The man looks elegant and steady, and the woman looks sweet and cute, but they have only been married for 2 years and often quarrel over particularly trivial things, on average about 1-2 times a week, each quarrel basically ends on the same day, and everyone forgets the reason for the quarrel afterwards.
She feels that her husband has many problems, is not good for herself, often ignores herself, and is afraid that her husband will cheat; He felt that she was sometimes an angel, sometimes a demon... What is the truth of the matter?
▼ Marriage and family expert Li Jianxue teacher interprets for you.
Two years ago, Mr. Ding and his wife, who are in their 30s, came to me for marriage psychological counseling, and my husband looked elegant and steady, and my wife looked sweet and cute. The wife complained that the man had many problems, and repeatedly taught and disobeyed, and sometimes quarreled and beat people, hoping that through psychological counseling, the husband could become "obedient".
Hearing this, I smiled slightly. The wife continued to say that Mr. has a particularly bad personality and has a big problem, and hopes to adjust Mr. 's personality a little better.
Speaking of which, I took a look at the gentleman, and the gentleman's expression was very helpless.
I asked my husband, "How do you feel when my wife says that?" ”
Mr. smiled bitterly and said: "She always said that I have a problem, I think the problem is on her, just take yesterday's incident, my sister is going to come over to play for a few days, called me in advance, when I told her about this, she immediately became angry, saying why my sister is not looking for her but looking for me, she said that she is the mistress of this family, because I usually disrespect her, so they look down on her, so they dare to ignore her existence like this, so it started an inexplicable war, you say I am aggrieved or not aggrieved?" ”
As soon as the husband said this, the wife grabbed the head of the conversation and said, "Isn't that so?" If he hadn't disrespected me and treated me badly, could they be so arrogant and insult to me? So this time, I hope that Mr. Li can help us evaluate and see if it is his problem or mine? ”
I nodded and said, "Okay, then let's discuss it together, see where the root of the problem is, and see who has more problems." ”
They often quarrel over particularly trivial matters
In the process of counseling, when I asked about the frequency of their quarrels and the situation after that, the wife took the initiative to answer, the couple will quarrel about 1-2 times a week on average, each quarrel basically ends on the same day, many times it is for some trivial things to argue, the result of the fight will escalate to quarrel, the more the two quarrel, sometimes even hands, generally can quarrel from night to 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, quarrel until finally can't quarrel, often with a hearty sex to end the war.
Waking up the next morning to regain your old affection, as if nothing had happened last night.
The pattern of arguing - arguing - sex - reconciliation, repeats itself over and over again.
They were exhausted from each other, so the couple decided to come to the Counseling Center to seek professional marriage counseling help.
When I asked them what kind of trivial things they usually quarreled over and wanted them to give an example, the two shook their heads almost at the same time and said that they didn't remember, and they knew that it was a very trivial little thing. When asked who was the initiator of the war, the two agreed almost in unison that it was basically all initiated by the woman, and it was also the woman who started beating people. Knowing this information, I felt that it might be better to communicate with them individually at this time.
She felt that her husband had many problems and was not good for herself
When I consult with my wife, my wife talks more about her husband's badness, for example, she sometimes calls her husband to bring some fruit home, and the stock at home is not much, but often her husband either forgets or does not buy it, which makes her very angry.
also said that sometimes even if Mr. is at home, he doesn't talk to her much, and he cares about playing with his mobile phone and iPad, just ignoring her, she will feel particularly insulted, she is a big living person here, but there is no mobile phone, iPad, okay? He would rather play with these lifeless broken machines than talk to her.
Whenever she felt this way, she felt that she was not valued, ignored, respected, and felt that her husband did not love her.
She said that whenever this happens, the inner emotions are difficult to control, it is easy to go crazy, like a bottomless pit, feeling that life has no meaning, and there is no decline in the heart. At this time, she wanted to quarrel with her husband, accuse her husband of being bad to herself, and must make her swear over and over again that she will only love her one in her life. When her husband really did this, gambling over and over again and swearing to love her alone, her heart calmed down a little. Sometimes I feel very pitiful, no one hurts and no one loves, even if my husband loves her now, will he still love her in the future? If he meets other girls in the future and likes others, what will he do then?
When asked why the wife thinks so, the wife said that the husband is the manager of a company, and recently changed a new female secretary, this new secretary looks gentle and generous, standing with the husband is very good, she feels very uncomfortable, always wants the husband to fire the female secretary. But the husband always said that she was thinking too much, and he had nothing to do with the secretary. Sometimes when she thought of this, she felt that her husband was wrong with anything, as if he was ready to leave her at any moment.
