Who Is Your Dad And What Does He Do?

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

"But now we are really having some fun. We will play a wonderful game" Who is my dad, and what does he do ". Let's start with you:

- My dad fixes cars that were broken by brainless women.

- My dad does nothing after the accident.

- My dad gives money to people who have no money, then they use it, and then they give him other money back, and dad is given exactly the same money.

- My dad watches TV all day.

- My dad is divorced and my mom is divorced.

- My dad is a psychologist. He helps people who have been offended or who do not feel anything. That's all.

“My dad works in the house and plays with me a lot.”

From the film "Kindergarten Policeman".

The other day, being in some of their daily affairs, from the background of the working TV, consciousness fished out this moment from the film, when the main character, an undercover policeman, interrogates a group of kindergarten about their fathers' activities. He pursues a very specific goal, according to the plot, one of the fathers of children from this group is a criminal, and the hero needs to track him down. It's already quite old cinema, it is more than twenty years old, but the answers of the children, in their essence, are absolutely amazing and relevant for any time. And here's what exactly.

There is such a widespread belief that a scientific theory is correct if it can be explained in accessible language to a seven-year-old child. In the example from the film, the children, of course, are younger, but this does not change the deep essence. Even if preschool children have limited vocabulary and do not understand many complex causal relationships, they often have a unique ability to grasp the very essence of phenomena. And under the amazed exclamations of adults to utter it to them. Let the logic of these statements suffer, but in each of them there is definitely something deep and prompting to think. An aphoristic age, a book is even named after him - "From three to five".

And, reflecting on all this, I remembered how a friend of mine shared with me a discovery that his little son accidentally helped him to make. He put him to bed, and his son, trying to grab more impressions from the passing day, kept asking and asking him questions. "Dad, why is that? Dad, why is that?" It is so typical of a child's mind. And he simply answered the child the first suitable thing that came to mind. But one question, suddenly, made him stop and think: "Dad, what do you do in life? What do you work for?" And he recalled how painful it was to formulate a simple and clear answer for a child: "You see, I give presentations for key clients … Well, the key ones are the most important, these are such important people.. Well, presentations are when people get together to they could be conveyed … Well, I pass on knowledge about what we produce to those people who need it.. I help them … Yes, I help people.. ". - I say all this to my son, and he looks at me with interest, and says: "Dad, so who are you, after all? What are you doing?"

A question that may well serve as the leitmotif of the so-called midlife crisis. When, it seems, some goals have been achieved, and the peaks have been conquered. But for some reason, all of a sudden, all this becomes unimportant, but something else is important, something else that is barely perceptible, constantly slips away, a sense of the fullness and meaning of the life being lived. Happiness in the end. And about such categories, it is rather difficult to build a coherent plan of achievement. Because there are no attributes, having acquired, having conquered which you can guarantee this to yourself.

In transactional psychoanalysis, there is such a conditionally schematic division of the spheres of the psyche, which has already become part of mass culture and, to one degree or another, is familiar to everyone: the Inner Parent, Inner Adult and Inner Child. And if the Parent often means all kinds of dogmas and attitudes that a person carries in himself, the Adult - a rational perception of life, then the Inner Child is exactly the one who can sometimes ask such serious and tricky questions. And if you can always dismiss your real child - well, say something back to him, lie, in the end. How do you get away from the child that you are at heart? From your spontaneous desires, impulses, dreams and dreams about how you once imagined your life? Its place in it. That business that would express you, your whole essence. So that all these regular weekly jokes about Friday and Monday would seem to you something absolutely funny, but completely alien and unfamiliar.

One of the classics of existential psychotherapy, Rollo May, in his book "The Discovery of Being" has a very interesting and accurate observation regarding the symptoms with which people often come to psychotherapy. He writes that anxiety, guilt, depression and many other mental suffering in modern man are no longer associated with suppression and repression, as it was in the time of Freud, but with an internal conflict arising from a person's awareness of who he is now. and who he could become. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that various kinds of anxiety disorders often accompany life periods, situations in which a person has some serious choice.

Which path to take, where to move on in life?

Go with the flow or finally start something of your own?

Should you choose comfort and insurance for now or risk a lot and get hope for new opportunities?

To find with difficulty once again the words in order to explain what you are doing, who you are, in simple language, or to do something in life so that the essence of yourself and your business is clear, first of all, to yourself?

These are all topics that contain a lot of fears. And the older we get, the more fears. Because experience, because many knowledge, because responsibility. But freedom always implies responsibility. And somewhere in this area, in the area of accepted responsibility for my choice, in the area of freedom, in the area of feeling that I am becoming who I felt, who I wanted, what I was drawn to, and there is a direction towards meaning, towards meaningfulness of life, towards its completeness. And fortunately. Even if it is such that it is quite sometimes, infrequently. But fortunately.

The word anxiety itself comes etymologically from the concepts of "pain during labor", "suffocation". All this refers to those conditions through which the newborn passes during childbirth. In fact, this can mean that one of the main tasks that life puts before a person is to give birth to oneself. Realize yourself as you feel inside. Allow yourself to come true and find your embodiment.

And then you can always simply and clearly answer both the child outside and, more importantly, the one inside: "Who is your dad, and what does he do?"

Author: Eremeev Pavel Yurievich. Psychotherapist. Krasnodar city