Why do some hearts chase the very flames that burn them?
“Masochism is the art of turning punishments into rewards.”
– Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Treat people well. It’s not hard. Actually the way human beings treat other human beings might be a little more complicated than simply ‘good treatment means they’ll like you and bad treatment means they won’t’.
Sometimes treating people well in one way (we let them have what they want 24/7) means treating them badly in another way (they become spoiled and therefore emotionally fragile and disagreeable to be around).
Dig a bit deeper and we see that those who are ‘too nice’ may be disrespected or passed over for promotions and romantic relationships.
The nice equals boring problem
It may be a case that reliability doesn’t keep us on our toes enough, at least not enough for some people. They may like a bit of rough treatment as rough as that sounds.
There may be a masochistic element to this. But why? Why do some people go back to someone who treats them badly?
- Because it mirrors early childhood experience and weirdly feels ‘safe’? An atavistic yearning?
- Because the rule of the increased enticement Intermittent reward?
- Unlike consistent, predictable rewards, (someone always being nice to us) Intermittent rewards appear at random intervals, which makes them more appealing to the brain. We appreciate something more if we don’t always get it.
- The mistaking of intensity for love even if the source of that intensity damages us?
- Wanting to ‘save’ the abuser from themselves?
- Simply feeling the need to be punished to assuage a guilty temperament?
- Such low self esteem that being in a relationship with someone who treats us well would be too big a mismatch of realities because respect and real love are unknown and therefore feel a threat to our sense of self or not considered possible?
Moths to the flames
The trouble is the moth attracted to the intense flame may eventually get burned big time.
In a recent Q&A session someone asked me about this as relating to a specific client of theirs.
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Question:
I’m working with a female psychotherapist with a doctoral degree who’s infatuated with a man who is verbally abusing her. She says she wants to end things with him but she keeps going back and not letting him go.
She’s dealing with child abandonment by her mentally abusive dad (who is still alive) and admits still wanting love and support from her dad. She admits seeing her dad’s negative behaviors in this man and can’t explain why she still can’t let go.
Gestalt revealed she wants his love and to reconnect with him so all can be OK. She dealt with extreme parentification as a child. Said she sees glimpses of good in him and is not just “loving a fantasy”. Suggestions?
Answer:
Popular psychology goes in trends and we hear a lot about narcissists and maybe enablers of narcissists and so on.
Terms we don’t hear so often are ones such as ‘sadists and masochists.’ But certainly some people DO seem to be sadistic, take pleasure in harming and controlling others psychologically or even physically and others do seem to prefer to be treated badly or to suffer in some way perhaps as a way of atoning for some real or imagined past wrongdoing.
We’d need to ascertain to what extent this woman is infatuated with this man because he is verbally abusing her or in spite of the fact he is maltreating her in that way.
Wanting or enjoying on some level to be treated badly has some attractions for some people. People mistake emotional intensity for significance or even love or they may find it a challenge that somehow this person maltreating them must be damaged and they are destined to save them.
So we see this with a kind of seesawing of good treatment and bad treatment and we know from behavioural psychology that intermittent reward can be more compelling than uniform reward. I think BF Skinner found that cats worked levers more compulsively when the lever produced the reward on some occasions rather than when it always gave them a treat. If gambling ALWAYS gave you a reward or if surfing ALWAYS gave you the perfect wave then these activities would soon lose their appeal.
When people are always nice to us we may come to value that niceness less so when they ARE finally decent or caring it feels so much more valuable-scarcity of something equals the value of it…if diamonds grew on trees they’d be a dime a dozen.
The danger is that a person starts to feel that it’s the ‘real him’ when he’s nice rather than when he’s being a bastard of course they’re BOTH the real him and the bastard may be more the real him.
It’s easy too, to make excuses for people. You could make excuses for absolutely anybody. We need to disentangle excuses with possible causes. She’s a psychotherapist so she is used to being empathetic maybe to the point of self abasement.
Yeah sure we can find reasons for why anybody does anything. He’s only disgusting to me because his dad treated him like…whatever when he was 5 but that of course doesn’t mean you have to put up with it.
There are causes for every murderer who ever murdered but that doesn’t mean you should put yourself in harm’s way.
Of course she might have a sense she has to save him from himself-the sort of beauty and the beast scenario but the question is..why?
I would hazard a guess that her self esteem isn’t too great and when we lash ourselves inwardly we feel more affinity with others who do the same to us.
If she has a low opinion of herself then being with someone who treated her like a princess or even half way decently might be too much of an ideological mismatch.
We all know, for example, that heaping praise upon someone with low self esteem can backfire and have them trusting you less than someone who treats them not so well.
It might seem a bit TV drama pop psychology to link her current willingness to be verbally abused to the way her dad treated her. And yet there does seem to be a clear pattern there. She still wants love and support from her dad.
This reminds me of a therapist who had a client who wanted something from a family member. The therapist suddenly and seemingly seriously demanded a million dollars from the client who laughed and rightly said she didn’t have it to give him. The therapist sort of made his point with that. Wanting something from someone who doesn’t have it within their capacity to GIVE you what you want from them is, of course, a losing game.
If there are wounds from the past being drawn to being treated badly might almost be a way of metaphorically picking at those wounds.
You could certainly do a helping hand technique for your client whereby she accesses a small sample of that hurt feeling…sees what if any memory comes to mind and then you have her access a sense of all her current adult resources and take her back hypnotically to that memory to comfort her younger self..calmly and compassionately perhaps telling herself she wasn’t to blame and that she never has to put up with bad treatment in the future….in this way we can help her find the resolution she’s looking for so that she doesn’t need to keep compulsively try to switch off unfulfilled emotional arousals in her current life by compulsively going back to poor treatment.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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