The Flordeluna Complex

A few weeks ago there was news about a teenage girl in a southern Cebu town who committed suicide. She was reportedly distraught over the decision of her boyfriend to end up their relationship. He no longer returned her phone calls and did not respond to her text messages.

Days before the unfortunate incident, in a desperate effort to solicit her man’s attention, the girl had already insinuated to kill herself. The tactic apparently did not work, so she went ahead and actually did the ultimate act.

Poor girl. Even if her suicide finally drew her boyfriend back to her, even if he would spend the rest of his life regretting his supposed rejection of her, it’s all useless now. In the first place, suicide is really a useless exercise, a grave lapse in judgment, to say the least. The moment one gets what she commits the act for, she’s no longer there to enjoy her reward.

This story is just one example of the many dramatic productions we, meaning all of us, stage in life. We create drama in order to get what we want. Drama is the intentional – although often involuntary – acting that we perform in life, for a certain purpose. As soon as we launch our act, it takes on a life of its own. We soon begin to believe it ourselves; we take it for real.

A single dramatic act usually takes some time to be completed. And for as long as it carries on, it controls our mode of behavior. After all, we are the lead character in it and have to play our role accordingly.

In the process, more drama is often required to fuel it and keep it going, each one requiring still more drama to sustain it. It’s mind-boggling if we have to think of all the ensuing complexities our single act triggers. To simplify matters, we just go along with it, take it all in as reality ? our self-invented reality.

By thorough analysis, it will come out that the purpose of our real-life drama is mainly to prove to others and to ourselves how right we are.

The condition we put ourselves in while we perform our act may be called the Flordeluna complex. Back in the 70s, or way back earlier, there was a hit Cebuano radio drama whose main character was named Flordeluna. She was endlessly in difficult situations all throughout the over ten years of the radio play’s airing, after which it was made into a national TV series that also ran for many years.

Flordeluna was always a victim. Needless to say, the public liked it or the play would not have stayed on-air for so long a time. People were able to relate with Flordeluna; they found her case so familiar, so similar to their own.

The Flordeluna complex, or the victim mentality, justifies anything the mind prompts us to act out, no matter how destructive to ourselves and to others. Suicide and murder are common outcomes of the drama people create in order to prove how right they are and how wronged they have been. We all commit suicides and murders every day of our lives, although not always in a literal sense.

Many of us are quick to murder a relationship when the other person does not live up to our expectations or does not give us what we want. We commit suicide by espousing mental fictions that make our own experience of life miserable.

But, again, our real-life dramatic productions may be intentional but they’re mostly involuntary, mostly unconscious deeds. It’s difficult to be in control over something that is so clouded with emotion and motive, and we normally won’t find reason to think that we need to check issues over. Then, as the act unfolds further, we find ourselves in deeper trouble than the one for which we created drama to overcome.

Without consciously being aware of it, we tell ourselves lies all the time. This is especially so in our human relationships. We feed our mind with erroneous notions, our hearts with impossible expectations.

It is not true that others have to be wrong for us to be right. It is not fair to regard others as uncaring when they do not put us at the center of their lives. These are thoughts too cruel to harbor, and we often suffer the worst from such self-inflicted cruelty.

Maybe the boyfriend of that poor girl did not actually mean to ignore her. Maybe he loved her as much as she loved him. Maybe he was just so caught up in his own life troubles at the time and did not want to draw her into his misery.

Maybe the guy’s cell phone was out of order or was out of phone load for him to be able to call her back or even send her a text message. Whatever his reason, his own circumstances at the time must have lent basis for his seeming cold to her.

We might think it was inconsiderate of him to not have taken the trouble to communicate with her, to even out the score with her if he had actually fallen out of love. So be it. But any woman would be so unwise to make her life miserable by a man’s coldness, no matter how dearly beloved he may be to her.

We must realize that the closest we can ever get with our dearest loved ones is to be second place. Their own personal issues always take the number one spot. It should not be so hard to understand, since that’s exactly the way it goes with our own selves, too.

Drama has its value in our life, precisely why we engage in it so much. It can intensify our life experience, enliven our rather dreary existence, give ordinary matters special meaning and, thus, make our life interesting. But we must always keep it in check.

Our passion for drama shall never push us to the extent of giving up on life, the very life it is supposed to fire up.  (E-MAIL: [email protected])