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Many people live for years with parents or partners who humiliate, criticize and even beat them. Why? The famous American psychologist David Selani is about people endowed with an adult body and children’s needs.
What’s wrong with self-esteem?
Self-esteem can be represented as a huge file of judgments about oneself, such as: am I smart or stupid, important or worthless, loved or rejected, believe in me or not. It contains conscious and unconscious “impressions” – opinions and memories – about who this person is in relation to the rest of the family.
But why is this self-assessment necessary? It is an important criterion that helps determine your place in the world around you. We get to know other people through their attitude towards us: whether they are similar to us or completely different, how their emotional world differs from ours, what excites them and what us, what they know and what we know, what they think and feel and whether they differ they are in it from us.
It is easy to see that an unstable and constantly changing self-esteem keeps a person in a state of constant fear and uncertainty. A person with low self-esteem is like a builder who has all the measuring instruments – rulers, tape measures – change scales every day, so that in a meter it turns out to be 110, then 90 cm … Self-esteem constantly fluctuates, not allowing people to be measured according to a single internal standard.
To love or be loved?
Such disorders have their origin in the dissatisfaction of children’s needs, which suppress and deform the ego. Adult people with a disharmonic character often behave like neglected, uncontrollable children… Their stories are filled with accumulated traumas, petty minor grievances and disappointments that piled up from year to year, deforming and suppressing the Ego and devaluing the personality in their own eyes.
The main source of childhood trauma is the cumulative effect of hundreds of reprimands received and categorical refusals that lower the self-esteem of a growing child.
The greatest trauma for a child is the feeling that the parent does not love him at all. A child not only needs to feel loved by his mother, but it is equally important to feel that his reciprocal love is also valuable to her. If this does not happen, the child will feel worthless and his love and will try to keep all manifestations of these feelings in himself.
Parental support
Over time, the rejected child needs more and more support. For example, a constantly oppressed five-year-old child needs to satisfy not only the needs inherent in this age, but also those that were not satisfied at an earlier period. The situation will be reversed for someone who grew up in the opposite environment. As he grows older, he will be content with ever smaller portions of parental support.
An emotionally rich child who enjoys all-round support retains memories of loving parents who energize him. A child who receives a sufficient portion of maternal care carries the image of the mother within him wherever he goes.
Conversely, those children who lacked maternal or paternal love, participation and support are not able to accumulate enough positive memories to painlessly separate from them. They continue to live with their parents even at an age when their peers live independent lives, or they cling to “new” people who symbolize their parents for them.
Relationships as a way to get parental love
The search for consolation for a person of any age is not a pathology, but just the norm of behavior. Children who grew up without sufficient parental support or in a hostile environment are deprived of the experience of receiving comfort in childhood and, growing up, do not know how to comfort themselves.
Deprived of love, they will cling to anyone, not particularly caring about the human qualities of partners. Their fear of being abandoned is too great. The irresistible need to find at least someone to live with overshadows other arguments of reason. This is necessary to get rid of the feeling of emptiness and loneliness. The choice of a partner usually becomes destructive to their lives. In part, it is predetermined by a lack of internal memories of good, caring parents.
Desire to fill the void
Children of attentive loving parents practically do not show aggression. This happens naturally, thanks to the caress received from the parents.
An emotionally deprived child has no memories of parental love that could suppress outbursts of rage. Anger is born out of an inability to tolerate rejection or dissatisfaction. Inner dissatisfaction is a permanent state. Getting at least some pleasure is very important for a child whose development does not receive proper support. Bad habits, alcoholism, and other attempts to fill the void within oneself are a consequence of the lost hope of gaining intimacy with other people.
Dysfunctional love
Problems in the primary relationship between parent and child are repeated in adulthood, each time recreating the style of relationship familiar from childhood. Love for a deprived child is a complex combination of conflicting feelings. He does not have the feeling that a loving person accepts and appreciates.
True love in the understanding of a person from a dysfunctional family contains rejection, self-hatred, flashes of hope, moments of passion, irresistible attraction, despair, extreme closeness, frequent departures. True love is incomprehensible, causes fear. Loneliness and substitute pleasures from childhood – eating disorders, smoking, gambling, alcohol, drugs – are accepted and felt as something close and real.
Read more: David Celani “The Illusion of Love”