2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Answer to the question from the title: stop devaluing the artist in yourself!
Everywhere I notice that modern society has a pathologically low noise tolerance threshold. Children are taught to behave "quieter than water, below the grass", and if in public places quiet behavior is natural and acceptable, since it is based on respect for the community of space, then the manifestation of intolerance to noise in the family is fraught with trauma for young artists.
Devalued in childhood, people from such families feel unable to realize their talents - and this is at best. Often, thanks to the program of implementation of generally accepted attitudes, better known to us as "common sense", in early childhood, a person learns to deny his own talent. Therefore, adults who once were such children do not see their talent at all and now they personally call themselves “mediocrity”.
Those of us who had the lucky opportunity to travel to highly developed countries may have experienced serious surprise seeing the attitude towards celebrities and artists in the West. Fame, fame, superiority, recognition - in the Scandinavian countries these qualities are by no means over-desirable. It is interesting that, in contrast to the post-Soviet society, where, at first glance, modesty and equality are valued as highly as in the Nordic countries, in the latter these values are sincerely revered - in our country, unfortunately, they are fragments of a dissociated psyche, which we replace the pursuit of excellence.
If you ask the average American what fame means to him, the American will most likely hesitate, and then formulate the answer: fame, fame, recognition are the natural needs of the inhabitants of the United States. But if Americans are more or less capable of realizing the desire to be in the center of attention, our person, due to historical events, denies this desire in every possible way and remains painfully fragmented.
Note that most of us have a strong relationship with celebrities. Few people speak of the stars in a neutral manner. The energetic message behind the expression of an opinion about the domestic show business is strong and directed in one of two opposite aspects: either famous people are frankly annoying a person, or he admires the artists and finds inspiration in mental unity with them.
Want more confirmation? See how Russian serials are sucking us in! Note that the character who often provokes us to experience strong emotions is either an envious person or one that everyone envies. Such people cause irritation in society, where you need to be "quieter than water, below the grass." Envy, striving for superiority, competition, which we rationalize as "white envy" and "motivation" - all these are manifestations of a repressed fragment of our psyche, which was told in childhood that it was unacceptable. To be quieter.
Why can suppressing a child's noisiness be equated with suppressing creativity?
Because what you, as an adult, perceive as noisy, is a form of self-expression for a child.
As I chatted with family and friends, I found that many of them loved to sing and dance at a young age. Both at home and in the kindergarten, these children organized performances where they performed for the audience, and this desire to be noticed was supported and expressed at matinees.
Oh, if I could fully convey the significance of the matinee for the baby! For those of us who were born artists, public speaking has always been something joyful and desirable. The irony is that in order to realize the prevailing talent, which later develops into a vocation, a person must first experience the exact opposite feeling. To know white, you need to understand what black is. To feel the desire to realize the happy, one must first feel the unhappy. This dynamic is fundamental to evolution.
Our desires tell us where to develop. The entire civilization that exists today was built and continues to build by moving from the worst to the best, from the gross to the subtle. Condemning the natural impulses that each of us experiences at the beginning of our development upon coming to the planet, we are only putting a stick in the wheels of the universal machine of human progress.
To learn more about the destructive attitudes that society imprints into our heads as children, read my article "Noodles We Keep Hanging on the Ears of Children."
Today we are transgressing into an era where emotional illiteracy is holding back further progress. Not understanding what emotions are, we continue to veto some emotions and encourage others. Regarding children's artistry as noisy, excessive volume, we impede the self-expression of the forming person. In order to maintain mental well-being in the family (read: survive), the child is forced to take the side of the parent as to which traits in him are unacceptable. The traumatic experience of devaluation of artistic inclinations leads to the fact that the little man independently suppresses his artistry, which, nevertheless, does not disappear and continues to live inside him - however, now in the closet of the subconscious. Only on the condition that in an adult state a person chooses to realize the emotional trauma that his parents inflicted on his inner artist, and to direct the light of consciousness to the creator closed in the closet, this person will be able to find happiness.
The devaluation of children's creativity takes many forms. Most often it is veiled, hidden. Perhaps the most painful form of devaluation is the invisibility of a child, non-recognition of him as a full-fledged personality. Phrases released into space, like: "Again she yells" or, in an appeal to another adult member of the family (so that the child can hear!): "Do something with him, he will blow the whole apartment with his extinction," the child's personality is split.
A direct message to a child about his mediocrity (an example of a phrase here is shamelessly prosaic: “You are mediocrity”, “What kind of dancer are you, look at yourself”, “Well, what kind of singer are you? requires separate consideration. Today we are looking at the subtle mechanics of devaluation of children's creativity, the real reason for which is the intolerance of parental discomfort.
Modern science recognizes the fact that before the age of eight, a child is unable to conceptualize his experience. Communication with the world is based on feeling. Not understanding why his pure desire to express himself causes a negative reaction from the parent, the child understands that the magic generated by creativity in his soul is not welcomed in the family, and that it will be safer to keep this magic to himself, referring to it in difficult moments as amazing inner secret.
Of course, violent self-expression can - and, in general, does - bring discomfort to the parent.
So what to do if a child with his loud behavior makes you uncomfortable?
Firstly, you need to figure out why such a manifestation annoys you. Identify your own major irritant. In psychology, such a stimulus is often called a "trigger" (from the English trigger - trigger, or catching event). Psychologists have discovered a pattern that the traits that are clearly manifested in our children, the accentuation of their character are the same traits that were suppressed in ourselves in early childhood.
It is important to remind here that with this statement I am in no way trying to throw a brick into my parents' garden. We all interact with each other in a society that has a gravitational center. What is acceptable to society today was not natural for the Middle Ages, and vice versa. Raising a child in isolation from society is unhealthy and impossible.
Pay attention to which manifestations of the child affect you the most. Find the beginnings of these traits inside yourself, which in the process of growing up were recognized by you as wrong, bad, evil.
Secondly, armed with the awareness of your own suppression, expand the work on accepting these emotions and accentuations in yourself. The child is the perfect mirror. If you feel that certain forms of the child's behavior annoy you more than others, this means that this child's behavior exactly reflects something that is present in you, but you subconsciously choose not to see it.
Finally, learn to mirror your child. What does it mean? Mirroring means formulating communication with a child in such a way that your words reflect the reality of the child's inner experiences and do not devalue his emotions. For example, if a child does not want to go to school and tells you that he is afraid, an example of correct mirroring behavior would be:
- Mom, I'm afraid.
- Yes, baby, I see you're scared?
In this way, we recognize the presence of an emotion within the child and do not try to change it as soon as it arises. Recognizing an emotion is the first step to raising a mentally healthy person.
Let's consider an example of a wrong reaction:
- Mom, I'm afraid.
- Well, why are you scared? There is nothing to be afraid of here. It's okay, see?
(The reaction is destructive because the child's real emotion, which he is experiencing at the moment, is recognized as abnormal. Therefore, the idea that the child receives is "I am abnormal. Wrong. Something is wrong with me").
To get a grip on emotional literacy, refer to the article titled "How to Befriend Your Emotions."
So, we found out that if the child's creative self-expression annoys you, seems excessive, abnormal, unacceptable, you need to look inside yourself and figure out at what point our own creativity was suppressed. The brilliant effect of such work is that it solves two painful issues at once: by accepting ourselves, we accept our child, and by accepting our child, we allow him to manifest his inner unique truth.
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