From the author: Interesting article - read it! It is very difficult for us to stop believing in fairy tales......And sometimes you want to imagine your proximity as a point of absolute value that you want to stop forever. "Stop, moment, you are beautiful!". However, everything we experience is a process of constructing this experience, always with someone who is also experiencing it. And, even if we use the same concepts, they sound differently in two different people. Intimacy and the trauma of intimacy are always the experience of the I-Thou relationship, the experience of hopelessness and sadness, since the "You" of another person is boundless and immeasurable. "I" and "You" are not structures, they are processes. Gestalt therapy is a practical philosophy of realism. And realism finds support in phenomenology. There is what is. In fact, it is very difficult to stop telling yourself fairy tales. The experience of human existence is the experience of relationships. But the experience of relationships is not only the experience of contact, but also the experience of separation, departure. If we do not move away, then we cannot meet. If there is no distance, then there is no space in which the desire to meet can form. We have knowledge about relationships. I know who I love, who I want to be with. However, experience often says otherwise: you want to be alone or with someone else. This contradiction often leads to the fact that we are together with those we love, but not when we want. Values ​​intervene and begin to regulate the process of intimacy. It is impossible to talk about closeness while ignoring the phenomenon of dependence. People often mistake addiction for closeness and find that such attachment is too intense and difficult for another person. And when one person wants to restore their boundaries, the other person feels pain. Below are some attempts to describe some parameters of proximity. On the one hand, closeness is experienced as a merger, loss of control, a sense of "softening" of life circumstances, completeness, integrity of life in the presence of another person. On the other hand, closeness cannot be experienced without having a positive experience of loneliness. The phenomenology of loneliness is a separate topic. Different "types of loneliness" can be described: * seclusion supported by the experience of uniqueness, which gives access to the inner world, "pause for oneself". Free loneliness, without pain - a healthy schizoid component of loneliness;* a feeling of abandonment, a painful experience that occurs when freedom is violated in a relationship, a signal of dependence;* isolation, despair from the powerlessness to control the process of intimacy, a narcissistic component of loneliness. In isolation, a person finds himself completely alone. Human relations, as the building material of the very nature of human existence, are closed within itself. The worst thing is that it is impossible to admit it to yourself. As if you can do without a relationship. When two people talk about loneliness, it is worth clarifying: Do you need to be alone? Do you feel isolated? Are you worried that you have been abandoned? Another facet of understanding intimacy is different phenomenology of love or different "chords" of love. In the works of early religious philosophers, especially Berdyaev, two types of love are described: love - admiration and love - pity, pity. And the third kind of love, love - tenderness. So, the schizoid component of love is tenderness, the neurotic component is pity, and the narcissistic component is admiration. It is pleasant to meet with passion, but it is difficult to constantly face it, it creates feelings of isolation, complete loneliness, even despair. Constant admiration does not lead to closeness. It leads to closeness to the desired image. Admiration is falling in love with an image, and an image, as you know, cannot be happy. A romantically enamored young man looks at a sick girl for hours, watching with admiration how her facial features become bigger and more refined, how her soul shines through her pale skin, but it does not occur to him to call a doctor or simply feed her. Admiration, which the psychotherapist encounters (the more often, the more famous he is in society), is perceived rather as aggression. And requests like, "This is necessary, and he turns out to be alive!", cause despair. Man needs pity. I often ask my clients the following questions:is there anyone in the world who can ask: "How are you?" And regret, and caress, and wonder what is on the soul and just be there? Pity is often confused - pity and humiliating, rejecting pity. "We don't need your pity, we'll get by!". But no, it seems that we cannot do without pity. When the need for pity looks too prominent, it causes irritation. However, this part, balanced with other chords of love, forms the melody necessary to experience intimacy. Without regret, intimacy simply does not come. Regret is a violation of boundaries in the direction of rapprochement. Love - tenderness means caring for a person as a value, recognition of his fragility and uniqueness. It's like I'm a little distant, I'm slowing down, I'm becoming sensitive, but I don't violate boundaries, I'm present, but I don't eat. Tenderness is always a touching experience and a little sad. I will never fully understand the one I love and at the same time understand that we are both mortal: "You" is unattainable. The melody of love is formed when these chords are combined, otherwise the whole life will pass, as it were, on one note. And what do the words: I love you mean? Two people can be at different points in this process. There is one more parameter that is important for understanding the phenomenology of intimacy. This is loyalty-betrayal. When we talk about closeness, the very word forces us to fix one single value forever. Everyone has a need to be one. And, at the same time, we