Coffee With Rajendra - A Conversational Psychotherapy Experience

When I was in first year of my college, I believed myself to be committed to pure monogamy, wherein I believed that I will have only one romantic partner for whole life, whatever may come. I was very bigoted towards this. I prepared my own detailed set of rules and expectations I will have from this person, and I decided that whoever comes into my life should first agree to all these expectations before entering. I imagined conversations between me and my prospective partners day and night. I was very elaborate and very  logical. Irony was that I had never been in a real romantic relationship by then. The rules I was creating were based more on fears, rather than on hopes. My awareness about who I am and what I want to be was substantially based on things I hated and people I didn't want to be like. My affinity to pure monogamy was based on my abhorrence for sins of serial monogamy prevalent in society. I saw it in other people's romantic relationships in school, college. What ...

In my life, the phenomenon I have observed to be the most common cause of emotional instability and damaged relationships is "Splitting". As per definition from the blog priorygroup.com, Splitting is a psychological mechanism which allows the person to tolerate difficult and overwhelming emotions by seeing someone as either good or bad, idealised or devalued. This makes it easier to manage the emotions that they are feeling, which on the surface seem to be contradictory. I first came across the term 'splitting' in the book titled 'How to overcome your childhood' published by The School of Life. The author described Splitting as one of the emotional disabilities that originate initially as a coping mechanism to simplify the world which otherwise is overwhelmingly complex to  make sense of, that we unfortunately and unconsciously carry on into our adulthood much longer after we have developed enough psychological capacities to see and understand the reality in m...