Hype or necessity? Why talk to a psychotherapist about childhood?

The phrase that all problems come from childhood, in recent years, as if acquired a particularly vivid meaning. On the expanses of social networks, you can often find the opinion that it is past injuries and resentments that are to blame for the fact that life does not go well in adulthood. We discussed this topic with Chita psychiatrist, psychotherapist Yegor Potapov.

The first thing we asked was how important the so-called childhood work was. Or is it just a “shoot” in the information space?

According to the expert, to answer this question clearly – it is impossible.

“If we consider our society to be sick — and it is clearly unhealthy now — it would be good if people understood the true causes of their actions, experiences, suffering and eternal conflicts with loved ones. The present cannot be comprehended without looking at the past, explained the therapist.

He added that if a person already quite clearly understands who he is, what he aspires to and what he wants to do, there is no need to stir up his childhood.

However, it is almost impossible to be completely healthy in the face of economic crisis and fierce competition. And the person who has to live in these conditions, formed in childhood.

“A child is not born into a clean room, but into a world that other people have built before him. Around it are plates, spoons, words, parental intonations, rules and hidden expectations of adults. Philosopher Ewald Ilyenkov very accurately described this as a world of human forms and things created by the work of other people. These are someone else’s ready-made patterns of behavior that confront the infant as an external, unyielding reality. To simply survive and become a person, the child must absorb these drawings, appropriate and learn to use them, managing his behavior according to the rules of the society where he found himself, Potapov said.

It is from these absorbed phrases, prohibitions and family foundations that our internal psychological architecture is formed. This is how the outer structure of the world is carried inside our head. On this basis, the entire system of personal relations is formed.

“We don’t just remember the past; we take real relationships between people in society and turn them into our personal relationship to life, to work and to ourselves. Childhood is a period when we lay the foundation of this system, taking from the hands of parents the very first tools to communicate with the world, the expert explained.

But during this period, Potapov is sure, there is a high probability of “breakdown”.

“If the family and society are distorted, and the first blueprints were defective – for example, a child was loved for only fives, constantly frightened, deprived of support or abandoned – he develops a distorted, painful habit of living.” This is a defect in the development of human culture itself. People don't just remember an old resentment. He uses a crooked, broken tool every day because he wasn’t shown any other ways to build relationships as a child. To work out your childhood is not to dig into old tears, but to engage in deep repairs of those very first drawings on which you still build your life. Without this conscious step, a person forever remains hostage to other people’s scripts and social programs that he did not choose, but which have become his essence.

He explained the increased popularity of the topic of working out childhood by the increasing introduction of psychology into everyday life in general.

“The number of mental disorders is increasing for completely objective reasons: protracted crisis, social conflicts, fighting. There are more appeals to specialists, so the topic of childhood pops up more often, Potapov said.

In his opinion, the popularity of the topic of childhood today is a symptom of a deep illness of society itself. The modern world requires a person to be perfect, successful, rich, strong, always smile. The person feels that he is not coping and desperately tries to understand why he is so bad. And the fashion psychology industry obligingly gives him a ready-made and very convenient answer, assuring him that all the problems sit exclusively in his head and grow out of childhood resentments against mom and dad.

The expert warned that this is a huge substitution.

“Popular psychology reduces the great objective contradictions of the world to the personal emotional experiences of the individual. In fact, our self is not locked inside the skull. It exists only in the space of real human connections. We always hear the voices and demands of the society in which we live. When true collectives are destroyed, when selfishness triumphs and the wolf man triumphs, people intuitively feel that the rules of the game are false. But instead of blaming the unjust order of life, they begin to blame themselves and go into endless self-digging. The popularity of the theme of childhood is an attempt to escape alone where salvation is possible only together with other people.

He added that this does not remove personal responsibility for their experiences and actions, but explains a lot.

