Generational Injuries-2

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

Continuation. Start here

It was very upsetting that someone did not hear the important thing: the child's perception of the situation can be very different from the real state of affairs. It was not the people of wartime who disliked their children, it was the child who perceived their "hardened" state from grief and overload. It was not the children of the war themselves who were really helpless en masse, it was their children who interpreted their parents' insane request for love that way. And “Uncle Fedora” is also not paranoid, deliberately killing any living initiative in their children, they are driven by anxiety, and the child can perceive this as the attitude of “being helpless”.

You see, no one is to blame. No one gave birth to children, so as not to love, use, castrate. I have already said and will repeat it again: this is not a story about crazy crazy people, not about soulless freaks who just get a better job in life at the expense of others. It's all about love. About the fact that people are alive and vulnerable, even if they can endure the impossible. About how strangely the flow of love is distorted under the influence of trauma. And about the fact that love, when it is distorted, can torment worse than hatred.

A generation of grief and stoic patience.

Generation of resentment and need for love.

Generation of guilt and hyperresponsibility.

The features of the generation of indifference and infantilism are already being drawn.

The teeth of the wheels cling to each other, "pass on", "pass on".

They ask me: what to do? But what to do when the flow is clogged, clogged, dammed up, distorted?

Clean. Disassemble, rake, knee-deep, waist-deep, as much as necessary to climb into the dirty rotten water and clean it with your hands. Get out of there grievances, guilt, claims, unpaid bills. Rinse, sort, throw something away, mourn and bury something, leave something as a keepsake. Give a place and a path to clear water. You can do this yourself, with a psychologist, individually, in a group, simply by discussing with friends, spouses, siblings, reading books, as you please, whoever can and wants to. The main thing is not to sit on the bank of a muddy stream, pouting offendedly and not booing about “bad parents” (they say that even a community like that is in LiveJournal, is it really?). Because you can sit like this all your life, and the stream will continue to go - to children, grandchildren. Environmentally highly unclean. And then you have to sit and boo about useless children.

It seems to me that this is precisely the task of our generation, it is no coincidence that most of the participants in the discussion are from it. Because, let me remind you, we have a lot of resources. Taking responsibility is no stranger to it. We are all educated, again. It seems that we are quite capable of this task. Well, in general, as long as possible, that's enough already.

They asked how to behave with their parents. With those who are disliked children. This is a very difficult question, I can't imagine how to give advice on the Internet, but I will try to write about the general principles.

Experience shows that if children rake something in themselves, then they let their parents go a little. Not always, though. Here a happy ending is not guaranteed to anyone, and there may be such a situation that the only solution would be to protect your own children. Sometimes there is such pressure and even aggression that you just need to limit contacts, save your family.

Because, whatever it may seem at the level of feelings, responsibility to children is much more important than responsibility to parents. Life goes forward, not backward, the flow must go from ancestor to descendants.

Fortunately, very difficult options are still not very common.

The main thing is to stop everything that you can on yourself, not to let it go further, not to wind up even tighter loops of guilt and resentment. By the way, sometimes it seems to me that one of the reasons for the flourishing of child-free (of course, not the only one) is this way of stopping the transmission of the “wrong” parent-child scenario, when you don’t want to continue it, but you don’t believe in the possibility of changing it. Such a radical reaction to both the fear of losing children and the idea that raising a child is unrealistically difficult.

It is possible that psychologically conditioned infertility comes from here. I happened to see a job in which a woman started with the question “Why can't I get pregnant?”, And went to her great-grandmother, who, during the famine and epidemics of the 30s, buried all the children except one.

But back to the parents. The main thing here, as one of the commentators said exactly, is to isolate those remarks that are not addressed to you. When the generation of "children of war" speaks to their children, they are in fact very often talking not to them, but to their parents. It is to them, to their parents that they say “I can’t sleep while you’re not at home”. It was just that then there was no choice, there was no way to say it, the parents could not do anything, reminding them of their unmet children's needs would be just sadism.

But the needs remained, and now they are screaming about themselves.

But no matter how hard the children of the third generation try, no matter what they deny themselves, no matter how ready they are even to sacrifice themselves, this will not give anything. After all, the request is not for us. We don’t have a time machine to touch that baby that was once mom or dad. We can sympathize, feel sorry for that child, we can try to help parents now, but when we try to set ourselves the task of “curing” them, “making them happy,” this is pride. By the way, pride is the hypostasis of hyperresponsibility. In our uncle Fyodor's childhood, we made up a little for ourselves that everything depends on us and without us everything will be lost. In fact, the irrational guilt that we feel before our parents is guilt for the fact that we are unable to do the impossible, we are not the Lord God and we are not even angels. Agree, a rather strange reason for guilt. Well, in the absence of a psychiatric diagnosis You have to be more modest

How, then, should we relate to all this? Yes, somehow, without unnecessary pathos. I work a lot with foster parents and foster children who have experienced real orphanhood, real loneliness, and even cruelty. And maybe that's why I always have a somewhat ironic reaction to talk about “bad parents” - because of the nature of my work, I often have to deal with what REALLY bad parents are. Which, you know, they put out cigarettes about children and not only. They themselves, in turn, sometimes have such a family history that we will not dream in a nightmare.

So, for a start, it would be good to realize how lucky we were with time and with our parents. The fact that we are now sitting and having smart conversations, that we have the mental strength for this, good mental development and money for a computer and the Internet is a sign of a fairly prosperous childhood. And good enough parents. Those of our peers who are less fortunate now while away the evening in a completely different way, if they are still alive.

Of course, it’s a pity about many things, and it’s bitter and insulting to this day. The injury is. It is stupid and harmful to deny and keep silent about it, because then the wound festers and does not heal. But making her a “sacred cow”, the main event of life, is also stupid. Trauma is not a sentence. People live with traces of burns on their bodies, without an arm, without a leg, and are happy. You can also live with trauma and be happy. To do this, you need to realize it, if necessary, clean the wound, treat it, anoint it with healing ointment. And after that, stop fixing on the past, because there is a lot of good things in the present. This is probably the most important thing. Stop presenting a promissory note to fate someday. Write off debts. To realize that yes, in some ways you were deprived of fate, but that there is - a lot and that's enough.

Sometimes, looking at parents, it is important to just remind yourself that they are parents, they are older, they are ancestors, whatever one may say. And we are their children, compared to them, just little stupid children, we cannot, even if we wanted to, be responsible for whether they will be happy, for their health, their marriage, their mood, for what they did and do with your life. Even if it suddenly seems to them that we can, in fact - no. And if they suddenly decide to ditch themselves, we can grieve and cry, but we cannot do anything about it, and we cannot stand between them and their fate. We are just children.

What we can? Help, support, please, take care if you get sick. But without the global ambition to “do it all”. As we can, as it turns out, as we see fit. With the right to make mistakes and imperfections. Only a serious illness and obvious old age "change the roles" of children and parents, and then this is a correct exchange, a natural cycle of life. Sometimes it seems to me that they are so seriously ill because the disease makes it possible to take care of them, like children, "legally", without violating the hierarchy, without pretending.

Something like this. These are, of course, very general things and not everything can be done “over the head”. If relations with parents are very tormented, I would still advise working with a specialist. Very strong feelings are involved, very powerful blocks are standing. All of this is best dealt with in a supportive and secure environment. Well, and not everything can be described in clever words, especially related to childhood experience, when we rather live with our senses and body than with our head.