2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
One young girlfriend showed me her paintings. She offered to choose one of the three that I like the most. The choice was not easy, because my friend is a very talented artist. I chose a picture in which a girl is crying, and there is a whole world in these tears. The plot felt familiar to me.
Throughout our lives we accumulate seas and oceans of tears. They are inhabited by unspoken childhood grievances, humiliation, and defenselessness. Youthful unfulfilled dreams, unrequited feelings, disappointments. The moments when we needed protection and didn't get it, when we didn't know how to ask, when we were alone. When they wanted to say something and failed, and our words stuck in my throat. There lives the pain of unmourned losses of relatives and friends.
To be honest, there are so many things that have settled there over the years that it's scary to look in. It seems that this whirlpool can tighten irrevocably.
And we live, under various pretexts, not approaching in a sea of tears. We live such a cautious life, we walk back and forth along a narrow path. And sooner or later we find ourselves face to face with our own vulnerability, when the methods of avoiding pain developed over the years no longer work. And the deeper the sea, the more carefully we go around it, the more abrupt and painful the dive turns out to be.
This often happens when we have children. Children do not know how to hide feelings. They are sad, angry, happy. And this can be unbearable for the parents, because it brings them to the place, getting into which they so carefully avoided. And gradually we pass on our experience to children. This experience says that pain should be hidden as deeply as possible, as carefully as possible to protect it. Showing pain is dangerous.
American psychotherapist of Russian origin Marilyn Murray writes that in our culture it is not customary to express feelings, rather it is customary to suppress and deny. Children are told: "Don't cry!", "Don't be a crybaby!" etc. Boys are added: "You behave like a girl!", "Men don't cry!"
Often there are families where the right to free expression of feelings belongs to adults, while emotional manifestations are prohibited for children. In such families, adults have tantrums, outbursts of rage. Children must endure these seizures in silence.
Imposing guilt is another form of emotional abuse that helps to reduce emotional sensitivity: “If you behave like this, I’ll go crazy”, “Because of you, I will commit suicide”, “I put my whole life on you!”, “If not you, I would arrange my life! etc.
The ability to express feelings depends on:
- whether the person has seen how other people express painful feelings;
- does he have sympathetic, caring listeners who are able to withstand overwhelming emotions, especially negative ones;
- do national, religious, cultural traditions allow to express feelings, - whether the cause of the pain is considered a decent topic for discussion in a particular culture, etc.
If in childhood a child is allowed to cry and is comforted when he is in pain, he understands that he has the right to experience pain, and most importantly, he understands that the pain passes. The child gains experience - the pain does not have to be endured, you can talk about it. If the crying child is ignored or punished for crying, shaming, he comes to the conclusion that it is dangerous to express pain.
So that our children are not afraid of their feelings, they need the support of their parents. Parents, on the other hand, will be able to endure the feelings of their children if they decide to look into their sea of pain, burn off frozen moments, accept their defenselessness.
Thanks to my dear artist Alena Lozhkomoeva for a wonderful painting and inspiration.
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