The Tale Of A Difficult Childhood

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

“We all come from childhood”, “all problems come from childhood”, “all psychological problems of an adult arise from conflicts and stresses received in childhood”. Very often and in different ways you can hear such a statement. How fair is this position? I believe that modern psychological counseling practices greatly overestimate the importance of an early age. At the same time, I do not want to say that it is completely unimportant and unimportant. Of course, it is possible and necessary to deal with the grievances and experiences that have lasted from an early age. But very often in practice there are situations when all attempts to solve current mental problems are reduced only to "children's conflicts". And this, in my opinion, is already wrong, often leads a person on the wrong track and ultimately reduces the final performance of the work. Indeed, when we are small, our life does not belong to us. In fact, a minor is the property of his parents and the parents decide how to deal with him. In the old days, this was stated directly and unequivocally, in the modern civilized world the rules have changed a lot (and it's good that they have changed), but the essence still remains the same. The child's psyche belongs to his parents, they develop it at their own discretion and they are responsible for the result. And this is normal, it has always been and will always be so. A person does not choose where he is born - in a palace or in a stable. A person does not choose his parents. Good people have children, and bad people also have children. And we can be that child. It makes no sense to ask to heaven - "why me", "why exactly so, why with me." Not why, just because the cards lay down. There is a starting position, we cannot influence the initial alignment, what we gave out is that we play, we have one attempt, the moves cannot be replayed. Moreover, the debut is played for us by other players, they are distributed randomly, they can be skillful or not skillful, competent or not competent, we also cannot influence this. At some point, they begin to allow us to make independent decisions, the more we make them, you are more capable of influencing events, in any direction. At this point, we already have an opening that was not played by us, we may like it, maybe we may not like it, we are not responsible for these decisions. Although they directly affect our psyche and our life, we did not accept them, we did not implement them, we are not responsible for them. But further, it is already our area of responsibility. And you have to deal with what is, and not with what we would like. These are the rules of this game. There will be no others. We sign on the fact of our existence, no other consent is required. The tool is the psyche, the rate is life. Have fun. The trunk was given out to spin as you know. I wanted a machine gun, got a musket? Sorry, random. Not all parents are good by default. No, we don't have to be grateful by default. We must take care and help, these are formal obligations to repay the debt. To love, no, we do not have to, it already depends on. And it may well be that our parents specifically did not treat our psyche in the best way. Dominant overcontrolling mom and aloof, indifferent dad. Or vice versa. Someone was disliked and lacked warmth, someone was overloved and strangled in their arms. Too harshly demanded or too indulged and pampered. Have raised high self-esteem and deliberately unfulfillable demands for the world, or lowered self-esteem and deliberately impossible demands for oneself. And so on and so forth. But the moment this happened, we were children. We are not responsible for what happened to our lives. Our psyche was not our property. But now we are adults. Our psyche belongs only to us, it is now our private and inalienable property. Forever and ever. We have documents for the right to own our life, called a passport. What happened to our head before is an accomplished event, we cannot influence them. But that was all a long time ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years. But what is happening to the head now - we can very much even influence this. Rather than worrying about the past that we can't change anyway, isn't it better to worry about the present that we can change? And even if we accept that in the past everything was bad and terrible. Or not quite awful, but not very good. And suppose we were made a psyche that does not quite suit us. Which is not adaptive, which is problematic, does not work optimally, breaks easily, seriously ruins our life, we would like to fix it. And yes, we didn’t make it this way, it’s all of them. We have nothing to do with it. But it's still our own psyche. What difference does it make how and why it was broken in the past, it is much more interesting and more important how to fix it now? Therefore, the analysis of childhood traumas is a deeply secondary activity, it is not an end in itself and has value only and exclusively in terms of answering the question, "can we draw some useful conclusions from this analysis?" The only criterion is performance. You can disassemble the past, you can not disassemble it, it all depends on the answer to the question "why do I need this and what practical benefit can I get from this?" In psychotherapeutic practice, I often come across this. The therapeutic request can be very different, but in general, the person is not satisfied with the work of his psyche, he would like to solve the problem, but does not really understand how. Otherwise I would not ask for help. It is quite natural that before that he tries to correct the situation on his own, tries to figure it out, reads popular psychological literature. And in pop psychology, it sounds massively that "all problems grow from an early age, deal with your childhood traumas." These views have historically developed, originate from the psychoanalytic tradition. Psychoanalysis is the very first and most ancient of the existing trends, the image has been replicated by mass culture, everyone has heard of Freud, everyone has seen a psychoanalytic couch in the movies, in the minds of people, the equal sign of psychoanalyst = psychotherapist is still often put. This is not true, but it is neither bad nor good, it is just a given. It is what it is. And in psychoanalysis, the concept of "internal conflict" is one of the key, and traditionally very close attention is paid to early development and its consequences for the adult psyche. And if for a third-party, idly curious reader with this there are no difficulties, then for a person who decided to sort out the issue not just for general development, but who wants to find a solution to his problem, that is, he is personally interested and emotionally involved, for him in the proposed model there are certain risks. Often people are excessively indoctrinated with this "childish concept", and all analysis, all understanding of their own psyche is reduced to these very "conflicts and psychotraumas". As a result, they spend a lot of time and effort on this, but there have been no visible changes in life. Because initially the question was posed incorrectly. Well, ok, you figured out your ancient problems, after which it became better or not better, but initially what did you want - to clarify the past or change the present? Once again I want to emphasize that I do not deny the value of this approach and do not urge to abandon it altogether. It can be useful very often. For example, when the key moment of the problem is the relevance of old grievances, long-past events affect our real ones, the dead man grabs the living, this person only has unpleasant experiences and discomfort, and no benefit. Then this is a task to work with. But it is helpful to understand that childhood analysis is not an end in itself. It does nothing by itself, it is not a solution. It's just a tool, one of many. It can be useful, but it is also often useless, depending on the situation. But to completely immerse yourself in this model and plunge headlong into the experiences of childhood hardships is a deliberately false path.

