What can repel the New Year holidays? Yes, anything! To some, they seem like a waste of time, some panic from the number of parties, and someone is afraid of … Santa Claus.
“I was four years old when my dad dressed up as Santa Claus and I got scared of him. I never got to love New Years. The wife is unhappy, the children are upset … “
Vladislav, 36 years old
Ekaterina Mikhailova, psychotherapist:
“You can’t imagine, Vladislav, how often children are frightened and upset if someone close becomes different from themselves. The self that the child knows and loves. It seems that something happened to a person whom you have known all your life, that it is him and not him at the same time. The world is collapsing! The line between game and reality is very thin. It changes as the child develops. And there comes an age when dressing up, hide and seek and other games with transformations and disappearances begin to be fun. Witchcraft becomes the focus. But something strongly hooked you in that old scene with dad – Santa Claus. Perhaps it’s not just the New Year’s situation, but the general feeling of insecurity and insecurity in the world of your childhood.
Read more:
- 21 self-talk questions
You write that you want to be a good father, to participate in the holidays with your family. But it is so difficult for you that you involuntarily shy away from everything that can remind you of your childhood horror. And you are very shy about it. Your feelings at such moments are very similar to the feelings of a child about whom they say: all children are like children, but this one was frightened (squeezed, did not understand …). The main message is that he is somehow “not like that” and he should be ashamed of this. But you are an adult and understand that you have the right not to do what is unpleasant for you (if it does not concern serious things). Many of us have little oddities that go back to childhood. Some people don’t eat something, they don’t wear anything under any circumstances, and they don’t do a lot more for about the same reasons as yours. No one gets “worse” from this. When these features are accepted as minor “moles”, special signs (and not the shame of a lifetime), their power over a person decreases.