Thirty years ago, I would not have believed – had I thought about it – that children had any right to have their way, to get what they wanted. I would have felt that their opinions were silly and ignorant. I would have felt that a young child's anger about her circumstances was meaningless, to be responded to with greater anger. I would have felt that her simply expressing herself was a nearly insane affront to the hierarchies of the world – the wrongest of wrongs.
Those would have been unarticulated feelings that would have been the deeper substance of what shallow therapists and their clients like to call "core beliefs." An impasse would have arisen, though, had I been asked to exhume the feeling, convert it to thought, and verbalize the thought. That's because I was far gone, but not that far gone that I would have consciously endorsed the belief, even while the feeling existed. That's to say, I would have surprised myself by my own inner contradiction.
I am certain this is the mental subterrane of many parents. The problem is that until they go to therapy, they may never be asked to materialize their hidden, hurt-formed, deep-rooted feeling as conscious conviction. And so they continue to be emotional history-based, treating their children as less-than, as owned, as deserving of punishment, as "misbehaving"* rather than simply behaving in a way that doesn't harmonize with their parent's equilibrium or unconscious unmet needs.
There are doubtless countless internal delusions adults harbor that might be disabused in a shock of disorientation. A man may find that he actually has never respected his hard-working father. A woman may come to see that her lifelong goal of becoming a nurse or a writer or a chef was a fantasy not a fact. You may discover, one day, you are more child than adult. These dormant epiphanies stay buried for a good reason: They speak to childhood failure that we can't base our life on. To be faced with our fundamental escapes is to dissolve our sense of who we are. Take note: Your child is as good as you, is your equal, but since you never got to be equal as you grew up, your child will seem superior to you.
That is undermining. And humanizing.
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* https://www.gordontraining.com/free-parenting-articles/children-dont-misbehave/
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.