When you sting with the spine of a flower you feel a shame, however, sometimes that same thorn stays for a while and we can’t get it out, we know it’s here, but now the pain is different. even hold on for a while until we can extract it. In human relationships, sometimes the same thing happens, with what we call self-destructive adaptation.
People can normalize suffering in surprising and unexpected ways; In addition, most of us do not know how far our innate adaptability goes; We often see him in the workplace: some people spend decades in a situation where their rights are violated, harassed or assaulted.
- Can you manage everything to get a salary at the end of the month?Sometimes it’s much more than the monetary issue.
- We can stay in this difficult job because that’s what we have and ‘it’s hard to get another one’.
- Thus.
- Through these verbalizations and justifications.
- The person adapts without feeling the weight of the psychological division that causes something like this.
Self-destructive adaptation goes beyond mere masochism and contains a series of realities worth living.
The phenomenon of self-destructive adaptation has been studied for years in the psychological field, it is always impressive and inexplicable from the outside. Self-destructive and deregulated behaviors can only be understood from one point of view: the behavior in which someone receives something in return.
For example, any addictive behavior, such as alcohol or drug use, is harmful. However, the person gets pleasure in return; dependency and self-destruction therefore appear. The same goes for practices such as excision or self-harm. In this case, physical pain acts as an outlet for emotional pain.
Now, what explanation can we give to the fact that someone has been in an unhappy relationship for years, why does a person who is constantly betrayed continue to maintain this bond, what benefits can a person who has degrading work have?
Let’s look at the possible causes
To understand the causes that sometimes mediate self-destructive adaptation, you can go to the essentials: the human personality, and while you may be surprised, there is a profile that is moving towards these harmful practices to the point of normalizing them. Theodore Millon, an American psychologist who pioneered personality research, spoke for the first time about it:
For Theodore Millon, self-destructive adaptation was once a feature of border-limiting personality disorder.
In addition to self-destructive personality, there is a different type of behavior, we are talking about the masochistic personality, which would enter a very specific clinical category: self-destructive personality disorder or masochistic.
A study by Dr. Otto Kernberg defines its characteristics
Seeing someone relentlessly tolerate suffering keeps bothering us, but before judging we have to understand.
Imagine someone who suffered physical and psychological abuse as a child, who understood from an early age that love is sometimes accompanied by humiliations, and that those who love you can also make you cry and suffer.
Without a doubt, something like this explains why many people tolerate pain and don’t react.
What will become of me if I leave this relationship, where will I go?Where am I going, what opportunities will I have?Resistance to change in humans is a factor we don’t pay for. Sometimes it is so ingrained and puts so many obstacles in our potential and well-being that it becomes pathological.
These are situations in which fear of change is more frightening than the experience experienced, self-destructive adaptation tends to normalize so much pain and humiliation that no other way of life is contemplated, in these situations it is essential to always have a good support network.
Breaking the web that self-destructive adaptation wees around requires nurturing self-esteem and establishing a distance to perceive what is happening Having someone to help us is essential, but it all depends on ourselves, our decision and our belief that we do not deserve to continue to tolerate the intolerable.