Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Introduction to Maladjustment

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The intensity with which trauma is felt is often dependent on the age of the child: the earlier in its life it experiences trauma, the more intense it will be. Psychologically, the first three years of life are the most important, since that is the time when the infant is most susceptible to trauma.

How does the experience of trauma lead to the formation of core beliefs?  It all depends on how the infant interpreted the situation within which he experienced the trauma. For example, suppose that the infant becomes traumatised. There are two common responses: the belief that he deserved what happened to him, and the belief that he did not deserve it.

The first belief creates a focus of guilt in him: so as an adult he may gravitate to being a follower of a traditional religion. The religion can help nullify his guilt. The other belief intensifies a focus on pride: he feels that life was unfair to him. So once he is an adult he may gravitate to atheism, since he cannot believe that a fair and just God can exist. The point to note is that I am not focusing my analysis on mild tendencies towards either religion or atheism. Mild tendencies are changeable quite easily. What I suggest is that trauma puts intensity into one’s core beliefs, making them very difficult to change, and so either religion or atheism will be followed with passion.

The second principal influence on a person’s life is that of the ideals he subscribes to. The intensity with which he follows his ideals is often dependent on the intensity of any childhood trauma. The more intense the trauma was, so the more intense his ideals are likely to be. We can usually work backwards and infer from the intensity of his beliefs how intense childhood trauma was for him. However, trauma may be so severe that any ideals may become impossible: the person may battle forms of madness for much of his life.

Any core negative beliefs generated by trauma are likely to be a major reason why an adult turns to crime and violence. This is especially likely if a core belief generates the desire for revenge. All through history, violence has been universal around the world and in all kinds of society. The universal cause of this unpleasantness is the time of vulnerability of the child in its family and social situations, when the child has to create its ego under difficult circumstances. I give suggestions in section 5 for some subconscious beliefs that are highly influential on a criminal mind. For now, I turn to the world of a child.

The World of a Child

Many children have a difficult childhood. Why is this?  In my view there are two general causes. Firstly, at birth the child brings with it from its former incarnations its strengths and weaknesses. This is what it contributes to the family situation. In addition, the process of reincarnation lays a foundation of pain, which can magnify any weaknesses the child already has: the lasting legacy of the pain is that the child as it grows up will usually gravitate to conservative beliefs about morality and reality. The background pain of reincarnation will intensify any severe distress that happens in the child’s life [¹].

The second cause is that of the family situation. This becomes the context in which the child begins to create its ego and its sense of identity. The context both helps and hinders the child in this task. These two causes shape the emerging ego of the child. When the family situation is problematic it creates the possibility for the child to experience psychological distress, varying from minor distress to major dysfunction. In this chapter I focus mainly on the family situation.

Some features of childhood induce excessive stress and unhappiness in children. Then the child may try to shield itself from such stress by developing negative coping mechanisms. Or the child may find that its social skills are not adequate to its everyday relationships and so it may have problems finding friends, especially friends of the opposite sex. Sooner or later the child realises that it is maladjusted to society. Why does a child become maladjusted to his family and/or to his social settings and relationships in general?  I expand the two general causes to provide a more detailed analysis. There are at least six important influences acting on a child.

Six Influences

The six influences are :

a). The influences that originate from its previous incarnation, which form the child’s existing character and set its levels of moral strength or weakness, vulnerability and learning potential. If it brings excessive vulnerability with it from a previous life, then this will magnify the effects of any instances of psychological upsets that it experiences in the current life.

b). The potential for personal evolution (in terms of character, morality, and spirituality) that his family and social environments offer. Personal evolution revolves around the beliefs and standards that are part of the environment the child grows up within, together with whatever feelings of wholeness the child has.

c). The degree to which the child can be allowed to develop its own dream world of phantasies: this is how creativity is facilitated. The importance of this is that a child looks at the world differently from the way that an adult does. I admire my parents because in my childhood they gave me lots of time to indulge in daydreaming. Daydreaming was a very important part of my childhood life.

d). The level of emotional maturity of the parents and other significant adults. In general, the parents transfer their level of maturity or immaturity to the child, through the psychological mechanism of transference  [²].

e). Any occurrences of psychological trauma experienced in early childhood. Trauma that occurs whilst the child is still creating its ego will be more devastating than trauma that occurs later in childhood when the ego has been formed. Trauma is created either intentionally or unintentionally by a parent or other significant adult, or even by an older sibling. There are three forms of trauma: sexual abuse, physical abuse, and emotional abuse. Of these three forms, emotional abuse is the most invisible, as well as being the most difficult to resolve and perhaps the most prevalent.

f ). The young child orientates on absolute thinking. His mind is still too immature to be able to make relational (or relative) judgements. So if he dislikes the mother, he is likely to generalise it so that he dislikes all women, or at least he will be wary of them.
Absolute thinking is a feature of stage theory, or a description of the mental development of children propounded by Jean Piaget. The child’s cognitive development occurs in stages. In the first two stages, up to the age of around seven, the child only understands absolute terms, for example “tall” and “wide”, but not relational terms like “taller” and “wider”.

