Every person who has heard of psychotherapy knows that psychotherapists for some reason often work specifically with the client’s childhood period. In this short post, I want to clarify this topic a bit.
Those of us who live consciously and realize that their well-being is their own responsibility rightly believe that they can build a happy and effective life. However, when they begin to put this into practice (starting a business, building a career, creating a strong family, managing chronic illnesses, etc.), it turns out that there are certain limitations that either make achieving these goals more difficult or impossible. And these limitations can appear in any form in any area of life. This is the influence of the very past. The most common limitations are the attunements that a person receives in the family. And it is not even that he considers them correct – he just lives this way and does not even realize it. And if there is something missing in a person’s settings, then trying to live differently causes extreme stress.
Imagine a child who is brought up by very strict parents, who are literally shut up and certainly not allowed to command. This child is very well-mannered, learns well, is quiet at school, quite possibly successfully finds the sphere of his professional realization. And then he finds a job in his specialty, becomes a good specialist and … need to move up the career ladder. And for this most likely will have to become a manager, where you need to be able to lead, and negotiate, and pressure, and possibly intimidate, that is, to influence by force. And you can only imagine what stress all this will cause in a person who has been gagged since childhood.
Imagine a girl who was brought up by her mother and grandmother, all childhood telling that “all men are assholes”. And if mom and dad divorced, and the girl with her dad is not really communicating, then it is a very “colorful” picture. Then such a girl with a lack of love from her father and conviction from her mother and grandmother, grows up and sincerely wants to meet a good guy and create a happy family. But in reality it turns out to meet such as in the belief, because the settings are such, and to get into a difficult co-dependent relationship, because very much lacked a father in her life.
How is it so? Let’s start with the fact that the lion’s share of information about ourselves, others and the world, a person learns in childhood. According to some data, up to the age of six, a person learns 75% of everything that he or she learns in life. At this age, of course, the child is not able to somehow realize, analyze, filter information or evaluate it. Moreover, the child does not have any protection from his parents, so he will accept from them whatever they will shove into him, even if it is unpleasant or harmful. And on such conditions the basic beliefs are formed in the child, we can say, about everything in the world. He forms ideas about himself, about others and relationships with these others, about adult roles, about what the world is like and so on.
And so, when an adult with some problem comes to a psychologist or psychotherapist, it is assumed that the experience can simply be realized, and this should help the client to solve the problem. And indeed, when a person has realized the mechanism of the problem, it actually becomes easier for him, but further he goes on in life and, makes the same mistakes. But there is the practice of explaining, and there is the practice of solving. That is, it turns out that the experience should not only be realized, but also worked through, it is necessary to change the consequences that it carries for the current life of the client. This is what quality psychotherapy allows us to do.