2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Do we ourselves, as adults and successful people, make decisions on our own? Why do we sometimes catch ourselves thinking: "I am now speaking like my mother"? Or at some point, we understand that the son repeats the fate of his grandfather, and so, for some reason, it is established in the family …
Life scenarios and parental prescriptions - what impact do they have on our destiny? And the fate of our children? On the fate of our children's children?
Evolutionary need for belonging
Modern man has not gone so far from his wild ancestors. There are biological reasons behind the fear of loneliness, which no-no and will visit us. The need for close ties with those like ourselves is inherent in us evolutionarily. And the thought of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle: "Man is by nature a social animal" is just about this. And although adults can, in principle, do without love, the child is not able to survive without losses as a result of its deficiency. The grasping reflexes and Moro, the primary biological tools for holding the object of attachment, are characteristic of both humans and higher animals. As a product of evolution, a person experiences an instinctive need to stay with the parent for whom the imprinting is developed. Otherwise, death. Some unconditioned reflexes are replaced by others - babbling, sucking, crying, smiling, following the guardian. Moreover, the instinct to follow is so strong that, like imprinting in animals, it is a social stimulus, performing the function of keeping the mother close to the baby. The cuteness of all the cubs, their angular clumsy movements evoke a reciprocal desire to warm, caress. In addition, the hormonal background of the expectant mother is changing - the first feeding of the child causes a rush of oxytocin, so nature takes care of attachment in both directions.
Safe haven and Safe base
From early childhood, the kid reflects and accepts information about himself and appropriates them thanks to the environment. - The outside world is too saturated and toxic for the baby. The mother protects him from unnecessary stimuli from the environment, and, reflecting gently and lovingly, returns the world around her to her child in an accessible form for "assimilation", including information about himself. And here the ability of the mother to reflect not her own projections onto the child, but the initial information about him is very important. And this is the basis of a person's mental "normality".
A safe haven and a secure base are indispensable conditions for the development of a child's exploratory instinct.
This instinct is one of the main ones in humans, which allowed the entire species of "homo sapiens" to survive in the most difficult conditions of the wild. Healthy maternal attachment and built trusting relationships without harsh, rigid attitudes, with one or two “no's”, and not with a two-page list, is the most important base for a one-year-old researcher and, in general, for human mental health. It is the unconditional love of the mother that is the very rope in which for the "astronaut" there is oxygen, and the very round-the-clock connection with the Base, which ensures the process of exploring the boundless Cosmos, which for the child is the whole world around - first within the radius of the room, then on the ground floor, then the whole house, street, city, country and the world. It is interesting, by the way, to watch how the world-year-old baby is exploring. He turns in the direction of his mother when he goes into the "unexplored distance", notices her, and if she nods to him or just smiles with confidence and hope, he follows on. What happens in the soul of a little researcher when his mother does not look in his direction and does not notice the signal? And this is not a one-off? - The base is unambiguously unreliable. And it is the formation of a healthy attachment that is a reliable "safety cushion" for the subsequent stresses that life is so rich in. A three-year-old child of a “good enough mother” (according to D. Winnicott) can already calm himself down, occupy himself with a game, and can wait. This is how the mechanism of reflexive functioning is formed: the ability to distinguish between external and internal reality, which leads to the development of mental representations associated with the concept of "I" and the concept of "other".
- We "caught" the expression on the mother's face when she was angry, or from the very first moments, by turning the key on the door, we could understand in what mood father returned from work. This is how we learned to interpret the behavior of others and understand their emotional states, because the relationship with the mother and father is in the future a relationship with the world. Moreover, understanding oneself and others goes beyond the scope of visible behavior and takes into account the emotions, beliefs, non-verbalized expectations that underlie human activity. (And this circumstance is directly related to the development of assertiveness - a person's ability not to depend on external influences and assessments, to independently regulate his own behavior and be responsible for it).
What ensures intergenerational continuity?
The acquired durable reflexive functioning as a result of high-quality parent-child relationships allows the child to develop, and then to him, already an adult, to give meaning to the behavior of others, to predict this behavior, which makes it predictable and therefore less difficult to cope emotionally. Early childhood trauma, for example, as a result of parental neglect or domestic violence, interferes with the acquisition of adequate reflexive functioning, and hence development. But it is precisely this mechanism that is decisive in the matter of intergenerational continuity (according to P. Fonagi). This continuity is ensured, on the one hand, by the child's fidelity, loyalty, readiness to follow traditions and family precepts, out of a feeling of love and devotion, and on the other hand, by those phrases, prescriptions, attitudes that the child hears from childhood from family members, the very environment that he surrounds.
