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Friday, 23 May 2008
Vine swingers
Roses wants to know what happened at the all day training workshop last weekend. Well lots of things happened. One was that I did a presentation on different attachment styles. I got the participants to do a questionnaire to see what attachment style they used in their relationships. Afterwards most were silent and did not want to report what they got to the group. That is always a good sign that the exercise worked.
The other thing that I did was talk about the vine swinger. That person who is the tarzan of human relationships. They grab hold of the next relationship before they have let go of the last one just like tarzan did as he swung through the jungle from vine to vine. Why would they do such a thing? There are a number of reasons and one is shown in the diagram below.
The wife in the second diagram has a very big problem. She has a strong attachment to a person who is now deceased. Never underestimate the importance of human attachment. If one perceives such an attachment to be breaking down then that can make people do very strange things even to the point of murder and suicide.
The wife is about to suffer considerable pain. It is called grief or bereavement which can last for many months. If she does her bereavement well then she will finally get to the place of the last diagram. Because it is so painful then people will do all sorts of things to avoid it and one of those things is to become a vine swinger.
Some people find this a very difficult place to be in. Alone.
Hubby is now dead so she quickly grabs onto another one. Some times called the rebound relationship. And it works. It does lessen the pain of bereavement. The new person and the new relationship does take away some of the pain of grief about Hubby.
The downside of this is that it disrupts the grief process and thus she does not get to the third diagram. This can then result in:
1. The person stops living in the here and now. They are living in the past
2. The child part of them is thinking magically in that it believes at least partly that the person is still with us and they will behave at some level like the person is.
3. The attachment is not freed up so subsequent relationships are disrupted by that.
Unfortunately the old adage applies in such scenarios. Short term pain for long term gain. Have the pain of bereavement and thus the gain is less affected relationships in the future. Alas the vine swinger ends up with short term gain but long term pain.
One way people can formalize human attachment.
I might do more on the vine swinger in another post.
Graffiti
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