Voice In My Head, Or Complexes Grafted With Love

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

No one will argue with the fact that loving your children is good and right. No one will condemn parents for passing on their invaluable experience to their children, giving them an understanding of what is good and bad. No one will condemn adults for wanting to warn, spread a pillow, protect from mistakes, anticipate misfortunes. Nobody, except the children themselves, who are deprived of the opportunity to live, making mistakes and disappointed, but still living a real full life

Ungrateful, you say? Unhappy ones, I say.

One of my acquaintances (not too fat woman) is very worried about being overweight. She understands that the situation arose only because as a child, her - a little skinny girl - was taught by her mother that if she didn’t finish eating everything that was on her plate, food would run after her all day. The horror of a small child has become a habit of finishing everything. Many years have passed since then, but a little girl in a large adult body cannot leave anything on a plate. And not only on her own: she "eats up" for all those close to her. Mom's "mindset" operates through time and years.

Another friend of mine all her life considers herself guilty in the divorce of her parents. Mom in her hearts said that dad left because she did not study well and behaved badly. Yes, she graduated from high school with a gold medal, but dad never returned even after two honors and a Ph. D. thesis. I think you can imagine that my friend's perfectionism takes on completely bizarre and often unbearable forms - she is a completely intolerant boss - and at 37 she is completely alone.

Another acquaintance, when she was six years old, overheard her grandmother complaining to her mother: "Oh, too much, why should I have such a nose?" The first operation that my friend underwent was rhinoplasty. And then - more. Did this bring her happiness in her personal life? Hope …

Adults often bring stories from their childhood to my office. In it, the parental message turned into a deep fear, a voice in the head, which is accepted as a principle of attitude towards oneself and the world. These messages will remain with them forever, as the core of our personality, as a message from the whole world. After all, parents for a child are the whole world, divine truth.

Yes, for a child, the parent's words are an unconditional indisputable truth, on which it is necessary and possible to rely, with which it will be easier to go through life. The truth that we repeat, without hesitation, to our own children, believing that we want the best, that this is how we "educate" them and protect them from danger. But we can't even imagine how many different fears "grow" out of casually spoken phrases, out of our "figures of speech", with which we want to decorate our parental attitudes, making them more convincing.

Quite naturally, against this background, the fear of growing up and becoming an adult arises, which is easily triggered by careless phrases: "when you grow up, you will find out how much a pound is dashing!" wherever you want "," now you will be 18 - you will find out what an independent life is! " A smart way to give the child's psyche the opportunity to justify all its infantilism, the desire to regress, the position dependent on the parent, and as a result - the unwillingness to grow, develop, learn, be independent and make decisions. Of course, an adult will grow out of such a child, but he "will not go anywhere from mommy."

Fear not to grow - another fear and the other extreme of parental endless concern. "Well, if you don't eat well, you won't grow up," "you cry like a little one," "but you can never do it," "you always succeed terribly," "they don't take such little ones with them." How can you enjoy childhood here? We urgently need to grow, prove, be able, not cry. And little "old men" and "old women" appear in psychologists' offices with a whole range of adult illnesses and complaints about this adult childhood life. Children deprived of childhood are a terrible sight! Obedient to nausea, rational to the edge, not childishly logical and reflecting on their fate, without dreams, without tears and without faith in themselves.

The fear of not meeting the needs of parents, and as a result - the needs of society, turns into a constant nightmare from the possibility and presence of social assessment: what will people say? It all starts with the innocent words "everyone will point fingers at you", transforms into "we will send you so (disobedient, careless, angry, ungrateful) to an orphanage (boarding school)", and ends with a passionate "if you come dirty, I will kill you!" And how to explain to an adult that this "metaphor" cannot in any way be perceived by a child as a figure of speech, and that the child sacredly believes in what exactly will kill? Yes, he is really waiting for a boarding school or prison! This is my mother, and my mother cannot lie. Mom is always right. And if my mother says that I have "crooked hands, and it is not clear where they grow from," then apparently it is. And nothing can be done about it.

Scenes of the parent violence against the will of the child, which look like a good deed of overcoming children's fears of water, heights, sports games and competitions, efforts to form the will to win and the desire to develop, not to give up what you started halfway. I’m sure you have seen how daddy drags a screaming baby into the water, saying: “Oh, you’re a man, it’s not scary!”. After that, the loving father pushes the baby into the cold water in front of the affectionate audience: "Well, yes, this is for good! If he learns to swim, he will thank him!" Probably, I do not know anything about gratitude, but I know that my friend considers the seven lost years in the music school to be seven circles of hell and violence, but in 15 years of our acquaintance I have never seen her "at the piano". I believe that it helped someone, and there will be a lot of defenders of the "grow up - thanks" position among my readers, but is the personality of the child behind all of this? Maybe this fear or unwillingness to do something is just a child's way to develop according to his personal program, his needs and in accordance with his will? But it seems to us that we know more about the child, that we feel him better, that we certainly will not be mistaken if we can warn and teach for future use. Manic parental control has nothing to do with the safety of the child; rather, it is just an opportunity for the parent himself to suppress his anxieties, tying the child to himself with fears with a forged chain. Yes, the world is not perfect.

There is a place in it for violence and indifference, deception and betrayal, and all sorts of frustrations that I would certainly like to avoid. But is it really so good and useful to live in a greenhouse? I will say a terrible thing: the dire consequences of traumatic events are often greatly exaggerated by psychologists. No, not that trauma is very good and useful, but many people are tempted to get away from solving many adult problems, justifying all this by some circumstances in the past that supposedly greatly influenced their lives. I am sure that an adequate healthy child will always have enough vitality to cope with even very serious traumatic events, provided that there is an adult who is quite adequate, loving and involved in the events next to him. Not the adult who, of his own free will, canceled the event, but the one who helped to cope with it, was there when he was needed. We are all faced with a difficult choice: to teach the child to defend himself or not to let him go where it is dangerous? Develop, despite resistance, or let the child know what he wants to do himself? Cancel all dangers and frustrations or support at the right time,giving an opportunity to be disappointed according to age characteristics? To grieve for unrequited love or never to love? Doing what you love or making a living? Whatever your choice, it is just your choice, and not to impose your patterns on the child is a great work that not everyone can do. After all, we all have repeatedly followed the "parental voices in the head", killing desires, dreams and changing destinations in ourselves.

Children need experience to grow. Your own personal. It is very difficult to forget or not take into account the "parental messages", and for many years they continue to "protect" us from love, from success, from ourselves …