My Mother Loved Life

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

Remember the famous baby monkey experiment? "Alive", emotionally accessible mother - the child walks, learns the world, develops, at some point grows up and can separate.

An artificial female orangutan, covered with fur and with a bottle. The cub will eat, drink and sit, clinging to the mother, does not leave her.

Mother orangutan, not at all like a living one. Just a metal frame and a bottle are a solid function. The cub doesn't even eat sometimes. All the signs of depression are there.

This cruel experiment proved that mother is not only a figure that feeds, and, first of all - an object of attachment and support for the further development of the child.

If little parent, then everything he does and says, appearing fleetingly, becomes overvalued … The child immediately internalizes this message. The more inadequate the parent, the harder it is to be angry with him. If your kids might be angry with you, that's a good sign)

What is a parent? This is a sturdy, resilient adultcapable of containing the feelings of the child. I want to show how much this can give with an example from the book of a Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller "Education, Violence and Repentance":

“Once I was sitting on a park bench in a strange city. An old man came up to the bench and sat down next to me - later he told me that he was eighty-two years old. Caught my attention his attentive and respectful manner of dealing with childrenwho were playing nearby, and I struck up a conversation with him, during which he told me about what he went through as a soldier during the Second World War.

“You know,” he said, “I have Guardian angelwho is always with me. It often happened that all my friends were killed by fragments of bombs or grenades, while I, being near the place of the explosion, remained safe and sound, without getting a scratch. It doesn't matter if it really happened as he said. This person actually gave this impression of himself - he seemed to fully believe in the benevolence of his fate … So, when I asked if he had any brothers or sisters, I was not surprised to hear his answer:

“They all died; I was my mother's favorite. " As he put it, his mother "Loved life" … Sometimes in the spring she would wake him up in the morning and take him with her before school to listen to the birds singing in the forest. These were his happiest memories. When I asked if he had ever been beaten as a child, he replied: “Hardly; accidentally my father could spank me. It made me angry every time, but he never did it in front of his mother - she would never have let him.

But you know,”he continued,“once I was severely beaten by my teacher. The first three classes I was the best student, and in the fourth we got a new teacher. He once accused me of something I didn't do. Then he took me aside and began to beat me. He continued to beat me, all the while shouting like a madman: "And now you will tell me the truth?" But what could I say? In the end, I had to lie to get him to fall behind, although I had never done this before, because I had no reason to be afraid of my parents. So, I was beaten for a quarter of an hour, but after that I stopped paying attention to school, and was never a good student. Subsequently, I was often upset that I never got a higher education. However, I don't think I had any choice at the time."

Apparently, when this man was a child, his mother treated him with such respect that he, in turn, learned to respect and value my feelings. Therefore, he realized that he was angry with his father when he received "spanking" from him; he realized that the teacher forced him to lie and wanted to humiliate him, and at the same time he felt sad because he had to pay for his honesty and loyalty to himself by neglecting his education, because at that time he could not do otherwise.

I noticed that he did not say the way most people say: "Mother loved me very much," but "She loved life"; I remembered that I once wrote the same about my mother Goethe … This old man knew that the happiest moments in his life were when he was in the forest with his mother, when he felt her enjoyment of the birdsong and shared it with her.

Their warm relationship was still felt in the gaze of his aging eyes, and her attitude towards him was unambiguously expressed in the way he now spoke with playing children. There was no sense of superiority or condescension in his manner, but just attention and respect.

Ignorant people constantly assert that in some a difficult childhood does not lead to the appearance of neuroses, while others, although they grew up in "greenhouse" conditions, suffer from mental illness … Neuroses and mental disorders are not a direct consequence of frustration, they are a manifestation of the syndrome of repression into the unconscious of the once suffered mental trauma …..

If the child survived hunger, bombing, if his family was forced to share the fate of refugees, but at the same time his parents treated him as an autonomous person, with due respect, a real nightmare will never lead to mental illness … Memories of the horror experienced can even enrich the inner world."

Often, early relationships with parents or those who replace them determine the entire subsequent life of a person. However, relationships with children are even more important for parents than relationships with parents are for adult children.

When the child grows up it can replace somehow the parent figure inside, "Grow" it in yourself … including with the help of psychotherapy … But a parent cannot replace a child with anything.

Because a child for a parent is the future, this is the movement of life forward

I would be glad if you share your thoughts on this matter!