The Family Setting

The obstacle is that you cannot solve present problems by directly trying to do an analysis of childhood difficulties. To attempt to change problems that arose in childhood, you actually have to start with present-day problems, and then slowly work backwards to your childhood. This is a long-term process and there are no shortcuts or easy solutions.

When we first begin to analyse and assess our childhood, we naturally look at it only from our point of view. Then, if we continue to seek answers for our difficulties, we begin to understand the problems that the parents had. Then we can see that some of the problems that we have are the same as some of the problems that the parents had. This is one effect of transference [²]. Or, to put this view another way, some of the character limitations that the parents had are mirrored, in some degree, in us. We may be aware that we have some similar positive qualities to our parents. However, what we also have from the parents are their problems in relationships.

For example, my parents lacked the ability to show me emotional warmth. As an adult I have this limitation too. So in my friendships I have to make an effort to show emotional warmth – I do not find it easy to do this. The reason my mother never gave me much positive emotional support is because her parents never gave her much positive emotional support when she was a child. And I presume that the reason for this is that her parents never received much positive emotional support from their parents (that is, her grandparents). So this particular problem just recurs down the generations until someone makes an effort to change it.

Taking a broad view of family life, what the parental setting usually does is to set the agenda for our skills, strengths, weaknesses and limitations, in terms of relationships. At some stage of our adult life, we begin to yearn for that which we needed but did not get in our childhood. Unless we learn to overcome our limitations in some degree, then if we have a family, there is a good chance that we will pass on to our children the same limitations that our parents had and that we still have. This transfer of abilities and limitations has nothing to do with genetics; it is purely a feature of psychology. Any state of mind that is changeable is psychological in origin. In general, the psychological frames of mind (or mindsets) of the parents often become embedded in the psychological frame of mind of the child.

Children usually absorb the moral, amoral and immoral standards and values of the parents. And the children usually learn to handle situations and relationships in the same way that the parents do. So if the adults are immoral, it is highly likely that the children will be too. This process is an aspect of bonding, particularly the stage of identification with the parent as a role model [³]. Hence this is a process of psychological inheritance.

Three Categories

We can arrange our beliefs and ideas about childhood into three broad categories.

1). That of the normal child who seems to be well-adjusted (perhaps even conformist) to society, but really doesn’t achieve much of outstanding importance. The child has average sensitivity and average self-confidence.

2). That of the introverted or inhibited child who sees himself as being different from other children, and who apparently achieves little (but is clearly aware of the difficulties of life). The child has above-average sensitivity but below-average self-confidence.

3). That of the extroverted child who seems to succeed at everything he tries and who therefore achieves a great deal (but is unaware of the difficulties of life for other people). The child has below-average sensitivity but above-average self-confidence.

The normal child is the “control”, whilst the interesting comparisons are between the introverts and the extroverts.

The introverted or inhibited child is likely to have a rough or lonely childhood, since such a child is different from the average social child. And it will be much more sensitive to any heavy-handed discipline given by the parents, or to any lack of emotional warmth in the parents.

The human mind likes to swing between opposites, and the most important “opposites” are the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. If the child experiences abuse or neglect (whether intentional or unintentional) by one or both parents, then its responses are intensified by its sensitivity. Typically the child’s responses are either active (resentment and anger) or passive (guilt and fear). Depending on the child’s perceptions of the parents, the child will either become (a) passive and conformist (the conscious reaction), and active and rebellious (in the subconscious mind), or (b) active and rebellious (the conscious reaction), and passive and conformist in the subconscious mind. In addition, the child may occasionally alternate between these responses, so sometimes it appears to be rebellious, and sometimes conformist.

If the child is aware that it has two contradictory responses (it can be either active or passive) to the parents, then it usually gets confused. This can lead to confusion about one’s sense of identity, and is often the reason for the difficult times that teenagers have. This confusion can produce intense love-hate feelings towards the parents.

As a child, I clearly felt that I was different from other children. In my middle age I engaged in psycho-analysis, on and off, for over three decades. Now I am still different from the average person, but more broad-minded.

Problems with Relationships

When faced with a difficult relationship that the child cannot escape from, he may resort to passively accepting it or he may actively try to surmount it. Passive acceptance may generate states of mind such as hopelessness, despair, desolation, compliance, abandonment, disintegration, and other such negative states. However, during times when he is determined to overcome his problems, he may develop critical and negative attitudes towards figures of authority and/or sexual figures, depending on which of these he feels is the source of his difficulties. So he may become hostile to people in authority and to men or women who bring out his sexual frustrations or obsessions.

Another issue that arises from a difficult childhood is that of intimacy. The child has never felt able to talk about his difficulties with his parents. Often this is because the parents are not comfortable with intimacy between themselves and hence do not know how to encourage it in the child. Intimacy is a sign that a person cares about another person. When an adult lacks the ability to express intimacy, it usually indicates that he lacks any meaningful relationship where he can talk about his feelings to the other person.

Is marriage an effective solution to childhood problems? A person may grow up in difficult circumstances, experiencing some degree of self-doubt and lack an adequate feeling of self-worth during his childhood. He may hope that, once he is an adult, he will find a compatible partner and hence leave his problems behind him. This is not likely to be so. Suppose that a man is wary of women. If he finds a woman who appears compatible with him, and who is sympathetic to his difficulties, can he expect to live a normal life with her if they get married?

