Overprotective Parents

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

“Everyone says that you need to listen to yourself first. What if I can't hear anything? I feel like I'm empty inside. I am used to listening to parents who love me very much, although their constant guardianship and control is depressing."

Is it bad when parents love too much? Anyway, how much love is there? Perhaps the answer to this question depends on what is meant by the concept of "love". If we talk about such manifestations of parental love as overprotection, excessive, sometimes even arbitrary control and attitude towards the child as a part of themselves, that is, continuation in the literal sense of the word, then this love can have significant consequences for the formation of the personality and further life of the child.

The main and most serious problem that arises in overprotected children is the lack of awareness of themselves as a separate person, that is, sometimes almost complete merging with the personality of the parent. The consequence of such a merger is often a feeling of inner emptiness, which a person who is overprotected in childhood can experience throughout life without even realizing it, since another serious consequence of excessive parental care is often a decrease in awareness as an opportunity to correctly recognize one's true feelings and emotions.

Thus, unconscious emotions and unlived feelings are repressed into the unconscious and try to reach out to a person's consciousness, turning into fears, anxieties and other neurotic symptoms.

A child of overprotective parents rarely understands what he really wants. However, often we are talking not only about the realization of deepest desires, but also the most everyday ones. In childhood, parents always "wanted" for a child. They always knew what was best for him, made almost all decisions for him, and more often than not they also acted for him.

And he became a bottomless repository of parental attitudes, which more and more oppressed the personality of the child himself. Thus, a triple repression is obtained here: the individual manifestations of the child as features of his temperament; feelings and emotions; his own desires.

Such a large-scale repression leads to the formation of a feeling of inner emptiness - emptiness, which not only is not really empty, but just contains an incredibly much.

Another feature of overprotected children is a strong fear of the world around them, since their parents constantly broadcast to them that the world is dangerous, that is why they take such care of children, protect and take care of them. The continuation and development of this fear becomes the inability to act independently, because the parents have always acted for them, respectively, they themselves have practically no experience of failures, they do not know how to experience it, and, therefore, they experience great fear of possible failure.

Accustomed to being under the wing of their parents, the child expects the same attitude from others and is severely disappointed that others treat him differently. As a result, a strong self-doubt often develops, a fear of rejection. The person begins to feel that he is not good enough. Sometimes, on the basis of such insecurity, perfectionism arises as a desire to become ideal in order to find a familiar attitude towards oneself.

It is difficult for children of overprotective parents to communicate and build personal relationships, since they have a huge craving for merging with another person and the expectation from him that he will perform parental functions in relation to them.

The main reason for overprotection lies in the personality of the parents, their own psychological problems - anxiety, guilt, obsessive fears, low self-esteem. As a rule, people whose parents raised them in the same way or, conversely, were rejecting and cold, are overly protective and controlling their children. Children of rejecting parents try to give their children everything that they themselves were completely deprived of in childhood, and they are often too zealous in this.

Working with the consequences of overprotection is to bring a person to the awareness of himself as a separate person, to eliminate parental introjects (attitudes), to release repressed own feelings and emotions, to restore self-esteem and self-confidence. It is important to work with the Inner Child, the formation of a new image of the Inner Parent and the abolition of destructive parental prescriptions from the perspective of your Inner Parent.