2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
In the course of work, I often hear from different clients: “I don’t know what I really am. I don’t know what I want, where I’m going, what I really love, and what I don’t love at all … I don’t know myself at all.”
As a rule, all these people are mentally healthy, are “in sound mind and memory,” are socially adapted and in many respects successful.
Nevertheless, it often turns out that a seemingly very prosperous person is actually not at all happy with his life and feels very unhappy.
How does this happen?
In the client-centered approach that I work with, there is a concept of "conditional acceptance" that describes the cause of this phenomenon.
The personality of the child is formed in interaction with the parents.
In them, as in a mirror, he sees a reflection of himself, his characteristics, receives information about what he is.
And he absolutely believes in the parental vision of himself.
Moreover, a small child very subtly feels the changes in the mood of the parents and connects these changes primarily with the fact whether they are happy with them or not, whether they love him.
In order to receive parental approval and warmth, the baby is ready to become anything, as long as he is loved. He learns to meet parental expectations and conditions, the image that they want to see in him, and sacrifices his real experiences, feelings, sensations and needs, fearing disapproval and rejection.
As a result, there is, as it were, a substitution of the child's own “I”.
A man grows up who knows himself only the way he was brought up, how they wanted to see him, how he was accepted by his parents.
However, that real “I”, repressed in childhood for the sake of parental acceptance, does not disappear anywhere and reminds of itself already in adulthood with incomprehensible doubts, apathy and depressive states.
It turns out that a person really may not know himself at all and live not the life that could make him truly happy.
But he is able to rediscover himself!
The help of a psychologist in this case, in my opinion, may consist in capturing the unconscious or distortedly conscious experiences and feelings of his client, treating them with attention and without condemnation and transmitting them to the client (reflecting), helping him to recognize his true characteristics and accept yourself as real.
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