Counselling -

Unknown Facts About Living

With a Pain Addicted Mate

The natural and healthy desire for a single person is to find a suitable mate and create happy home together. What many people are unaware of, even those familiar with marriage counselling, is that large numbers of people who commit to marriage do it with no real goal or objective in mind. Worse than that, many have a bunch of unexpressed negative expectations.

These sort of people often have grave fears of the worst possible scenario happening in their marriages. If this becomes the habitual mental focus they hold onto, they become what I refer to as “pain addicts.”

These types of people don’t easily see the way their thinking is hurting their marriage relationship, and generally consider their perspective as being sound. The pain addicted mate is one who has gone through many difficulties in life and instead of seeing these experiences as temporary, they have chosen to believe that they are permanent, commonplace experiences.

Solid counselling strategies can help this individual to discover where these buried hurts lay and get a better perspective on how they are affecting their relationship. In most cases, the deep wounds happened in childhood and have formed a stronghold in the person’s psyche.

What the person expected from life when they were 12 years of age, can end up being the same expectations they hold onto until they reach the grave. A simple example of this can be found in someone who had to speak in front of their class in grade three, and flopped terribly. This same person is now 45 years old and they still believe they are lousy at public speaking and the thought of doing so causes them to feel ill.

Beliefs about marriage that pollute can be picked up from living with parents that were consistently at odds with each other. The pain addicted mate claims to want a happy marriage, yet holds tightly onto beliefs that “it can never work.” They may be unaware of contradictory thoughts they have in their head, but that is little consolation for their mate and family who find themselves fighting a losing battle.

Pain addiction is something that can be overcome if the person is willing to lift their sights higher than they’ve been before. Hopes and dreams need to be unearthed and focused upon consistently for there to be measurable progress. Just because feeling lousy or mediocre seems like a normal state of being, doesn’t make it healthy and productive. This sort of addiction produces the same sort of destructive results as alcoholism or work addiction. It breaks apart families and marriages with no regard for age or race if it is left unchecked.