Devaluating Parents

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

“What does my childhood and my parents have to do with it? I feel insecure now, you know? My ordinary parents are like everyone else. I didn't really need their praise! I have been living separately for a long time and do not depend on their opinion."

Our psychological defenses are a very powerful and cunning mechanism, and they firmly protect the child from feelings that are unbearable for him, thus allowing him to survive.

And a person grows up, day after day displacing into the unconscious the pain associated with the fact that instead of vital emotional support, he receives depreciation from the most significant people in life. But it is precisely from the awareness of oneself as significant for the parents, from their support and acceptance that a sense of self-worth and integrity is formed. If the parents reject some part of the child's personality, he will subsequently reject it himself.

Here is a girl who is complex because of a few extra pounds, trying on a new dress, on which she has sewn fashionable frills with her own hand. And dad, passing by, casually throws: “It's so funny! You look like a blue donut in it! Nice joke, and dad immediately forgot about it. The girl seemed to have forgotten too.

But then she comes to tell her dad that the guinea pig has learned to respond to her name - the girl taught her for several months, even developed her own training system. But dad, who is busy reading the newspaper at that time, dismisses it with the words: “Don't be silly. Now, if we had a dog … . The girl is severely allergic to dogs, so they will most likely never have a dog. She feels that dad does not accept her like that, with her weak, painful part, and her achievements are worthless to him.

She seems to fall short of getting Daddy's praise all the time. So, I am not worthy of praise, the girl decides, and from now on she lives with this knowledge: she carries it to school and walks with it in the yard. She is ugly, looks like a donut, and often speaks nonsense … It does not even occur to her to doubt her father's words. The pain is repressed, and only occasionally does something ache inside, but this quickly becomes habitual. She feels insecure in communication, especially with boys, then with men.

But - the boy, whom his mother meets from school, proudly shows her that he has learned to pull himself up on the horizontal bar, and his mother laughs: “Yes, you are just like a girl, jerking! How frail you are … ". The boy, who has long given himself a vow not to cry, instantly boils tears, and he does not have time to turn away, and his mother says: “Well, surely - the girl is. Let's go home, athlete. " The most important woman in his life, more important than which no one will become, rejected and devalued his still childish masculinity.

And the boy decides that if he is not good enough for his mother, then he is GENERALLY not good enough, that he is a weakling. Mother's sentence is not subject to appeal.

Also, parents often devalue or ignore the child's feelings when he feels something different from their reaction to the situation: "You don't need to cry about nonsense!" But FOR HIM this is not nonsense. Such words undermine the child's self-confidence, because he feels one thing, and the parents say that it is right to feel the other. Repeated repetition of such a situation leads to the development of internal conflict.

Another type of depreciation is excessive parental expectations for the child. “You are our only hope,” they often repeat, and the child constantly feels guilty, invaluable to them, because he does not live up to their expectations. Parents expect from him something that THEM lacks, which is significant in THEIR picture of the world, but for a child it can be completely different, and for happiness he needs something completely different.

Thus, the child is faced with a choice: to meet the expectations of his parents or to be happy himself. Although how to feel happy when you have such a load of guilt and responsibility on your shoulders …

As a rule, parents' devaluation of their children is not in any way a consequence of malicious intent or dislike. The paradox here lies precisely in the fact that they devalue from the best intentions - "so that a person grows up" and "so as not to over-praise." They sincerely think that this is how they encourage children to become better. Because this is how they themselves were brought up, and they simply do not know what could be different. In some cases, this is aggravated by the desire to maintain total control over the life of the child, who is perceived as their property.

Parents take care of the child's physical safety, feed, dress, teach. But praise and approval is a child's confidence, his vitality. Parental assessment is the main basis for the formation of self-esteem.

Children of depreciating parents often have low self-esteem and find it difficult to manage their own lives, set boundaries, and make decisions because they are very afraid of failure. Difficulties can also arise in personal relationships, since such people often unconsciously choose managers, controlling or ignoring partners.

In this article, I am in no way encouraging you to blame your parents or get angry with them. It is important to remember that it is never too late to learn to trust and value yourself. In therapy, it is possible to completely or almost completely heal childhood traumas, although this requires some effort on the part of the person himself and a highly qualified specialist.