2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
A client inspired me to write this article with her question: "How to take care of your inner girl?"
“To become a kind mother to myself” was my answer.
But these are just words of how you can be a good mother for yourself if you did not have a “good enough mother”. You are looking for this mother in the outside world indiscriminately "putting your inner girl on someone's lap" and you are disappointed because no one cares about her and this is not their task.
The task of the parent is to create favorable conditions for the child for physical and mental development
When a mother is caring, responds to the child's needs, understands them, calls them to the child, is tolerant, indulgent, can support and endure the child's feelings, she does not expect the child to achieve achievements that exceed his capabilities. She has the resource to support him in weakness and weakness. She understands that the child is small and depends on her, because she is the whole world for him.
For a mother, it is desirable to support the child at every stage of development, so that the child can successfully solve his age-related problems. And this is not always the case in life.
Most of the needs remain unsatisfied, and they do not go anywhere, but go into the unconscious and wait for the opportunity to manifest. This is how the structure that we call the Inner Child is formed - that part of the human psyche that contains the experience (in the broadest sense of the word) received in childhood and in the perinatal (intrauterine) period.
This experience includes emotions and feelings, bodily experiences, behaviors and images, needs and motivation. He does not disappear anywhere, but continues to "live" in the psyche of an adult and to influence his emotional state today.
Most of the psychotherapeutic work goes into discovering the Inner Child and the specific situations in which he suffered, accepting the experience that he has.
There is also an Inner Parent structure. This is the image of a real parent (mom or dad) who was in childhood. Whether this “mom” is demanding, disregarding, or caring and supportive depends on the examples we saw in childhood: if the real mom was oppressive, then the “inner mom” can be very cruel and demanding, exhausting and critical. In fact, such is the tyrannical figure that lives in a person.
And how, having such a “inner mother”, it is not clear how to be a good, kind mother for oneself…. After all, there was no relevant experience.
Childhood is over, but a small child and a large tyrannical, criticizing figure who opposes him, regardless of his needs and needs, continue to live in the inner world. And maybe mom is no longer around, we are our own critics, and tyrants
Therapy is to discover the Inner Child and give him permission to Be, Live, listening to his feelings, so that he feels support, care, respect for his feelings and needs. I realized that something that was happening to him is normal, and not ashamed or bad. And to protect him from the "bad mother" who reigns in the inner world, and in fact to deprive her of parental rights.
Where to start?
The first thing we will do in relation to ourselves is to notice what is happening to me now? We learn to understand ourselves. What do you want? And give it to yourself or take it where it is given. What can you feel, be wrong, not want, want, be imperfect, be afraid.
A child needs an Adult to tell him about it. In therapy, this Adult is the therapist. The therapist becomes that “kind mother” who can later be appropriated and be a kind mother to herself.
Recommended:
We Take Off The Masks. How To Learn To Accept Yourself, And Not Always Please Everyone And Remake Yourself
We are so stuffed with different patterns, strangers' expectations, strangers must and must, that in this maelstrom we lose touch with ourselves. We plunge into the eternal race “how to please everyone, please, be good for everyone,” that we do not notice how we ignore ourselves - true, genuine, living.
Become Your Own Mom
If we briefly describe what a mature person is, then this is a person who has become a mother to herself. Ideally, dad too. But as a mom, it is a must. Growing up, like learning, and upbringing, and any personal formation, can be completely reduced to such a phenomenon as interiorization.
Do Your Homework! Take The Plate Away! Brush Your Teeth! And So A Hundred Times. Sound Familiar?
"Do your homework! Remove the plate! Brush your teeth!" And so a hundred times. Sound familiar? As a mother, I am even very … Sometimes I catch myself feeling a growing impotent anger and at this moment very familiar phrases from childhood are in the language:
How To Stop "fighting" With Your Mom And Start Living Your Life
In a previous publication, I wrote that the protracted struggle, which sometimes the relationship between a mother and her matured child turns into, takes a lot of energy and does not have a winner. Alas, such a struggle imperceptibly becomes a substitute for a full-fledged own life and drags on for years.
How Not To Become A Mom To Your Husband
When a relationship between a man and a woman turns from a partnership into a parent-child relationship, passion and awe of love, equality and flirting leaves the couple. Why? because do not sleep with mom . The psyche puts a strict taboo on incest.
