Someone else’s opinion affects us from early childhood — from parental attitudes, both spoken aloud and unspoken. With age, not everyone and not always manages to separate their own desires and ideas from those imposed.
As the psychoanalyst, psychotherapist Oleg Katostrovsky noted in an interview with Doctor Peter, on the one hand, reason helps us to make the right choice, and on the other hand, intuition. People around us tend to give us rational advice and sound advice, and this often drowns out intuitive clues.
“A child always feels great what he wants and what he needs. But from early diapers, according to the classics of education and especially post-Soviet pedagogy, external pressure is piling on the child from all sides. Do this, eat this, sit still, stand up straight, speak silently. Such pressure destroys innate intuition, introducing the psyche into a constant conflict between its desires and imposed instructions, ”the expert comments.
The result of education according to this model is the inability of a person to figure out what he wants himself.
The contradiction between unconscious desires and what a person is advised is the basis of internal conflicts and life failures.
Oleg Katostrovsky believes that the best way to separate «one’s own» from «alien» is the inclusion of intuition. Every now and then it “breaks through” into our consciousness in the form of insights, insights, and non-obvious clues. How to make the voice of intuition louder and more noticeable?
“In order to restore contact with intuition on your own, without the help of psychologists, it may take a lot of time. But these efforts will pay off handsomely. After all, you will get the most positive results with minimal effort. This is what intuition does. In any area — relationships, money, family, health, ”says the psychotherapist.
The expert advises to start with the simplest — with nutrition
It is from him in childhood that the primary “violence” over our desires begins, when the child is forced to eat what he does not want, and then when he does not need to. Later, our inner feeling of “what I really want” is finally “finished off” by various food flavorings, sweeteners and taste enhancers.
“Start eating simple foods with minimal additives and factory processing,” advises Oleg Katostrovsky. Be sure to listen to yourself what exactly you want and what you don’t. Start learning to feel. And as you restore self-awareness, transfer the experience of this self-awareness to other areas of life.