have many different values. A person who has more than one value is a traitor by definition. Two children, family and work, wife and mother. These are not the most terrible examples, as you understand. There is not only a figure, but also a background, a life context. The meaning of what is happening is formed by figure-background relations. There is a direct experience of the "here and now", but there are also long-term relationships that "wait" for us and to which we want to return, to return to betray them again. You can betray only a really close person, it is impossible to betray an outsider. And we leave our loved ones with some sense of guilt. Proximity is possible only if there is a right to freedom to act in one's own interests. If you see a figure without a background, it is very easy to get addicted. Experiencing the presence of another person as a single value turns closeness into dependence. Human freedom, as Rollo May wrote, is in the pause between stimulus and reaction. Therefore, in working with addictions, it is important to restore the client's freedom. This means restoring the opportunity to take a break and consider the context of one's own life more broadly than <here and now> under the influence of strong emotions. The other side of freedom is competence, the ability not to fixate on helplessness in the face of value frustration. We have not only wounds, but also scars. They say that a good psychotherapist works with scars. Not with wounds, but with scars. It is impossible to work in the morning. But the scar has one feature - the wound is tightened by connective tissue, however, the skin around the scar has increased sensitivity. Our competence is our scars, our freedom. There is the breadth of the context, the duration of the relationship, the experience of experiencing failures. This is the way to self-respect. And again, one person says: "You are very important to me, but I am interested in many things," and the other person replies: "And for me, the whole world is you." The word "treason" is loaded with a very strong negativity, and loyalty is honored. But the development of a relationship without betrayal is impossible. Even in order to start a new business, it is necessary to stop the previous one, to get on the path of betrayal. In order to grow, we inevitably have to lose something, give up something. Without the betrayal of a contact, the free choice of this contact is impossible. I cannot love if I have no right not to love. Proximity implies a constant risk of separation. Loyalty is usually spoken of when one wants to betray. When there are many lies, they talk about the importance of telling the truth. When it's really bad, they hang up crying about love. There is freedom "from" and freedom "for" described in the existential tradition. We run from freedom to hide in relationships or we find freedom to experience relationships as chosen and notforced And again - closeness and dependence. Closeness suggests that two people can do without each other, but they are good together. Dependence, on the other hand, means a lot of reasons for the impossibility of leaving each other. Therefore, in dependence there is always a lot of anger, tension, guilt, intolerance, but there is an illusion of security. And in intimacy there is a lot of risk, loneliness, horror, betrayal and shame, which you do not want to call intimacy at all. If we want to live the experience, it always has a downside. This is the price of accommodation. I sometimes conduct an exercise in groups about many <truths>. There is no one truth for all cases and for all times. People torment themselves with the false need to choose: either one or the other. It is impossible to make a choice at all without it being wrong. The choice can only be recognized. The integrity of a person is determined by his ability to withstand his disintegration, the multiplicity of values, which often contradict each other. And at the same time remain yourself, each time finding the strength to be the "captain of your ship". I like the Gestalt approach, in particular, the word "and" as opposed to "or". And it's true, and it's also true. Of course, Pavlyk Morozov's "pioneering truth" exists, but who needs it when everything is clear, but it is impossible to live in this clarity. When the truth turns out to be more important than relationships. The truth lies in motivation. The difficulty is that it is impossible to fix your motivation. Centuries-long efforts of mankind to subjugate the desires of morality have not yet led to anything. The wife asks her husband: did you betray me? And he answers her: no. This is true regardless of the facts. The truth is that this man at the moment wants to preserve his relationship with this woman and save her from unnecessary pain. There is more truth in this than in a detailed account of how everything happened. And if in response, yes, he cheated, but in fact he was faithful, then the truth is that he is so angry that he is ready to take the risk of destroying the relationship. It is important to understand what regulatory mechanism a person uses when establishing relationships. For the first time, we reveal ourselves to the world as "not I". This is the experience of a person's boundaries/limits. Boundaries simultaneously stop and serve as a support. Borders unite and separate. A person becomes a person only in the experience of relationships with other people. Children raised by animals learn other programs. We all need a Witness of our lives, thanks to whose presence we recognize ourselves. I exist because You exist. If a small child runs somewhere, headlong, and an adult catches him, then the child is at the same time angry and happy that he was caught. He is not alone. It is simple to make sure of the existence of reality: you need to run away and hit your head against the wall. Other people save us from this experience, keep us, watch over