Relationships, sexuality, and psychological abuse: how to love without destroying
The "Psychiatry of One Life" series · Andris Saulitis, M.D.
On the source of this material. All the source, original material of this book is exclusively my own authorial work. This is easy to verify: for years it has been publicly laid out in my streams and videos on social media, above all on YouTube — more than 1,000 streams and over 3,000 videos. This book is not a retelling of someone else's work and not a compilation from the internet: it is that same authorial material, arranged for the reader's convenience into a digestible, readable form. That is the more honest way — and it is one you can check.
Introduction. Between the two
Everything most healing and everything most destructive in a human life happens in one and the same place — between two people. In the space between me and the other, love, closeness, and meaning are born — and there too are born the deepest pain, betrayal, and psychological abuse. One and the same territory. This book is about that territory: about how closeness is built, what its dark shadow is, and how to learn to love without destroying — neither the other nor yourself.
Let me say it at once and without false modesty, because science is science: I have the right to lead you through this territory. I am a psychiatrist, M.D., with 40 years of practice, more than 20,000 clinical examinations, and thousands of completed courses of therapy. For forty years I have seen people both in the radiance of healthy closeness and in the hell of relationships that are killing them — and I know how one climbs from the second to the first. Relationships are at once the most powerful medicine and the most frequent source of the suffering that brings people to me. To understand them is to understand half of human pain and half of human happiness.
What this book is about — and with what honesty
I will lead you along both sides of one territory. First — the light: how closeness, attraction, and attachment work, how to choose and how to keep yourself alongside another, how to relate to sexuality without shame. Then — the shadow: psychological abuse in all its faces, from what we inflict on ourselves to abuse in the family, between partners, in society, and in the digital world. And finally — the way out: how to escape destructive relationships and how to build ones that do not maim but heal. I will speak of sexuality maturely and without prudery, but also without vulgarity — as a physician; and of abuse — directly, and on the side of the one who is hurting.
Write to me personally. Through the vitamodo.store system you can write to me directly — about your relationships, about closeness, about pain, about abuse. I am a physician, and I answer. The door is open throughout the book, and I remind you of it wherever I explain something.
My intention and to whom this is addressed
As with the whole series, this book is my contribution: an attempt to explain the nature of closeness and abuse in a way that lets healthier and safer relationships be built on its basis — in families, in child-rearing, in education, and in the way digital environments are constructed. I address myself also to the creators of AI and of education, including those who build systems like Claude: today a vast share of relationships and, alas, of digital abuse unfolds in the environments you build. To understand the mechanics of closeness and abuse is to build spaces where people draw closer rather than maim one another. Forty years of clinical work — there is the material. I extend my hand.
Write to me personally. Are you building AI or education in the field of relationships and human safety? Write through vitamodo.store, directly to the author.
The foundation of mental hygiene and a pact about safety
Healthy relationships are mental hygiene of the highest order: on whom we are close to, and how, the health of the psyche depends more than on almost anything else. But first, a pact — the most important one in this book. If your relationship contains abuse — physical or psychological, especially with a threat to safety — then here what comes first is not "understand it and fix it" but safety. I will say plainly where that line runs and where to turn. To stay in danger "for love's sake" is not love but a trap, and getting out of it can be a matter of life and death.
How to read
The book moves across the territory of the two: Part I — how closeness is built (attraction, attachment, choice, keeping yourself, sexuality); Part II — the shadow: psychological abuse (its kinds, its signs, from the self to society); Part III — how to love without destroying, and how to get out (leaving abuse, recovery, healthy pairs). Read straight through — here light and shadow are inseparable.
Write to me personally. Any question about the introduction — through vitamodo.store. I am a psychiatrist, 40 years of practice, and I mean this in earnest.
Part I. The two: how closeness is built
Chapter 1. The two: the space where both love and disaster happen
Let me begin with the central thesis of the book: closeness is not a property of one person but something that lives in the space between two. And that space is the most powerful thing there is in human life: there we both heal and wound.
Let us examine why the "between" matters so much. The human being is a deeply social creature; our brain is literally tuned to connection with others (we spoke of this in The Body Speaks — oxytocin, mirror systems). We are formed, healed, and destroyed within relationships. A child becomes itself in the bond with a parent; an adult heals in warm closeness and breaks in toxic closeness. That is precisely why relationships are not a "pleasant addition" to life but one of its load-bearing supports: the quality of your "two" largely determines the quality of your psyche. And that too is why they are the source of both the highest happiness and the deepest pain: what has the power to heal has also the power to wound.
And here is the key point for the whole book. Remember the "talking past each other" from The Reader (schityvatel) — when two people speak the same language and never meet, because they read reality in different registers? The space between two people is precisely the place of meeting (or non-meeting) of two readers, of two realities (I will return to this in the chapter on abuse — "two brains, two realities"). Healthy closeness is when the two learn to hear each other's register without losing their own. Disaster is when one register begins to suppress and rewrite the other. The whole book, in essence, is about how, in the space between two, a meeting is born rather than a suppression.