Do you want to know a top secret in handling any relationship?
This is essential, whether your relationship is with your spouse or partner, your parent, your child, or your friend.
Ready? Here it is: do not be a hostage-taker!
Reality is, many are experts at “hostage-taking” in their relationships.
I know you might get confused. That word, “hostage-taking,” is something we usually only hear applied to war, abductions, prison camps, terrorism, or criminal acts.
But here, I’m telling you that it can also be applied to the way lots of people around the world handle their relationships.
My marital therapy sessions with Mandy and Mario were going roundabout. In a persistent circular causality. Stuck, not moving forward.
One major reason was Mandy’s daily hostage-taking of her husband. And deep, stubborn inner resistance and unwillingness to change.
Mandy’s hostage-taking was done by her compulsive checking and dictating on, and controlling/manipulating his schedules, his home and office behaviors, his salary and spending, his friends, his thoughts and feelings.
Mario simply just got fed up. “I’m done! I want this marriage dissolved! Let me be free!” he shouted during our last prematurely terminated Zoom therapy session.
Hostage-taking is one’s need for security transferred into a need for extreme attention from and for another person.
It’s the hostage-taker’s tight clinging to and controlling of the other person. It suffocates the hostage victim. It withers him.
The hostage-taker takes the hostage in prison where she dwells. No one wins. No one grows. No one celebrates when one is forcibly bound to the other.
Such relationship slowly dies … until healed and set free.
We learn a healing remedy for this from therapist/author Karen Casey, who explains in her bestselling book “Let Go Now:”
“Our role in one another’s life is to nurture growth and peace and wholeness. This can only happen when the touch we offer one another is light, not tight. When we release rather than grasp. When we celebrate freedom, not stifle it.”
That’s a top secret in handling any relationship.
myonlinepsychotherapyph.com
