What People Will Say

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

We are people, we live in a society, and living by the rules of this society is the norm for us.

But where are the boundaries of these rules? How to understand what is already here - only I decide how to live and act, and the environment should not have any influence on this? It seems like the answer is quite simple - where the importance of personal comfort begins, and for each person it is his own. And it seems to be so simple - someone lives according to their personal preferences the way they want, and he is not touched by what they say about him, someone - lives for show, just to seem prosperous, and someone turns out to live well outside, that is, approved by others, and relatively comfortable inside, behind the closed door of the apartment. But it’s one thing when it all concerns adults who consciously or completely unconsciously make a choice in my life, and it’s a completely different thing when children suffer from this choice.

There are families in which adults do not care what others will say about them, where they can drink and use drugs, where children are abandoned and no one cares about them, and if / when the situation suddenly reaches an extreme, then the public screams about where the organs were who should have known this and took appropriate action. But in families where everything is fine and exemplary on the outside, children can suffer from endless violence (as victims or witnesses), and almost no one can know about this, and children are no less traumatized than in a situation with alcoholics.

I know the story of a family where a girl for many years witnessed her father's violence against her mother, who did not sleep at night because, falling asleep, she was afraid not to have time to protect her mother from her father's beatings. Outside, it was a very nice family. When she became an adult, she exactly repeated the same scenario in her life, and already her daughter tried to protect her mother from her mother's husband. But for those around her, this already adult woman also created an outwardly very prosperous family, and when the unfavorableness of her family became very obvious, so that people would not say anything bad, she simply ceased to keep in touch with everyone with whom it was possible.

For many people, sharing their difficulties, shortcomings, asking for help means exposing their vulnerability, destroying their self-affirmation, and plunging into shame, which can destroy a personality without a trace, like acid dissolves the flesh. Not realizing their problem, and sometimes realizing, but refusing to do anything with it, and thus destroying themselves, such people deprive their children of the opportunity to live a normal life, doing with them the same way as they did with them, and this cycle may end, crippling generations, or may never end.

Psychotherapy makes it possible to gain that experience in relationships that many of us did not receive in the most unprotected period of our life - in childhood, and to act, subsequently, from a healthier part of ourselves, with greater knowledge of ourselves, the boundaries of our comfort, and, probably, with knowledge of the reasons for our actions, because if we understand that we are not acting the way we want, then we have the ability to control it, and if we know the reason for this, we can relive it, which means that somewhere to rewrite the previous experience again, which gives us the opportunity to feel, think, act differently.