When I Was Born, My Parents Were Younger Than I Am Now

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

Psychologists are often faced with a situation where already mature enough people at 35 - 40 years old complain that their parents could not provide them with a happy childhood. And along the way, it turns out that their parents at that time were 19-20 years old and themselves were essentially children. And their childhood could be much more severe than the life of a person sitting in front of a psychologist.

Over the past decades, there has been a very strong infantilization of society, which allows us to keep grudges against our parents in our souls up to 40-50 years and beyond. And our contemporaries are constantly convinced that we can explain all our failures and suffering in life by the fact that we did not receive something in childhood.

Who owes whom and what?

In most psychological areas, in the process of working as a psychologist, he devotes a significant part of his time to discussing and working out topics related to his client's childhood. Immersion in all these childhood grievances, fears and experiences is meaningful when it happens to a person who has taken responsibility for his life into his own hands. But the problem is that the main reason people turn to psychologists is precisely because they fail to fully manage their lives successfully.

Recently, I became an unwitting witness to a conversation between two friends, one of them reported to the other: "I started going to see a psychologist, and now my relationship with my parents has deteriorated." It turned out that this girl dumped to her mom and dad all those childhood experiences that the psychologist working with her helped her remember. However, instead of remorse and apologies from her parents, she received counter-aggression and counter-claims. The question arises: were this mother and this father so wrong in their reactions to the accusations of their daughter?

• Back in the middle of the twentieth century, the public consciousness was dominated by the attitude that children owe their parents in life.
• In our time, the conviction is growing stronger and stronger that our parents owed us something, but we did not receive it from them for various reasons.

The development of psychology and the popularization of various psychotherapeutic practices played a significant role in the formation of such an attitude towards parents. At the moment, we have to take it for granted.

The popularization of psychology has led to the fact that very often people come to see a psychologist with a kind of list of debts that they would like to claim from their parents. If you bring a metaphor in which displaced childhood lives, resentment and suppressed aggression are compared to mineral deposits, then such a drilling of psychological wells in its past can be called a predatory development of its resources. Fountains of emotions and energies gush out of us, which we are not able to process and use for the benefit of ourselves.

It's not so bad when memories of forgotten grievances and insults, of helplessness and injustice lead to cleansing tears. But there is nothing useful in the fact that every time, remembering his childhood, a person begins to cry. Getting rid of old and already ineffective psychological defenses, a person can feel the influx of energy and forces into his soul, which were previously spent on the maintenance and maintenance of these defense mechanisms. But there will be nothing good if he directs this liberated energy in the form of aggression or righteous anger at his "offenders", which his parents were quite often in his childhood.

In general, the answer to the question in this section might sound something like this:

No one owes nothing to nobody.

At the very least, presenting your old scores to your parents is often useless. But this does not mean that you need to abandon expeditions to your past and not explore forgotten territories or abandoned slums of your childhood.

What were not given and what our parents were able to convey to us

Lists of what our parents have not given us can be very long, but the following points are most often found in them: we have not received love and attention, respect and recognition, support and faith in ourselves, a sense of security and safety, the ability to have fun and enjoy life. It is often said that we did not receive proper education from our parents and they did not provide us with specific skills.

However, all these psychological claims against parents are often not very useful and are rarely enforceable. It is much more important to understand what they managed, were able or managed to convey to us. Immediately, we note that parents convey to us both something important and useful, and something negative and harmful, and in addition, they convey to us their unfulfilled plans, impulses and hopes.

It is difficult for us to imagine our parents as young and not very experienced people who suddenly have a small child in their arms. As this very child, we remember that we were dealing with strong and powerful people who, for some reason, were not always fair and kind to us.

The child intuitively feels the basic state of his parents: the general emotional background prevailing at that time in their soul, the basic human effort that they were trying to realize during that period, as well as the logic of their relationship with each other. We can say that the child feels what kind of music sounds in the soul of his parents: victory marches, mournful songs, helpless protest, or melodies full of energy and drive.

And, of course, the child feels an attitude towards himself. The time of parental enthusiasm and praise, as well as curses and harsh predictions will come a little later, when the child learns to speak and understand the essence of the prophecies voiced to him. In the first days and months of life, the child perceives the general emotional and energetic mood of the parents, what they consciously or unconsciously broadcast to him.

Thus, if you want to understand what exactly lies at the basis of your self-esteem, then you need not only to restore those events that you remembered or forgotten in your childhood - you need to understand how your parents felt then. What state they were in that period, what fluids emanated from them at the same time.

We can say that the family or life scenario that is finally formed in our psyche by the age of 6 - 8, and in some cases by 12, has our first impressions of life with its emotional background. And we can say that the words and meaning of this script are sung to the music we heard in the first months of life. And this is the music that sounded then in the souls of our parents.

What help did your parents need when you were born?

A fairly effective psychological technique is the offer to a person who recalls his childhood and himself in childhood, to imagine that he, being already the way he is now, turn to that little child, as he once was, with an offer of help.

Imagine that you could now help this little creature.

What would you do for him now? What did he need then?

In general, it makes sense to apply a similar technique in relation to the memories of their parents. It is worth trying to restore their life situation at the moment when they gave birth to you, as well as during your childhood. They could not or did not want to give you something, we did not receive something important from them. But imagine that you can now do something to help them - then.

• What would you do for them?
• What did they need then?
• How would then change their fate and the state of their soul?
• How would these changes affect you?

Mentally adjusting the fate of your parents and their lives during the period when you were a child may be more useful than rehash of accumulated grievances and replenishment of the list of complaints against them.