We brought it from home

Authors: Emőke Bagdy, Dr. Mária Angster, Zsuzsa F. Várkonyi, Dániel Kozma-Vízkeleti, Liza Lukács, Noémi Orvos-Tóth, Ferenc Pál, Péter Popper We get to know each other, love each other and decide to try life together. We seem to be starting with a completely clean slate, as this is a new relationship, shaping it the way we want it to. In addition, we are full of enthusiasm, confidence, and positive feelings for each other. Soon, however, we may find ourselves beginning to develop this relationship as before - in fact, its operation is suspiciously similar to what we once saw at home, in our own family of origin. We should be aware that the basic pattern of our relationships — that is, how we connect with our partner, how we relate to him, how we communicate with him — comes with us from our childhood. Both we and our partner come into contact with a “basic package,” and it turns out relatively quickly that deep intrusions define our lives together. Often, we can’t even justify why we feel and behave the same way in a given situation, because our many automatic, spontaneous responses are nothing more than echoes of our old injuries. It is also possible that I am already somewhat aware of all this and say that we will certainly not be like our parents, we will not treat each other the way they did. However, conscious determination alone is not enough to rewrite unconscious patterns, and by telling us what we don’t want to copy, we haven’t taken a step forward yet. What leads is to formulate and work out what we are doing instead. Overwriting patterns that don’t help us requires serious psychological work, sometimes months to years - but it’s possible! We can come from the past to the present, where it is not the events that took place many years or decades earlier, but the given situation, the current moment, that determines our feelings and behavior. In the thematic collection volume of the Open Academy, both previous lectures and brand new writings made specifically for this book were included.