For this reason, she always plays a "suicide" game from time to time, threatening that if her husband leaves her, she will make him regret it for the rest of his life. Even once the husband only went to the field for a few days, because she was taking a bath and did not receive her call, she went crazy and called her dozens of times in half an hour, if not for the husband coming out in time to reply to her, and repeatedly assured that there was no one else around, she would almost take the plane that night to rush to the city where the husband is. Sometimes thinking about it, she also feels crazy, but when the emotions come, she can't do anything at all.
When asked if her husband was particularly kind to her wife, she said one thing that made her feel very warm, such as her cold hands and feet in winter, and her husband sometimes made hot water to wash her feet. She said that when she was in a good mood, she would also feel that her husband was indeed very good to her.
In the process of counseling, I also learned that my wife has 4 siblings, two older sisters and one younger brother, and since she was a child, she has felt that her parents love her younger brother more, and the relationship between her and her parents is not good, she rarely goes home, and occasionally quarrels with her family when she comes home.
He felt that she was sometimes the devil and sometimes an angel
During the private consultation, the husband said that he really felt very tired in the face of his wife's frequent "madness", as if he was coaxing a little girl who would never grow up, and he had to hold her in the palm of his hand at all times, and she would be angry and even threaten suicide if she was not careful.
Especially every night after a fight, the wife asked for sex like a nobody, he was the most miserable, he couldn't adjust his emotions, but he had to pretend to be very excited and struggle.
But when she is in good shape, she is a completely different person, gentle and cute, making it difficult for you to love her or not. Speaking of the relationship between the wife and relatives and friends, the husband said that the wife not only has a bad relationship with her parents, but also has a bad relationship with siblings, colleagues, and friends, and many times she feels good at the beginning, and will alienate her one by one in the end.
So my husband can sometimes understand why his wife has to hold on to herself so tightly, because there are too few people around her who care about her.
Consulting evaluation and consulting programs
After understanding this information, I showed my wife the following diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder and asked her to do a self-assessment.
According to the latest version of DSM-IV-TR, the main symptoms of borderline personality disorders are as follows:
1. Crazy efforts to avoid being abandoned in real or imagined.
2. Unstable and tense patterns of interpersonal relationships, characterized by shifts between the extremes of over-idealization and denial of their values.
3. Identity disorder: Persistent marked instability of self image or sense of self.
4. Impulsive behaviors that may lead to self-harm in at least two aspects.
5. Repeated suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-injurious behavior.
6. Unstable emotional performance due to over-reaction.
7. Feeling empty for a long time.
8. Inappropriate and intense anger, or difficulty controlling anger.
9. Transient paranoid thoughts associated with stress or severe dissociative symptoms.
If 5 or more of the above 9 points are met, borderline personality disorder can be diagnosed.
After reading it, the wife confessed that she did have these problems, and there were definitely no less than 5 of them. After assessment, the gentleman said in surprise: "I didn't expect that she actually had every one, is her situation very serious?" Teacher Li, you must help her. ”
Borderline personality disorder is a type of mental illness that is easily overlooked because the person lacks self-knowledge and is not clear about his real problem. They often come to psychological counseling because of emotional problems, intimate relationship problems, career development problems, interpersonal relationship problems, etc., such as Mrs. Ding. She comes to counsel about marital problems, and if the diagnosis is not accurate and targeted, it will affect the effectiveness of the counseling.
People with borderline personality disorder are insecure about relationships and do not have a stable relationship pattern and cognition. In counseling, when he admires the counselor extremely much, he will blindly fantasize and fantasize that the counselor is a very perfect person; But sometimes she will belittle the counselor to worthlessness, she will say that you are not good, you are not a good person, but at the same time she cannot do without you, she may say that you are not good every day, but she wants to find you every day.
People with borderline personality disorder are not only to counselors, they also treat people in intimate relationships in life, and their troubles are mainly manifested in relationships.
▼ It has the following characteristics:
(1) I may be abandoned at any time, so I will work hard
Such people will work frantically to avoid the real or imagined possibility of abandonment.
For example, Mrs. Ding in the text, due to her insecurity, she is extremely afraid of being ignored and abandoned by her husband, but she always can't help imagining that she may be abandoned at any time. In order to avoid this possible abandonment, she would either give up the relationship first, or she will work hard in the relationship, what to do? Control!
