Return To Childhood

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

When a person turns to therapy - to a psychoanalyst, to a psychologist, to a psychotherapist - he always faces his past. And he meets not only with the facts of his biography. First of all, he is faced with experiences, those that he felt as a child before, and now as an adult who grew out of him.

The memory of our childhood? What was it: happy or not? Why does someone remember him, and someone diligently avoids memories of him.

Quite often people say that they don't remember their childhood well. In most cases, this is not a memory issue. The unwillingness to remember is associated with an unconscious desire to forget the past. The psyche in its own way defends itself from everything that is too hard to bear - it rejects, erases, forgets. A person spends too much energy on the work of forgetting and often this does not give him the opportunity to see the good that was in his life and what he can rely on today.

“I don’t want to remember” - this usually refers to events, returning to which a person feels very strong feelings. For example, a person may not want to go back to a time when their parents divorced. They swear, not noticing the child, because he is small, unless he understands what is happening. They may part and not explain to the baby where his father went and why from that moment he is bad. And with this event, the child's world collapsed, the cozy world of his childhood.

A small child will try to make sense of what happened. Returning to these experiences in therapy, to the question "what happened then?" memories suggest that it was a tragedy. He could not keep two people who were equally dear to him, or he did something wrong. A boy or girl may decide that a given event happened because he or she was born. The child begins to blame himself for what happened.

Alas, childhood is not the most carefree time, as is sometimes commonly believed. This is a period of tremendous intensive work of the soul.

A child's experiences can be different. He can be disliked by his classmates and this leads to hurtful memories in the present. And we see that today a person, already an adult, has achieved a lot, but that painful feeling of being an outsider is alive and does not allow moving on in life. The inability to survive a mistake, a failure, plunges a person into the same situation of feeling like a confused child, to whom no one came to the rescue.

What are we afraid of? We are afraid to face shame, humiliation, grief, or acute loneliness. But we also protect ourselves from pleasant sensations, which for one reason or another were then forbidden - these are sensations from our own body or touching another person.

A young man. When it comes to his father, he says that he does not want to talk about him.

A woman, talking about her childhood, coughs because the spasms come to her throat and do not allow her to speak. “I know I shouldn't blame my mother,” she says.

An adult man cannot endure moving, because every time he recalls his childhood and repairs in a one-room apartment.

In fact, experiences affect memory and we, growing out of childhood, continue to carry the light and shadow of its trials. And sometimes it becomes impossible to define yourself in the present without defining who you were in the past.

In therapy, a person can touch on taboo topics that are family secrets. Adults whispered about these "skeletons in the closet", not paying attention to the child who was running alongside. Françoise Dolto, a French psychoanalyst, argued that children know everything. In any case, children understand and know much more than it seems to adults.

It seems to us that, having escaped from childhood, we become completely independent. But often a person continues to follow the instructions of his parents, so the secret must be hidden. But along with the hidden secret, fragments of childhood, as well as scenes, people, and experiences associated with it, go away. Life history loses its continuity.

As an adult, have you ever noticed how your heart contracts when you see a child standing alone? And some films about children are simply impossible to watch to the end. This is because you have encountered something that resonates within you, something that is familiar, that touches and hurts. At that moment, you crossed paths with your experience of grief.

When we become parents, we again face ourselves and our unresolved conflicts. This complicates relations with children, makes it difficult to see their life, their originality, it becomes impossible to hear their desires and problems. Very often, parents first of all see themselves in their children and this triggers an unconscious competition with their parents, because you need to become better than them. So, the mother who came to the reception insists that her son be friends with his parents. Her story with her mother ended in a quarrel, as a result of which they are far from each other. The teenager refuses to be friends. In fact, parental love and friendship are completely different feelings.

Children try not only to fix the relationship of their parents, but also to make their parents happy. One such strategy is described by the psychoanalyst Andre Green in his work "The Dead Mother". This mother, who is present, she is alive, but she is depressed, she has lost interest in her child. The child, trying to awaken her, resorts to various means that are available to him - hyperreactivity, phobias - everything that can attract her attention. But the child's unsuccessful attempts to awaken the mother from eternal sleep make him identify with his mother, with her depression. And from now on, everything is forbidden to him: to have fun, to laugh, to just live.

In psychoanalysis, a person puts his story piece by piece, and childhood is an integral part of history. From today, you can look differently at your parents, at their relationship, at their story of love and life. In the course of therapy, they become ordinary people, they are allowed to make their mistakes. Yes, they could love each other in their own way and part, they could live in their own way.

In the process of experiencing, a person realizes that then he was a small frightened child who needed love. But these memories also make it possible to find love. Letting go, rethinking, rewriting history, we can already accept it. An ambivalent attitude towards your parents will allow you to relate to the events of your childhood in a different way, possibly with a little sadness. That's why you can become a little freer if your childhood story takes its place in life. Then there will be a place for you.

The article uses paintings by Nino Chakvetadze.