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1. SURVIVAL RELATIONSHIPS. These exist when partners feel like they can't make it on their own. Thechoice of a partner tends to be undiscriminating, made out of emotional starvation&emdash;almost anyone available will do.This involves relating at its most basic: "Without you I am nothing; with you I am something." The survival involved may be physical as well as emotional, including the basics of finding shelter, eating, working, and paying bills. For example, a drug addict may be connected with a rigid, regimented partner who holds things together. In such a connection, the desperate quality of my choice is based more on my needs than on what you actually can offer me. Since we are likely to have few shared interests or complementary qualities, there's little positive "glue" to hold us together when our relationship comes under stress. With each of us trying to get the other to provide what we're missing, our union is likely to be a symbiotic, desperately clinging one. Often the relationship is subtly or openly hostile and abusive. One partner or both may be actually afraid he or she could get killed for talking about the partner's drinking or drug addictions or other problems, or for behaving in a way that appears to threaten the relationship. Such fears may have a basis in reality. Relationships where one partner physically abuses the other are often of this kind. Partners may be desperate for caring, or they may be overwhelmed by any sign of caring and not know how to receive it. In the latter case, the desperation may be just to have another person around to provide some kind of contact, order, routine, or even an opponent for fights and arguments. As a result of the desperation for contact and fear of losing it, partners tend to have a very fuzzy sense of their personal boundaries. Their contact is characterized by "confluence," in Fritz Perls' terms, in which it is unclear where one leaves off and the other begins, with considerable projection of the needs of each onto the other and introjection of the other's definitions of oneself. Often partners think in terms of what the other person wants them to want, and are out of touch with what they themselves want. They may have little tolerance for independence and aloneness, and "go everywhere together and do everything together." Instead of taking care of their own needs, they resent the partner for not taking care of their needs. The tiniest flicker of independence can be perceived as a threat. Even going into an ice cream parlor and asking for strawberry ice cream can be perceived as threatening if both of them have always ordered chocolate. Strong feelings of insecurity tend to play a central role. Despite all this, they are getting something out of it. The connection feels better than being alone or institutionalized. Since the partners are so afraid to be alone, when they leave one relationship for another, they tend to make sure there's someone else to jump to before they let go of the person they've been with, or make a quick impulsive choice of a new partner. Since the partners tend to be very dependent personalitis, or "relationship junkies," co-dependency is often a dominant feature of such connections. (Co-dependent relationships can also exist at more sophisticated levels. A person may not feel his or her emotional survival intensely threatened, but the partner can be perceived as an anchor in one's life without whom one is rudderless and lost. This is very common and is often an element in a number of the other relationship types described below.)

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12y ago

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