Take, for example, the phrase: "Think with your head!" In it, as in any metaphor, there is a multi-layered, context. And the child, feeling disapproval and threat in the parent's voice, grasps the context, and without fully understanding the meaning of the message, he still feels that he has made a mistake. Inwardly he shrinks, feeling helplessness and at the same time his eternal dependence on his parent, feeling this duality with every cell of his body. What kind of internal dialogue can there be? - about the following: "my feelings are not important, what is boiling, scary, must be suppressed, because parents must be obeyed …"
The figure of the child himself is central to his understanding of the world until about five years old. If the parent is angry, it means that he, the little boy, is to blame for this (and not because the mother is probably tired at work). He, a little boy, is bad. And he does everything wrong. And his feelings are not important. And if it doesn't matter, what's the difference what you call it, this feeling that flashed in your chest?
The younger child will supplant this experience, and the older one will split the image of the criticizing mom (dad) into a kind, loving and ideal mother, and the “bad” part will project, for example, onto Baba Yaga and place his despair and pain in her. In addition, the world culture willingly slips us such images, a kind of containers in which negative can be placed completely legally.
And so, parental advice "Think with your head!" (= "Feelings are not important") will become a parting word for life, and since there is family and intergenerational continuity, such a motto will be passed on to subsequent generations. After all, the message to think with your head is most likely also received transgenerationally, from grandparents and so on. So, outwardly imperceptibly, parental messages, like other mental elements, determine the scenario of our life, when it would seem that parents are no longer there and their children are growing up.
Scenarios become a mental inheritance, something familiar, they affect us, becoming decisive in various life situations - when choosing a partner, profession, type of relationship, lifestyle. These scenarios represent a type of relationship between two or more people in the family system, and the child, having mastered this scenario, will further identify himself with this character. For example, in the previous article I described the mechanism and scenario of violence, in which there is a victim and a rapist. So at first the child, growing up and becoming an adult, will act out the roles of both the victim and the rapist. Following the parental script plan.
Basic scenario plans
Back in the last century, Claude Steiner, following Eric Berne, drew attention to the fact that a certain set of life difficulties are repeated over and over again. And he divided them into three large groups. Nothing on Earth passes without a trace, and parental prescriptions, attitudes and other similar directives (sometimes in the form of wishes), due to children's loyalty and the lack of mature defenses to the actions of the caregivers of adults, become life scenarios with all the ensuing consequences. Rigid, rigid scenarios are characteristic of dysfunctional types of attachments - avoidant, symbiotic, anxious (ambivalent), disorganizing (in the future, it tends to form the previously considered introject of the aggressor).
So the script "Without love" arises from the parent's constant emotional neglect. Lack of stroking, both tactile and emotional, verbal and non-verbal, does not allow the child to develop the skills of confidential, close communication and often further lead to "sticking" to the object of love or fencing off from the world. Children seem to have to "earn" love, because "in life, remember, nothing is given for free." The inability to express feelings, difficulties in the balance of taking - giving - often lead to depression and the feeling "no one loves me" or "I am not worthy of love." Such people depend on the opinions of others, tend to underestimate close relationships.
Other people live with a constant fear of losing their minds, of losing control of the situation as a whole. Madness is the extreme expression of the script "Without reason." The inability to cope with the challenges that life poses - what in everyday life is called lack of willpower, laziness, not knowing what you want, frivolity, stupidity - is formed thanks to the lessons learned from childhood under the general title "Mom knows better."
This also includes the famous "double bills" according to the principle "stay there, come here." It is not surprising that the prohibitions on knowing the world on their own, thinking on their own (after all, a child can hit, get lost, fight - and the list goes on), the persistent desire of adults to patronize in order to give way to their own parental anxiety lead to the fact that the child's initially powerful, evolutionary impulse - the researcher goes out, and the child begins to live according to the template and model of his parents. Partial or complete rejection of one's “I”, appropriation of non-characteristic mental elements and reaction mechanisms, misunderstanding of one's true needs and failure to realize one's capabilities - all this is a kind of betrayal of oneself, because everyone has something to take from the world and have something to offer it.
