Giorgio Nardone is considered one of the fathers of strategic brief therapy, this psychotherapist has written numerous books in which he has dealt with topics as complex as eating disorders, fear and the most important discoveries in psychology. To deepen his ideas, today we will analyze 5 phrases by Giorgio Nardone on a specific topic: the mistakes of women in love.
Giorgio has a book on this subject: “The Mistakes of Women In Love. “In this work, Nardone gives us up to 17 roles that women usually play in love, and who have curious names like?The fairy? Or? The frog’s kiss?. The funny thing is that we identify with many of them, because they are forms of relationship that we learn in our lives and that society has normalized as normal behaviors.
- “Even the most exciting stimulus.
- If it is very recurrent.
- Reduces its effects due to our perceptual and physiological adaptation.
- For emotion to continue.
- Do we need constant changes?.
This is the first of Giorgio Nardone‘s phrases, and it nullifies one of the beliefs of romantic love, which considers that if we reach true love, passion will never diminish, that is not reality. Unchanged, emotion eventually dies, like the flame of a candle. Nardone offers two options to solve this problem.
“In the phase where we are in love, we see the other person according to what we want to see: love is the most sublime deception. When this initial impulse in the relationship loses strength, is disappointment inevitable?
During the passion phase, we idealize the other person and the expectations we have of him make us not see what we do not like so much, this first stage of the relationship, however, has a fixed duration, when it ends, the ideal that we have invented for the other person inside our mind breaks.
It is then that one is surprised by the real characteristics of the person, finding what he has tolerated before being unbearable, this disappointment can be such a blow that the relationship loses its strength and begins to deteriorate, so we must be aware of the existence of these self-deceptions to try to identify the defects before we are surprised by the end of the idealized passion.
“To maintain onese, a relationship must satisfy both your needs and your desires: in a couple two selfishnesses coincide. When these selfishnesses don’t match, doesn’t the relationship work?
This third sentence by Giorgio Nardone allows us to reflect on the selfishness that exists in each relationship, understanding them as the needs and desires that we hope to be satisfied by the other person.
For example, imagine that we understand as a couple two people who are very fond of each other, in addition, forming a couple should be something that makes us feel good, where we give everything and hope to receive the same in return. Let’s say, however, that our partner is cold, distant, and generally doesn’t show much affection.
In this case, the selfishness of this relationship did not coincide and, therefore, over time, it would be very clear that the couple can no longer move forward, the reason is in the likely appearance of conflicts, since one requires something that the other cannot give.
To complete, by definition, is to add something that is missing. In addition, in relationships where this is believed to occur, the base usually involves dysfunctional elements of the interaction between two subjects that feed.
We all understand the concept of “couples complementing each other,” like two people who fit in and fit well, but, according to Nardone, when two people complement each other, there’s a dysfunctional element in the middle. For example, there may be a dominant person and a submissive person within the partner.
Just because these people complement each other in a relationship doesn’t necessarily mean the bond is healthy. In addition to being healthy, an emotionally dependent person may be attracted to someone with avoidance characteristics. As you can see, there may be couples complementing each other, but they are clearly dysfunctional.
“The couple, as a living system, must adapt to maintain their balance, evolving in parallel with the evolutionary changes that time inevitably brings them. “
The last of Giorgio Nardone’s sentences allows us to realize, if we weren’t before, that a couple needs to change over time. It’s not a negative thing, quite the opposite. Knowing how to adapt to these changes will be an indication that the couple is able to move on.
Problems, lack of passion, routine, children . . . All of this can exhaust the relationship. However, they must be able to adapt and seek solutions, if you don’t pursue it and start blaming the other, for example, the relationship will be doomed sooner or later.
Each of Giorgio Nardone’s phrases helps us see love in a romantic relationship in a different way, forcing us to observe and analyze what we often lack Which of these phrases do you identify with the most?Is there one that makes you think about your own relationship?
Images courtesy of Henn Kim