Strive to let all events be controlled by themselves, strive to let all people be controlled by themselves, once there are some events that they do not know, or some links that she does not know, such as Mr. did not receive his own call when he was on a business trip, which is equivalent to him disappearing from his sight, she will become very panicked, her phone will keep coming, she must know in detail where you are now, what you are doing, who you are with, and whether you have her in your heart at the moment. Because she feels abandoned at any time, she strives to be in full control.
Therefore, sometimes we can see such a person grabbing you like an octopus when getting along with people, and the people around him will even feel love drowning you like a tide, he is good to you, under the banner of being good to you, but you are so uncomfortable and full of depression.
Under the banner is good for you, she also firmly believes that this is for your good, and does a lot of things to not be ignored, and the motivation behind this is her fear of being abandoned and ignored. This kind of abandonment and neglect may be real or nothing, but whether this is real or not, she will be very concerned and nervous, so she will try very hard to do something to prevent what she is worried about from happening.
Because of the fear of being abandoned, so to strive to become a controlling personality, temper, all things to do according to their own ideas, if they can't reach it, under the banner of love, in the name of caring for others to control others, extremely insecure, the result is intimate relationships and interpersonal relationship chaos.
(2) I hate you, but I can't do without you
In an intimate relationship, repeatedly jumping from one extreme to another, the people who get along with him are tormented, especially those who have an intimate relationship with him, and they get along with him in torture.
People with whom he is intimate may be imagined by him as perfect people, but will soon be denied again. He switches back and forth between extreme perfection and debasement. The most typical is the relationship with the counselor, who said for a while that you are particularly powerful and adoring; But it is possible that in a few days you will be reduced to nothing, thinking that you are not helping him in anything.
But in the process of conversion, he will not leave you, he does not say that I hate you and leave you, he will not leave you, he will belittle you while relying on you. One moment I think you are perfect, the next I feel bad, and the relationship is extremely unstable.
If we see such a person around us, we have to be careful about the relationship with him.
(3) I have always wondered what kind of person I am
Each of us has an identity with ourselves, this identity is the characteristic of personality stability, we know that the most stable part of a person is personality, what kind of values it has, what kind of attitude to life, to life, to themselves is not so easy to change, so some people say "easy to change, nature is difficult to shift". There is also a relatively stable cognition of yourself, if you feel that you are a good person for a while, and you feel that you are a bad person for a while; One moment I feel that I am valuable, and the next I feel that I am worthless, which has some obstacles to my identity, and my personality is relatively not very stable. The image of the self is also, one moment feel that they look good, the next time feel bad, repeatedly, there is no objective assessment, which is a more significant performance of this type of person.
We generally don't change our values and perceptions of life because of a little thing. Unless it is a big emergency, have a new understanding, re-comprehend life, and then arrange your role in the crowd, and then recognize what kind of person you are, such as a person who lost a loved one in a major earthquake disaster, he will re-recognize the value of life, at this time you will find that his outlook on life has changed, this change is objective and understandable, because his life has indeed changed.
That's why we say that people who have experienced major events will have a new understanding of their lives after experiencing these events and rearrange their understanding of people.
If he does not have such a stressful state in his life, but he still always doubts what kind of person he is, we have to consider whether his personality is unstable and whether there is a problem.
(4) I should be punished because I am not good enough
When something has a bad result because we didn't do it well, we will feel guilty; Then we blame ourselves for not doing a good job, blame ourselves for why we didn't do that, this is self-blame; If you do something wrong, you should be punished, so you start self-masochism. This type of person has conflicting perceptions of himself in his heart, and he thinks that he deserves a certain punishment, so he has a tendency to self-destruct, and self-destruction is actually self-abuse.
There are three ways to manifest self-abuse:
First, I am not good enough, so I have to take action to punish myself, what is the way, that is, directly hurt myself;
Second, in order to achieve the purpose of destroying myself and punishing myself, I do not do this to myself, but to others, in order to achieve a way of hurting me in turn because others have been hurt by me. For example, if I borrow someone else's money and don't pay it back, waiting for others to come to me, beat me, and scold me, this is a kind of self-abuse;
Third, the third is to live his life as a mess, very uninteresting, some things in theory and objective reality he can do very well, but when the time comes to the critical he will do things badly, there will always be some events, so that this thing can not develop in a good way. If such events occur in a cyclical manner in a person's life, then that person may have hidden tendencies for self-destruction.
(5) I will die for you so that you will pay attention to me
The performance behavior of such people is repeated suicidal behavior, or a suicidal posture.
We all know that if a person thinks about suicide and wants to give up his life, then he can do it once, or he has really been traumatized at the psychological level and wants to give up his life for a certain period of time.