Every marriage goes through ups and downs – it has periods of good times, periods of average times, and periods of bad times. If the pair marry, then whilst the honeymoon period lasts, everything will be fine. The man’s fears are buried. Even when the glitter wears away and the relationship settles down to routine average, then it can still work fine. However, when the bad patches are encountered, then the man’s fears rise up again like a phoenix, and the marriage may seem to be on the rocks.

Partnerships do not remove or heal psychological stressors. In a partnership, so long as it is good then stresses remain buried in the background. However, when the relationship gets difficult, or negative external influences get intense, then any psychological stressors (relevant to the current difficulty) can become active again.

From a man’s point of view, the best way that offers a good chance of the marriage surviving for many years is if there is a lot of access to privacy for the man. Hence when the bad times are encountered, the man can retreat into his privacy for that period. Then when his fears subside, he can return to his partner. This implies that, at least for the first few years, it will be best if the partners live apart for some of the time. This strategy can enable the man to slowly formulate a realistic procedure for handling the bad times, with the eventual aim being that he will no longer need privacy to avoid those times. So in modern, high-stress societies there is a place for part-time relationships.

The same need for privacy will also be beneficial to a woman who has had a troubled childhood.

Compensations for Trauma

When the child grows into adulthood, his vulnerability may lead him to create compensations for his sorrows. However, these compensations can be both positive and negative. Consider a positive compensation. When immersed in a difficult relationship, the person may generate one or more ideals as his means of compensation. If he can rise above materialistic ideals, he may propel himself into a search for freedom, justice, socialism, the pursuit of truth, mystical union, and other high ideals. The energy with which he pursues his high ideals is just the energy that he would like to put into his relationships but cannot. As a general rule, the deeper his sense of sorrow, the more motivated he is to pursue his ideals.

Consider a negative compensation, that of mania and manic depression (also called bipolar disorder). When the child is regularly denigrated in some ways, this will lead to the shrinkage of its aura, meaning that the boundaries of its consciousness shrink. When it becomes an adult, it may compensate by learning to expand its boundaries beyond its capabilities, thus generating mania, which is based on the vanity mode of pride [4]. The adult needs to generate positive thoughts about himself. The apparent advantage of mania is that it is a way of switching away from the victimised social identity into the unscathed individual identity. In effect, the child learns to dissociate from the crippled ego and switch to an apparent “limitless” ego. It is rather like a seesaw: as life goes down, so vanity goes up. But when the adult cannot fulfil the desires of the limitless ego, when he realises that he is out of his depth, he becomes depressed and hence switches into the depression mode of manic depression.

Sometimes the person does not produce a compensation, but rather a displacement of his sorrows, especially if his difficulties have generated confusion in his mind. Then he finds that his mental difficulties are creating behavioural and physiological problems. Now he is in the psycho-somatic arena, meaning that the mental stresses on him are producing body symptoms of ill-health. In this situation, the disorders he suffers from have both mental factors and bodily-health factors.

Managing Trauma

The adult who had a difficult childhood may end up hating other people. He hates people because he fears them. From a psycho-dynamic perspective, the intensity with which I hate others is the same intensity with which I hate myself. This implies that I have some similar psychological characteristics to the people that I hate. Or, perhaps, in some ways I am the same as the people I hate.

One way to overcome self-hatred is to find a way to develop self-confidence in oneself. As self-confidence slowly increases, then the levels of my guilt and self-hate slowly fade in intensity. I become increasingly more content with life and my place in it. Self-confidence slowly begins to arise when the person finds a way to overcome his fears. When fear decreases, the person can become more authentic.

If a person cannot develop self-confidence on his own, then an alternative strategy is to join one or more groups who can appreciate him. He finds validation this way and so he may become more content with life and his place in it.

The keys to managing childhood trauma once a person has become an adult are to either develop one’s authenticity or to be validated by other significant people. All meaningful relationships, or the avoidance of meaningful relationships, centre on the themes of validation and authenticity.

[²]. I have an article on Transference in another book, Living in Times of Change. [2]

[³]. I have three articles on bonding, the first one is Overview of Bonding, on my book Living in Times of Change. [3]

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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.	Psychological Problems start in Childhood For many adults, psychological problems start in childhood [¹]. The problems may vary from minor ones to major ones, or may even be severe enough to create trauma. The more severe the problems are, the more sensitive to them the child becomes. Normally a child is taught how to behave and what he can believe, without questioning such teachings. This is the process of social conditioning. However, for the child who has a difficult childhood, the more severe his problems are, the less likely is it that he will absorb the social conditioning put on him, and so he may end up as a social misfit. Even if the adult’s present difficulties did not originate from his childhood days, even so the way that he handled his problems in childhood will set the pattern for the way he handles them in adulthood. Usually, however, childhood problems get buried by the problems that the person is facing in adulthood. If the adult finds that his problems have become serious enough to interfere with his life, then he may want to try and change them by examining the difficulties of his childhood. Unfortunately there is a major obstacle to doing this.
Sub - Headings
Three Categories
Problems with Relationships
Compensations for Trauma
Managing Trauma
References