stupid;kind, evil, strong, weak, and man is everything: all possibilities. .. ".

Further he writes: "It would be good to write a work of art in which to clearly express the fluidity of a person, that he is one and the same, then a villain, an angel, a sage, an idiot, a strongman, or a powerless being."

A similar idea is embodied in the works of FM Dostoyevsky, who remarkably demonstrated the many-sidedness, ambiguity of man.

Thus, in the analysis of human behavior, behavior, marital conflicts, certain success is expected only when we recognize the cruel truth: there are many shortcomings in every person that complicate the lives of loved ones and people who are dear to him.