The work and relationships that allow us to lead a life similar to the one that has been drawn to us as ideal, often takes us away from our deepest longings and desires. Connecting with them will make us remove the feeling of loneliness and emptiness that we can feel.
It is surprising to find divorced, separated women, aged between fifty and sixty, who still wait for a love to fill their lives, which leaves marks of pain on their bodies. They feel empty. Alone
However, a woman is not alone because she does not have a partner, she is because she cannot extinguish the hope of finding an intimate bond that fills her life. A woman is alone if she cannot diversify her sources of pleasure, so necessary for her mental, emotional and bodily well-being. A woman is alone if in affective relationships she does not know how to put her desires before her needs.
WHERE DOES THE FEELING OF EMPTINESS COME FROM
We come into the world unprotected and in need of love, and yet civilization imposes on us a series of contradictory ideals that hurt: on the one hand, romantic love and, on the other, the ideals of strength and power.
The romantic love that songs, stories, novels sing… makes us vulnerable and in need of a love that fills our deepest longings.
The ideals of strength and power despise vulnerability and cause us not to talk about our weaknesses, to hide suffering or the need for help.
Many people fearful of life eagerly seek security and try to obtain it through accumulating money, saving and accumulating assets, thinking that this way they will feel protected in old age.
But that excessive concern projected into the future requires not living in the present, refusing to enjoy pleasant experiences that are necessary for our passage through existence to have more heat and color.
The search for security is a claim that can become dangerous because there are never any guarantees.
We know from clinical experience addictions to work so as not to encounter a void; Also, addictions to love for the same cause. And we know the aggressiveness that is unleashed by frustrations, which can be directed towards those who are closest to us or towards ourselves.
Anchoring in reality always supposes a certain renunciation of pleasure, but with limits if we do not want to get sick. We can miss opportunities for joy and satisfaction, bent on putting off our deepest longings, as if our time were eternal, for the sake of safety.
NEED AND DESIRE ARE NOT THE SAME THING
A healthy emotional life is based on three fundamental pillars: work, health and emotional life. When any of the three fails, the rest are unbalanced.
In times of deprivation, need prevails and desire starves. The more needs, the greater the risk of establishing relationships that we do not like, simply because loneliness becomes unbearable.
Work is a powerful introduction to reality, but it is not always satisfying, and you do not always have it. That’s when reality forces us to look for pleasant compensations that give us the opportunity to open a hole for hope.
The family is a place where you can find refuge, but where deprivation of your own desires to care for your children is also imposed; the desire for a lighter and more pleasant life is then postponed.
Any experience of contact with others involves a risk, and the most vital people take it better.
Others remain prey to their desire for comfort and establish alliances that offer them material or emotional security even at the cost of their own desire. What a bitter experience that of those women who pledged their lives to support their loved ones without listening to themselves because they did not feel authorized to do so!
Women who, when they have more freedom because their children are no longer at home, feel that they have lost the opportunity to live what they would have most wanted.
LOSE FEAR OF UNCERTAINTY
Excessive work can be such a considerable stress that it can lead to a heart attack; A too costly renunciation of our most vital desires can make our mind and body sick: asthma, gastric ulcers, irritable bowel, skin problems, panic attacks, depression, anxiety …
The body expresses what we want to silence. Not to mention that life has an expiration date…
This must be taken into account to establish a sensible limit between the necessary sacrifice of those desires that hinder the means to maintain our existence, and the space that we will give to those other desires so as not to get sick or not to spend life as inert beings.
Desire is a powerful engine of life that includes all the yearnings and desires for fulfillment that make us feel alive, whether professionally, sentimentally or sexually.
Our privacy cannot be neglected to be healthy. It needs to be satisfied in various aspects that include the need for recognition, gratitude, the warmth of friendship, love, sexuality, to mention the most intimate, but also a social recognition, a projection of our potentialities, the realization of our ambitions.
Taking charge of the housekeeping, ensuring the education and development of the children and becoming the emotional support of the whole family implies that many women renounce their own desires that do not include being for others: they will renounce professional fulfillment or work, economic independence … Women are required to take care of others.
And this sacrifice has a cost that is paid with the body of pain, with depressions that cannot find words to explain them, psychosomatic discomforts without justified reasons, self-destructive behaviors for directing hatred towards themselves.
Those who try to develop their ambitions as men do also pay for their frustrations as they do, with stressful excesses.
How will we go from the body of pain to the body of joy? Eros is an important civilizing instrument and an antidote to sadness. Eros are the deep desires that give us strength to fight in life and for life, for our dearest interests, to take care of those we love and of ourselves.
REGAIN JOY AND PLEASURE
The right to sexuality as a privileged means of accessing intimacy is human, only because of cultural blindness is it allowed for men and censored for women. If we open our spirit to what we truly want, our body would receive the care it deserves and would make it noticed.
In fact, when this happens, our appearance changes, not because of external interventions that provide artificial youth, but because our eyes shine, our skin becomes smoother, our gait lightens, our health improves, and we regain hope and confidence to live a fuller life. And so, we transmit it, offering a share of hope with which we want to express that another life is possible.
But courage is needed because we live immersed in the culture of sacrifice, of the impossible demands that only generate sadness and a feeling of worthlessness.
Once I received a message of good wishes for the New Year from which I will reproduce some phrases that help create and strengthen the body of joy: “More kisses than slaps, more poetry and less speeches, more sex than chastity, more dreams than nightmares, more wealth and less money, more justice and fewer trials, more books and fewer newspapers, more men and fewer males, more women and less submissive”.
Hopefully each of these ideas will catch on in our emotions. Our body and our mental health will thank us.
