Italian
A caring and available mother and father who have responded to needs, both physical and emotional, especially in moments of anxiety, suffering, or danger, become an inalienable personal legacy that allows, in crucial moments of life, to activate resources, to draw on the “generous caregiving parent” that has been internalized.
I remember the case of a 12-year-old boy, who often arrived with obvious signs of abuse. When the possibility of social workers’ intervention was mentioned to him, the boy, terrified at the thought of being separated from his meager family unit, began desperately denying the beatings and kept repeating anxiously that his mother loved him… the idea of well-being and love that one builds and to which one remains firmly attached is a very personal idea, often linked to the fact that a child does not possess cognitive, emotional, or comparative tools to determine whether what is proposed to him as a mental caregiving model is good or not.
To love, to smile, to experience positive emotions such as the pleasure of closeness, the warmth of intimate attachment bonds are correlated with overall well-being thanks to a self-reinforcing circuit, a sort of self-fulfilling positive prophecy.
Intimacy and well-being of attachment still need time and care to manifest and consolidate in order to provide full satisfaction. The timing of feelings is dictated by emotion and rarely coincides with the rhythms imposed by work and commitments. However, how often do work, commitments, and activities serve to structure time precisely to avoid the experience of intimate bond?
Let’s see what Gestalt psychology says: The entire existential path seems to be designed by the constant interplay of balance-imbalance between the “needs and resources” of the organism and the “resources and demands” of the environment.
Every experience, naturally, follows a process that in “Gestalt Therapy” is defined as a “contact cycle”, in which from a phase of gradual approach to the external or internal environment that signals a need, a necessity, a problem to solve (pre-contact) we move on to the identification of behavioral options, to the mobilization of energy in the search for possible satisfaction of the need in the environment (contact initiation) and to the enactment of appropriate behavior (contact – full contact) with a consequent feeling of accomplishment, satisfaction, and integration of the experience into personal history (post-contact), until the closure of the contact with this part of the internal or external environment that had activated the process (withdrawal).
When the need/desire is allowed to clearly emerge in the figure from the background of the perceptual field, the experience follows the course of dynamic balance, experiencing fulfillment, well-being, and energy flowing in the process of self-regulation.
All the complexity of human behavior, from a brief experience, a simple action like eating an apple, to relational experiences like a love encounter, to understanding the entire cycle of life, respond to the same process of approach-contact-withdrawal, imbalance-dissatisfaction-rebalancing action-equilibrium-satisfaction. Emotion is what signals the need, which in the early stages of life only responds to the “pleasure-displeasure” code and then becomes a differentiated emotional code that adults understand through moment-to-moment awareness of their experience. Adults always carry with them the experiences they have with themselves and with others in the world, processed through their emotional and relational history, thus easily creating stress, discomfort, and psychophysical pathologies.
Emotional blocks manifest in the way individuals do things: in the way they speak, walk, in their postures and gestures, in other words, in the way they exist in the world.
When contact with needs is interrupted and discomfort appears, it is necessary to repair the primary emotional wound, recovering not the content of the painful experience, which belongs only to the past, but its lived experience. If you want to overcome fear, you must enter into it and go through it.
Dr. Maura Luperto
