2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
To answer this question, you first need to understand what state an adult is in, for whom some developmental need was not satisfied in childhood (for example, the need for secure attachment or the need for his needs to be heard and satisfied).):
1. He experiences a strong psychological hunger, the reasons for which he often does not realize.
2. From old memory, hunger is felt as huge and all-consuming. In an adult, the needs for love, care and safety are not as critical and vital as in a small child, because an adult can more or less take care of himself, while a child is absolutely helpless and absolutely dependent on his parents. Despite the fact that an adult needs much less, the memory of the times when it was desperately and a lot remained, and in assessing his hunger the adult relies on it, and not the real state of affairs in his life.
This leads to the fact that even if a person gets what he needs in a small amount, he rejects him, because he needs more than one apple or one cookie, he needs a freight train of apples and cookies (as he thinks).
3. According to the same old memory, a person feels small, weak and needy, and perceives the people around him as big and powerful, possessing the resource that a person needs so much. Children whose needs are ignored feel deeply helpless at the realization that they have no tools or "currency" with which to get what they want from adults. That is, they cannot force their mother to come when she is needed, they have no control levers other than aggression - to get angry and show their unhappy state. If mom does not come, a feeling of worthlessness, uselessness and her "badness and unworthiness" is born.
An adult already has something that he can exchange a resource, but from old memory he continues to consider himself insignificant, worthless and helpless. He is either angry with the world and people because they do not hear his needs and do not satisfy them, or he lives in a state of doomed pessimism "life is meaningless, nothing good will ever happen to me."
4. Unmet needs in childhood gives rise to persistent myths about oneself and the world. About myself: my mother did not love me / ignored / did not see me, because I am bad and unworthy of love. About the world: the world is cruel, indifferent, cold, nobody needs me in it and is not interesting.
Even if a person is given something, he will not believe it, since this does not agree with his attitudes. Or he will reject it on the basis that "a normal person cannot fall in love with such an unworthy monster, and if someone loves me, it means that he is the same monster, and I don't need anything from a monster."
5. As a small child, he is convinced that all his needs should be met by one person (mother).
6. Since he does not have the experience of satisfying the necessary need, he does not have the necessary "enzymes" in his psyche to digest it. Even if he receives what he needs from someone, he will not be able to accept and assimilate it.
A person with such baggage builds their relationships with others in two main ways:
A. He does not say anything about his needs and at the same time expects people to somehow figure out what he needs and give it to him. Often he begins to give people what he really needs - also in the hope that they will guess and do the same in return. At the same time, he is silent, like a partisan, because he is afraid - if he needs to publicize and openly ask for their satisfaction, he will be rejected (as it was with his mother). In addition, he initially does not believe that his needs will ever be met.
B. He aggressively tries to knock out of people what he did not get in childhood, demanding for himself absolute love, adoration, obedience and provision of his needs. Moreover, on "childish terms": I am small, hungry, and I can not give you anything, but you, strong and large, who have a lot of resources, owe and owe me simply because I need it.
Aggression can also be passive - a person looks with unhappy eyes, belittles himself, pauses, clings, blames.
In case A, the adult world reacts like an adult: no one knows how to read thoughts and desires, and until they are openly declared, they will not be responded to. In addition, in the adult world, relationships are built on equal terms and on exchange, and not on imbalance, when one person gives everything to another, receiving nothing in return (nothing in return is about very young children).
In case B, more or less healthy people shy away - even if they have a resource that they can share, they do not have it in such huge quantities that a traumatic person claims to. Only the same traumatics will get into a relationship with a traumatic person, who, in terms of resource, also have a rolling ball, but who are led by the installation "I will save him so that he will be filled with resources, become my mother and start investing resources in me."
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