He comes from a very nice family; his mother and father are Doctors of Sciences but they divorced when he was a little boy and divided their sons. He stayed with his mother but she had no time for him. She was working all the time, often went to great construction sites, dammed the Yenisei river… He realized that no one wants him.
Most of all he wanted to reunite his family and be loved by his parents, but it was impossible, his greatest desire was blocked. He had to adapt to his suffering, he pitied himself all the time thinking that his fate was unfair to him. He envied other young men. When he pitied himself, the best consolation was vodka, it let him forget his suffering, get disconnected and acquire a warm and sweet feeling of a beloved child sleeping on the mother’s chest. If someone saved him from troubles, took him home, undressed, washed, scolded him he felt that somebody wants him. In a hidden way, he considered his parents responsible for his troubles and in his soul, he punished them by his acts of moral lapses. At the same time, he hoped that they will come and prove that they love him. But they didn’t do it and couldn’t…
Alcoholism gave rise to new problems… He began to be downgraded at work, conflicts emerged in the family. And he had to adapt to it too. He had to say that everything around him was wrong, unfair, particularly as perestroika was under way… It was necessary to lower his ambitions, to consider himself to be a victim of injustice [and he did already think himself to be a victim]. And to raise his self-esteem he had to criticize all people and lecture to them. There was little money it was necessary to be economical and suspicious. He had to hide his inner world from everybody, cover up his shame, so his body was always tense, his chest sank in. He could be frank only when he was drunk, then his true feeling got out, but only strangers or his friends-alcoholics could hear them.
If only he could see that little unhappy child [that is himself] suffering from the lack of love! If only he could generously give love to that child, so that he could forgive his mother and father, then a miracle could happen and the gigantic thing of his sufferings and adaptations would break down in a moment and there would be no need of alcohol any longer, it would even become disgusting. If only…
If we can get to the initial cause of the tangle of problems and in some way remove the deep conflict, then the whole system of psychological incrustations can be removed. All pathogenic adaptations will scatter like a house of cards.
You can struggle with the outer layers of a problem for a long time but to the doctor’s surprise all achievements will disappear not leaving any trace, and the old symptoms, which are the expression of adaptations will occur again and again. This will go on till the key change takes place, when the needle is broken, after that all symptoms will become pointless.
There may be a lot of dysfunctional adaptations, practically as many as different psychological and psychical distortions are described. Our view is that even so called diseases can be considered as forms of adaptation to the initial emotional problem. The disease is just the problem that has reached a certain pathological development! Since there are a great number of adaptation firms we will not look at all of them in detail but some variants will be presented. Here we will analyze the structure of the initial problem which leads to emerging the whole system of defenses, oustings and suppressions, secondary defenses and so on. In every case the work with EIT is aimed at getting the person back to being natural, delivering him from all unnecessary adaptations and defenses. Only after getting freedom and naturalness can a person solve the problems to which he surrendered before and because of that created psychological adaptation.
The problem is always a contradiction between an individual’s desire materialized in the energy of a feeling and a barrier on the way to its gratification. If the barrier is something from the outside of the person and can in principle be overcome and the desire is not pathological, then the problem is objective. The problem can be social, economic, scientific, political and so on. It can be solved by an external objective way, that is by overcoming the obstacle and gratifying the desire. For this aim it is necessary sometimes to earn money, sometimes to invent something, sometimes to resort to diplomacy or to turn for help and so on…
The problem becomes psychological only when the reasons of failure are in the psyche of the individual himself. In other words, either the desire is “wrong” or the obstacle on the way to reach the aim is an illusion. For instance, sometimes the obstacle can be impossible to overcome as in the case when you want “to return last year’s snow”. This may be the situation of emotional dependence when love is lost or when a very close person dies. Then obviously, it is necessary to help the individual to get rid of his irrational desire however difficult the task could seem.
When the obstacles are inadequate moral prohibitions, prejudices, complexes, fears and so on, the solution may require not only overcoming the initial impulse but liberating from the obstacle. Since the psychological obstacle can hold back the initial impulse because it is also supported by certain chronic emotions, the essence of the work doesn’t change – the doctor works at overcoming the emotional fixation state.
The problem state in every case may be called a deadlock state. If the actual feelings are strong and there is no way out, some undesirable consequences take place. The initial reaction is most often aggression. The person who got into such situation tries to destroy the barrier but can be aggressive to himself, to his own desire, to the object of his desire, even to strangers. Most people restrain their aggression but constant restrain [control] leads to new difficulties and problems. Another form of reaction is to suppress or oust [suppressing, ousting] one’s own feelings, one’s own desire, grief, anger… The third form is when people transfer their feelings over to other safer objects [transfer]. In the fourth case, people start to avoid any situations in which they may express their feelings [escapism]. In the fifth case, they behave as helpless little children [regression]. In the sixth case, they ascribe to other people their own feelings and desires [projection]. In the seventh case, they quit active life altogether [autism]. In the eighth case, they create symptoms of some illness to justify their failure and not to do something prohibited [forming a symptom]. And so on…
Defenses used by a person help him to adapt but don’t solve the problem. They only preserve the problem and create new problems distorting his interaction with surrounding reality. The key factor determining the degree and the character of the distortions is the energy power of the locked-up feelings and the method of adaptation chosen by the individual. In some cases, this method may become a permanent trait of character or a form of emotional disturbances. The same reason generates chronic muscle tensions [blocks] and various psychosomatic symptoms.
To describe our conception of a psychological problem structure more brightly we can use the following metaphor. In India, they catch monkeys in the following way: hollow out a pumpkin, put some bait inside and leave a small hole, the monkey puts its paw through the hole, grabs the bait, but can’t pull its little fist out because it is bigger than the hole. The hunter comes and catches it easily because it can’t guess to unclench its fist.
People do the same. In their imagination, they have already got the bait and sometimes with the other hand they hold the barrier, and, well, they are caught! Every time you should think what “paw” the client must unclench. At times, there may be quite many such “paws”, but the initial problem is still only one. When it is solved all the rest happens by itself, because “the monkey” is free. The conclusion is: the basis of psychological health is inner freedom. A young man liberated from the unrequited or unfortunate love may say the words of a merry song: “If you bride goes to another man, we don’t know who will be happy in the end!” It means that he unclenched his “paw”. And the one who failed to do it may fall into depression or aggression as in that drama: “Then no one will have you!”
But this is not the only model, there are five