Be that as it may, childhood and relationships with parents are essential aspects in the construction of a separate personality. According to Potapov, mother and father for our psyche are two different, but equally important forces that form certain stages of life.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan figuratively compared the first environment of the child, created by the mother, with the mouth of a crocodile: it is a world of great emotional warmth, but also complete, total dependence, where parental anxiety can literally consume the child, not allowing him to take any independent step. The father is the force that helps the child to get out of this addiction. He is the personification of the external world, rules, boundaries and social requirements. Father comes and shows: there is a big world, rules, prohibitions. You don't belong to your mother, and she doesn't belong to you. The father literally pulls the child’s psyche from a cozy home nest into a rigid channel of social life, the psychotherapist explained.

He added that this “bridge” to society in childhood someone was ugly or broken – through cruelty, coldness or indifference of the father. In this case, the child distorts the entire system of requirements for himself. He grows up with a subconscious belief that I am only valuable if I am the best, or I will be destroyed or abandoned.

“As a result, an adult man fights endlessly with his bosses at work, rebels against any rules or is panicked about showing himself. It seems to him that he is fighting for his independence here and now, but in fact his psyche is just continuing an old, unfinished children's dispute with his father for the right to be noticed, accepted and loved.

Unfortunately, there are cases when the wrong model of behavior was broadcast to the child by both the father and mother. According to the therapist, a dysfunctional family is very common. And then you need to consider in detail the relationship of a person with both parents. It is important for a person to learn to live without regard to the experience, opinion or possible criticism of a father or mother.

As for specific psychological injuries, one of the most frequent specialists called the trauma of abandonment, abandonment. It leads to the fear of remaining insignificant, invisible, invisible to others.

“There is often what is called conditional love, when a child is taken for something, not for the fact of his existence. These mental wounds cause a person to walk in circles for years, reproducing the same scenarios: to finally be loved, not abandoned, appreciated completely and selflessly. And this in the adult hard world in such an absolute form is impossible. And the man runs in a vicious circle. For example, you want recognition and respect from the boss, but inside there is a panicked fear that he will scold or expel with shame. This fear causes a person to subconsciously look for or literally create real illnesses in order to justify his own failures: why he could not make a report on time or did not have time for a meeting. A person begins to feel like a rebellious slave, considering the leadership to be unjust or against him. This is the same war with my father for recognition and protection, as well as deaf anger that he did not give it, and subconscious revenge on him. Revenge in the form of endless struggle or their own sufferings and diseases, the source said.

The first condition for getting out of this situation, Potapov called the need to see himself from the outside. As a rule, a person repeatedly breaks his own life with his own hands. You need to see this pattern and realize that the very “splinter” that prevents you from enjoying life is the person himself. And then there will be a chance of freedom from the usual destructive scenarios.

“But the tragedy of our work is that with all the desire to get rid of the problem, people are actually panicked about changing. He wants everything in his life to stay the same, but it just gets easier. Asks him to get rid of a splinter, but the trick is that this splinter is himself. Whole, with his own character and habits. This pain has created his own way of life. Not because he made some mistake in his thoughts, but because he is exactly what he is, and in those conditions, it simply could not be otherwise. Therefore, in real psychotherapy, there is not cosmetic repair, but remelting, reformatting the very core of the personality. It is impossible to remove the disturbing symptom without this. It can't be taken away from a person, so we sort his personality like an onion. And when we get to the core, we find a contradiction that can lead to pain, because there is fear and anger. When we pull it out, there is an explosion: the person ceases to understand who he is. So much anger at yourself, at parents, at others. And under the anger, it turns out, is still a fixed little child who is afraid to get angry. And when we remove anger, only the child remains, and then the person begins to reassemble himself. Only seeing his vulnerability and experiencing the pain of contact with it, a person begins step by step to build anew his real identity, said Egor Potapov.

He is sure that work is possible at almost any age. Therapy leads to shifts in the foundation of the human personality, and age has nothing to do with it. What matters is a person’s readiness for a deep internal audit.

“We do not contrast a person’s personal responsibility with his past. We're not looking for parental guilt -- it's a dead end. We analyze his personal history, his relationships with significant people - relationships that once became the solid framework of his character today. A childhood relationship with a mother, with a father, with a brother, sister, friend or first teacher is a person. It's the core of his personality. Therefore, it is impossible to separate a person from his history, just as it is impossible to separate walking from legs, where one is a derivative of the other.