us. You can, of course, master all the boundaries alone. For example, to swim far into the sea, make sure that the strength has run out and go to the bottom. Or stay in isolation for a long time, until all the stupid things come to mind. The therapist, working at the border of contact, acts as a living wall, softened by the idea of ​​distance. The client encounters these walls and leans against them, finding a <human situation>. Researching and mastering the boundaries of the human situation takes place through various mechanisms. The first of them is fusion, where a person defines himself as a representative of a family, people, group. The regulatory mechanism of relations in this case is fear. In psychotherapy, they don't stay like that for a long time, most of them find themselves somehow. Then there is a desire to hang in regressive dependence, to hope that someone will explore my boundaries for me. And if I do something wrong, you can always pretend to feel guilty. A feeling of guilt is a good opportunity to "disappear" from the relationship into a childish position with a sad face. "Excuse me, fool!" The one who is the accuser is at first satisfied with his power, but then he is convinced that he is responsible for everything. Guilt cements addiction. The guilty person is not responsible for anything. Guilt presupposes that somewhere, somewhere else, there is Righteousness. Right means power, authority, competence and, therefore, responsibility for relationships. Guiltreduces a person's confidence in himself and <drives him away> from himself. Guilt regulates relations with morality and power, fixing a borderline (borderline disorder) split. At the same time, people are divided into good and bad, right and wrong/guilty, authoritative and helpless. At the same time, an addicted person is prone to pressure and has a lot of rigid expectations that the <agent>, on whom responsibility is assigned, should be constant in its characteristics and manifestations . Sometimes, the latter begins to regret that he is not a <bottle>. Addiction means attachment to one's own values, to disgust. I think it is clear that all this has nothing to do with the experience of intimacy. In children, addiction is a healthy phenomenon. In adults, addiction slows down the experiences without which life <loses its color>. This is the experience of one's individuality, uniqueness, freedom to stay and go, to love what one likes and not to like what one does not like, and even the right not to love what one loves. If a person is obliged to love - this is already an addiction. Proximity is an experience of a higher order. Proximity is establishing a relationship at a distance that is comfortable for both partners, and it is the experience of exploring this distance. The regulatory mechanism for establishing intimacy is shame, or, more precisely, the work of shame. It is worth distinguishing introjected parental shame, social shame and shame as a regulator of one's authenticity. We can introject the feelings of our parents, which they did not manage to live by themselves and passed them on to us as a legacy. It can be shame of social origin, lack of education, shame of nationality, etc. These are not our feelings, these are the problems of our parents, but they can accompany us throughout our lives and lead us to feel toxic shame. It is the shame with which we first come into life. Around the age of 3, social shame is formed as the shame of a crime that is incompatible with the requirements of society and its morality. Much later, rather in adolescence, shame begins to emerge as a regulator of authenticity. Borderline splitting (borderline disorder), which is natural for a teenager, during the diffusion of identity is gradually replaced by an orientation towards a holistic experience of oneself, the discovery of one's uniqueness and the value of one's own position. This happens due to the displacement of the driving forces of personality development from the outside to the inside, forming freedom and responsibility as the basis of authenticity. This is a long process and for some it can last a lifetime. The quality of a person's adolescent crisis depends on the quality of his human self. And, accordingly, this quality of his perception of You as an experience of boundaries that provide intimacy and are regulated by shame. Shame, as a regulator of authenticity, orients us to our own sensitivity, as opposed to the pressure of the environment and situations. Adolescence confronts us with the challenge of life's many possibilities. The midlife crisis, on the contrary, forces one to recognize one's limitations. Both of these crises are associated with the frustration of a person's experience of their self and, accordingly, with shame as a regulator of authenticity. The experience of shame occurs when the self is damaged, as a reaction to the inequality of the self. The self is restored through the work of shame, through the recognition of oneself and the real circumstances of one's life in the presence of a significant other, a significant You. The work of shame regulates the quality of a person's presence in his life. Experiencing closeness and experiencing the reality of one's existence are very closely related. Intimacy is impossible in the absence of the Self, and in dependence the Self disappears. Proximity and physical proximity are often confused. Many try to replace the lack of intimacy with sexuality. Sexuality, however, being one of the languages ​​of love, in fact can turn out to be simply a release of tension in the hungry need for closeness in one person and a pleasant game for another. Closeness, paradoxically, often leads not to physical closeness, but to distance. Distancing can be confused with devaluation, as devaluation is a coping mechanism for fear of closeness. Where there is value, there is always the potential for pain. The desire to avoid pain leads to avoidance".