Imagine that you bought a car from your hands. Used car. And let's say you're not very happy with the way the previous owners treated it. A lot of problems and malfunctions. The candles are flooded, the chassis is knocking, there is a scratch on the door, the starter is seized. Well, I got this one, there was no money for another. Now what? And you can continue to ride as it is, a lot of people do so. And you can endlessly take offense at the past owners that they treated so carelessly and shook a good car. Or, on the contrary, to understand and forgive. You can do it this way, you can do it, but why? Who cares? The car is already yours. You are registered, your property, you use it, you decide who else to entrust the management. She is who she is. And instead of worrying about the exploitation of the previous owners, wouldn't it be more useful to fix the existing problems? The past will not change from what we think about it. There is nothing we can do about it. But with the present we can do whatever we want. Everyone has a complex, continuously learning decision-making machine under their skulls. Mammals are the most educated of animals, primates are the most educated of mammals, and man is the most educated of primates. The system learns and retrains all the time, not only in childhood. This is what we call "life experience", this is why "people get wiser over the years." Not all, of course, and not always, but if a person uses his cognitive machine in any reasonable way, he is guaranteed to get a result over a long distance. Always and without options. You do something, you get a result, good or bad. You do nothing, you get nothing. And if, for any reason, we are not satisfied with how the system works, then the primary importance is to understand the mechanics of what is happening and fix it. Is the system not trained correctly? Answer: retrain the system. This can happen (and often does) due to "natural reasons" and due to "life experience", simply because over time many events happen to us, the psyche learns on this array of events and over time corrects old mistakes. Therefore, we get smarter with age, so our psyche becomes more efficient over time. Or you can retrain the psyche in a directed manner, it requires additional efforts, it requires additional knowledge, but we also get the result faster. You can wait until "life teaches", but it will take time. Maybe 5 years, maybe 10 years. Or you can retrain in a forced mode, and we will get the same result in a few months, in six months or a year. In any case, we can predict with some probability, but we cannot know exactly what will happen to us in the future until we arrive in this future. We can influence the future, but we cannot know for sure. We know the past, but we cannot influence it. We only have the present. That is why I have always said and say: A difficult childhood is not an excuse. Everyone has a difficult childhood. All have wooden toys, all have tall windowsills. This is an accomplished event. We can assess it positively or negatively, but in fact the event is already neutral to us. It is useful to understand what happened, but it is useless to worry.