But this type of people repeatedly perform suicide to others, or even to themselves, and the motivation behind the performance is to make you care about me and pay attention to me, only then will you value me and feel my existence.
If this category of people is more serious, it will become a performative personality disorder, so often "wolves come... The wolf is coming..." leaving the people around him at a loss. Among the suicide deaths, some people inadvertently commit suicide successfully, in fact, they "mistakenly kill" themselves, death is not their real intention, they are just performing, hoping to take extreme behaviors and postures to attract attention, which is the "no way" for such people.
(6) I can't control my emotions
The mood of this type of person is happy for a while, worried for a while, and unstable mood for a long time. The emotional space of our average person can be divided into 3:7, that is, 3 points are negative, 7 points are positive, and unhappiness is just a time period.
But the emotional response of this type of person's mood is extremely unstable and easily provoked, and anxiety lasts for several hours, temper for several hours, and happy for several hours, and his emotional response is not a reaction that lasts for several days. Emotions cannot be controlled at all, belonging to a state of emotional loss of control, which is also one of the criteria for diagnosing borderline personality disorder.
He will feel very empty, and it will last for a long time and can not let go, the long-term emptiness and loneliness will not be transferred by time, not by the environment in which he is located, and his heart will always be full of emptiness, which will not be relieved by a normal lifestyle and interpersonal relationship. Even if he is in a crowd, there will always be a long-term sense of emptiness in his heart.
(7) Paranoia, separation, but I am not schizophrenic
Short-term stress and related stress concepts, encounter some events will have some extreme thoughts, this extreme thinking and many people are inconsistent, this type of people will evolve into paranoid personality disorder. Or a more serious dissociative symptom, psychologically called "dissociative personality".
In the case of schizophrenia, the spirit is in a state of loss of control, and the self-manifestation of an external action is split from the inner spatial self. The dissociative personality is separate, it is sometimes combined together, so it cannot be diagnosed as schizophrenia, and it cannot be diagnosed as neurosis, neurosis dominates two ideas are comparable, two selves, two ideas conflict with each other; Schizophrenia is when two forces do not interact with each other; And this dissociative personality, he sometimes merges, sometimes separates, merges, separates, most of them tend to be paranoid or dissociated.
Most people with borderline personality disorder have had a childhood experience of abuse, or neglect, or forcibly leaving their loved ones to care for them. Childhood is influenced by emotionally unstable parents, resulting in a partial split personality, an inability to integrate the poles of good and bad, and an inability to develop a unified and integrated concept of the world.
As a result, the lack of security in the world forms absolutely good and absolutely bad expectations, neither of which is realistic, but oscillates at these two poles - forming an extremely unstable personality.
After Mr. and Mrs. Ding understood this, we jointly determined the counseling goals and counseling plan. With the progress of the consultation, Mr. has learned more about his wife, Mr. knows that his wife's personality is related to his early experience, her willfulness, control, capriciousness, vexatious is not intentional, is a pathological reaction, and his entanglement with himself is more derived from his early relationship with his parents, Mr. also understands that when his wife is emotionally unstable, as long as he can give the promise and assurance of love, the wife can slowly calm down.
Thanks to Mr. Ding's understanding and cooperation, his wife also increased her confidence in treatment. During the counseling process, her relationship with her parents and siblings was greatly improved after using counseling techniques to return her to the past and repair her early trauma.
In the following six months of counseling, through the comprehensive use of cognitive therapy, analytical therapy, behavioral therapy, positive psychotherapy, image therapy, psychodrama technology, and empty chair technology, her cognition was adjusted and her mood was well improved.
Especially after using the empty chair technique for many times to let her talk to the child inside, and using image therapy to let the angel in her heart talk to the devil, she can obviously feel the gradual maturity of her mind, her black and white, partial mind-set is slowly replaced by more gray areas and flexible thinking, she also gradually understands that sometimes the world she sees is not an objective world, and gradually knows that she likes to push the responsibility to others and the objective environment without looking for problems from herself. Learn more about the weaknesses of my character.
Due to her ability to perceive others, self-awareness and ability to control emotions has been improved, her whole person has become more and more peaceful, her emotions have become more and more stable, and eventually the relationship between husband and wife has been well improved.
Experts in this issue
I heard that Li Jianxue, chief counselor, senior marriage counselor, and sexual psychology counselor of the psychological counseling center
Li Jianxue
・Hear about it, chief expert of the Psychological Counseling Center
Member of the Professional Committee of Psychological Counselors of Guangdong Mental Health Association
Senior Marriage Counselor
Senior Family Education Instructor
Psychosexual counselor
Senior hypnotist