What can such a person really offer the world?
In adulthood, he will do what others demand and will be unable to express his own desires and needs. "Household preparations" do not always work, and it is difficult for another to learn in artificial conditions, in conditions of "conservation". Submission to bosses and devaluation, ignoring subordinates - this is the lifestyle of people with such a scenario. "Without joy." In a family with a destructive attachment, where they are encouraged to “think with your head,” the directives “I don’t care how you feel”, “There is such a word“must”,“Yes, cry more”,“Well, how little you are”may prevail. In such a family, there is an unspoken prohibition on the expression of elementary feelings - pain, discontent, resentment, fear, despair - those that are called "negative" in society. Family members can communicate with each other, for example, solely through fear. This may be the only reaction emotion allowed in the family, because “you cannot be offended by your mother”.
Claude Steiner described a situation in which children, afraid of losing their mother's loyalty, did not even report that they were hungry. Usually in such families they save warmth and affection, and there is always a pill in the first-aid kit for the complaints of the child. Further - the quote: “People do not wonder why when they come home from work, they feel the need to drink, why in order to fall asleep, they need to take a pill and why in order to wake up, they need to take another pill. If they thought about it while staying in touch with their bodily sensations, the answer would come naturally. Instead, from an early age, we are taught to ignore our bodily sensations, both pleasant and unpleasant. Unpleasant bodily sensations are eliminated with the help of medication. Pleasant bodily sensations are also eradicated. Considerable pressure is exerted by adults to prevent children from experiencing the fullness of their bodily existence. As a result, many people do not understand what they feel, their body is separated from its center, they do not own their physical self, and their life is joyless."
Because, as the parents taught, "life is a test," "to live is to fight." And in battle, you should be in a state of mobilization. And since life is an eternal battle, where there is no room for error, the state of inner mobilization is also eternal. The whole life of such people happens in the head. I quote further: “The head is considered a smart computer that controls a stupid body. The body is considered as a machine, its purpose is considered to be work or the execution of orders from the head. Feelings … are considered an obstacle to its functioning. " Let's remember the well-known - "boys don't cry." And if they cry, which of them are soldiers?
Such life scenarios - "Without love", "Without reason", "Without joy" in their extreme versions are manifested as depression, madness and drug addiction. "Moderate" manifestations of scenarios are more common - chronic failures in personal life, inability to live even a day without a device, protracted crises from inability to cope with everyday problems. It is not necessary to resort to just one scenario, they have a lot in common. Each of them suppresses naturalness, is based on specific prohibitions and prescriptions imposed on children by their parents, and on their parents by their parents' parents, and so on.
Each of us has elements of all scenarios. But they manifest themselves in different ways. At the same time, each of us has a chance to overcome parental prohibitions and prescriptions, these schemes with the well-known "software", although they were mostly undertaken by parents in order to save us (if they sounded consciously). It is possible to overcome the scenarios, to get out of them when you find the ability to effectively interact with the world, that is, to become more autonomous and free from parental prescriptions.
There is an exit
Children are very sensitive to outside "intrusions" and are more likely to react bodily. The body, in fact, is the only property that the child has. Mothers who complain of somatic diseases or somatoform disorders (“it hurt here, it hurt there”) can be asked to say to their child in the evening, 15 minutes after he fell asleep, in the REM sleep phase, one of the phrases indicating unconditional acceptance:
I'm glad that I have you
- You can grow at your own pace
- I accept you as you are
- I love you because you are
- I allow you to take from me and my father the best that we have and that will benefit you
- You are any dear to me
- I love you and I will always love you
- You can be interested in everything - the world is big and open for you
- You can explore the world you came to, and I will support and protect you
- You can learn to think for yourself, and I will think for myself
- I accept all the feelings that you express
- You can be angry, afraid, happy and experience all the feelings, I am with you
- I gladly take care of you, I love you
It is difficult to say to whom this therapy is more directed. I think these sincere words were uttered by my mother mainly for herself. They will help to “switch” the given scenario, which is mostly unconscious, to the “autonomous life of a child” mode, because love is built on trust in oneself and another person. Especially for a beginner who is just starting to explore this crazy, beautiful world.
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