Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Some Vulnerabilities of the Family Life

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Fragility is a state of mind based on self-pity and is very influential in shaping the child’s life. Children in dysfunctional homes will often be fragile, even when they have grown up. For example, the person (whether he is a child or an adult) may be normal in some situations (where self-pity is absent), but in other situations he may be fragile (when self-pity rises in the background of his mind). And fragility may become the situation of a normal person in old age who is losing some of his mental facilities.

An additional feature of vulnerability is the way that it can effect the child’s emerging sexual identity. Each child, whatever its sex, has both masculine and feminine influences acting on it. These influences act on the masculine and feminine traits in the child’s ego. Whilst Western society accepts that this view is accurate for describing a girl, it is still difficult for society to accept that it is accurate for describing a boy.

Normally, the mother should validate the child’s femininity, and the father should validate the child’s masculinity. For example, as a child I liked to do some sewing. So on my 10th birthday my mother gave me a sewing kit, which helped to validate my feminine creative sensitivities; to do such a thing was highly unusual for a mother in the 1950s.

Now if, for example, the child’s masculinity is validated but its femininity is not, then it is more susceptible to trauma within its feminine identity than within its masculine identity. In that situation, the child may be able to handle stress that affects its sense of masculinity but not stress that affects its sense of femininity. In general, stress that is too great for the child to handle can affect it in three different ways: the stress may damage its sense of femininity, or its sense of masculinity, or both.

Several Factors

I list several factors that influence the child’s ability to attain a feeling of security and a sense of empowerment.

• The intensity of a sense of “threat” from a parent (a source of fear).
• The degree of sensitivity of the infant
• The degree of resilience of the infant
• Any occurrence of fragility
• Any lack of emotional warmth from a parent.
• The process of abreaction, which subjects the child to negative emotions like guilt, resentment and bitterness.

Overall, a parent’s negative character qualities will affect in various ways the vulnerability of the child’s ego. The child will suffer when subjected to regular fault-finding, ridicule, sarcasm, victimisation, rejection, neglect, abandonment, and similar kinds of denigration. Some children are more sensitive than average and will suffer more, whilst other children are insensitive (or “thick-skinned”) and will suffer less.

It will also suffer if the parent cannot give it enough love (the parent has “frozen emotions”). The love that is needed is jealousy (in love mode); this mode produces tenderness and a sense of caring for the child. The love can heal psychological wounds. For example, a parent may punish a child for something. If the punishment is excessive, then afterwards the parent should cuddle the child and give emotional support to it. The support will enable the child to heal. However, if after the punishment the child is immediately sent to its room for an hour or so, then no emotional healing is likely to happen to it. This is how abuse has the powerful effect that it has on a child – no emotional healing occurs after punishment.

The inability to show emotional warmth has another significant effect, that of inhibiting intimacy. If there is little intimacy in a marriage, then there is likely to be little intimacy between parent and child, especially if the child is scared of the parent. Intimacy has the function of turning vulnerability into a positive asset, thereby allowing the development of effective emotional communications between people. If there is no intimacy between parent and child, then the child doesn’t know how to confide its difficulties to that parent.

Security and Safety

When the child is growing up, it needs a sense of security in order to develop its budding ego. A sense of security allows the child to explore its world and to develop a sense of validation from its parents as it grows up to be a secure ego, unless it is subjected to severe stress. The validated ego will have a sense of inner harmony. Overall, this process is facilitated by having a sense of safety in the family environment. Safety minimises any effects of fear and psychological confusion.

However, if the child feels that there is no safety within its milieu it becomes afraid. It feels that its social boundaries have been violated. So the child feels that it has no refuge against the turmoil of reality. It feels that it has not been given sufficient validation by significant people. 

Fear is initially created when the child is subjected to excessive physical punishment. The punishments create both a sense of insecurity in it and a deep sense of guilt (in the mode of self-hate) [¹]. Additionally, being subjected to repeated denigration, humiliation, and excessive fault-finding can produce a big impact on a sensitive child, especially if it is unfair criticism. These kinds of experience bring on episodes of jealousy (in the mode of self-pity) in the child. Also, being rejected creates overwhelming self-pity in it. Fear, guilt, and self-pity modes produce insecurity in the young ego. Once the child has been subjected to regular negative experiences, then it learns to fear any circumstances where these negative states of mind can be aroused. If trauma has been intense enough, then fear begins to percolate throughout the child’s sense of his being.

Physical punishment is usually easy for the child to understand. However, the non-physical distresses of being rejected and not being given adequate emotional support are more difficult for it to understand. The child has to make his own interpretations of difficult experiences. These kinds of experience may be due to real events, interpreted correctly by the child, or they may be due to confused experiences that are interpreted incorrectly by the child. Either way, it is the child’s interpretations that matter, and not the views of adults. This is because the child’s interpretations will influence its beliefs about its parents, about its future relationships, and about life in general.

Whilst insecurity may cause many negative emotions to flow regularly through the mind, I believe that vanity and fear are the ones that are most long-lasting and hardest to overcome. The child may compensate for its fear by inflating either its sense of self-importance (or vanity) or its need for self-assertion as ways of repudiating negative feelings about itself. Because of the background fear, any display of self-assertion will be unskilful and usually take the form of aggression. By the time it has become an adult it will be unable to handle criticisms constructively: any criticisms will make it emotionally upset because its sense of self-importance has been deflated. Hence it will find any responsibility hard to manage. It may gravitate to grandiosity (unrealistic ideas about its self-importance).

Interpreting Experience

When dealing with a complicated issue, even if we know all the facts, that by itself is only partly helpful. The most important point is how we interpret the facts. Sometimes this can be done in more than one way. Our interpretations will govern the way that experiences form and shape our identity and determine the path we take in life. Our criteria for making the interpretations are our present beliefs, ideals and prejudices, or our psychological strengths and weaknesses. The most significant or formative time when interpretations have the greatest impact on forming our identity is the time of childhood.

A person creates his identity from the flow of emotion into his desires and ideals. The emotional input creates experience, whether of pain, happiness, fear, anger, etc. Each emotion, when it is being temporarily dominant in his consciousness, offers its own field of human inter-activity. For example, guilt offers different ways to interact with other people than jealousy does.

These interpretations will shape how well or how poorly a person can function harmoniously within society and on his own. When a child makes negative interpretations of its relationships with others, it does not grow out of such interpretations when it becomes an adult. Unless it eventually seeks psychological help, it will keep these interpretations for the rest of its life.

Surmounting Vulnerabilities

The adult can surmount his difficulties in two main way, if he does not want to seek suitable psychological therapy. He can seek either faith or self-belief.

The adult can seek faith in someone, or in a teacher, or an ideology, or an organisation. Faith is relevant to validation, and the intensity of the faith he needs has to match the intensity of his underlying self-pity, otherwise the faith will not last in the face of hard times. Faith enables him to acquire self-confidence.

He can develop belief in himself. Self-belief is relevant to authenticity, and enables him to gain self-respect. The intensity of believing in oneself has to match the intensity of the underlying fear, in order to be able to neutralise that fear. To be authentic, the person has to find something in himself that he can use as a rock for liking himself. For example, by always doing the best I can, and by doing things my way instead of someone else’s way, then I can feel authentic even in the face of failure.

[¹]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

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