Child's View of the World

All too often an adult believes that a child’s view of looking at the world should mirror the adult view of reality – if there is a discrepancy between the views of the child and the adult, then the child’s view of reality must be wrong. This is purely a rationalisation: the adult believes that his present view of reality is the way he saw reality when he was a child. The more imaginative that the child is, the less likely is this adult view going to be true. Why should this be so?

The adult mind has developed filter mechanisms for filtering and reducing the multitude of sensations that constantly impact on it. The adult learns to react only to a selected range of sensations. The purpose of this filtering is to make it easier for the adult to make sense of his reality. The young child has not yet established its filter mechanisms and hence it can be affected by a wider range of sensations than the adult can be. For example, the child can be influenced by subtle sensations that have a spiritual origin, but it can also be influenced by the overall levels of fear and hate that exist within social communities. The fear and hate form the mental cement that maintains the central burden of social conformity and which is responsible for the widespread resistance to change. The fear is not usually detected consciously by an adult, though it will influence his subconscious mind, thereby helping to shape his beliefs. The hatred is usually visible as the dislike of people who are different.

The idea of filters can easily be proved. If a person is willing to ingest an hallucinogenic drug such as LSD, he will see many images in his mind: some he can make sense of, and some are too strange to make sense of. Some of these strange images are not the result of mental distortions but come from those features of reality that are normally excluded from the person’s awareness. LSD disengages the mind’s filters, so opening up the person to a wider range of sensation than he is normally prepared to accept. The difficulties that the adult has in understanding the LSD experience indicates just how difficult it is for the infant to make sense of all sensations impacting on it.

Of these six factors, factor (a) can be the most significant one. The crucial feature of this factor is that of vulnerability. Vulnerability, with its own factors of fragility and sensitivity, is a very important variable. If a child is sensitive but not particularly fragile then he may grow into a creative artist, focusing on positive themes. Whereas, if he feels very fragile he may be propelled towards a dark and/or negative use of creativity. For example, he may explore forbidden social mores, or experience some kind of mental disorder, or experiment with being cruel to animals.

Fragility is based on self-pity and can be viewed as either a positive or a negative character trait. When felt to be a positive one, it gives rise to tenderness. But when felt to be a negative one, it generates cruelty. So cruelty can be viewed as a perverse form of tenderness. Cruelty arises when the person is unable to show tenderness in a positive way. Hence the joy that is often felt in exploring tenderness can change to the joy that is felt when exploring cruelty.

Similarly, sensitivity can be viewed as either a positive or a negative character trait. When felt to be a positive one, it gives rise to artistic expression, but when felt to be a negative one, it helps to attune the person to fear. Excessive sensitivity magnifies for the child the discordant effects that occur within family relationships.

Fragility is a feature of social identity, and is a basic feature of consciousness that drives a child to bond with its parents. Whereas, sensitivity is a feature of individual identity, and is the basic feature of consciousness that produces creativity and the formation of new ideas that will be useful to society.

There are Several Aspects to Maladjustment

• The child may grow up maladjusted to the family unit.


• The child may grow up adjusted to its family, but the family as a group may be maladjusted to the rest of the community.


• The child may at first grow up reasonably adjusted, but the onset of puberty may activate dissonant strains in its character and so propel it towards maladjustment.


• The child may at first grow up reasonably adjusted, but the experience of severe stress and trauma (such as bereavement of a family member, or a parental separation) may activate dissonant strains in its character and so propel it towards maladjustment.

Maladjustment can take one or both of two forms: the child can become unstable in some degree and/or it can become disempowered in some ways.

Instability can result from receiving excessive and regular negative criticisms from the parents, such as fault-finding, ridicule and denigration: these are aspects of emotional abuse. The instability is the result of the child being made to feel that it is contemptible. The worst form of emotional abuse is that of rejection; hence the most extreme form of instability is the result of the child feeling that it has been rejected by one or both of the parents. It may also feel rejected if it has not been given enough love and emotional support – this is a problem caused unintentionally by parents who are unable to show much love because they have “frozen emotions”. The child may sink into a state of desolation and self-pity.

Dis-empowerment occurs when excessive punishments and negative criticisms from the parents have the effect of making the child feel valueless and worthless (for example, telling it that it will never achieve anything in life). The most extreme form of disempowerment is the result of the child feeling that it has been victimised by one or both of the parents. It feels trapped in an unbearable situation and may sink into a state of helplessness, fear and passivity.

Vulnerability sets the scenario within which the young child experiences life. By this I mean that if the child rises above the challenges of vulnerability then it may eventually lead a positive and fulfilling life. Whereas, if it succumbs to vulnerability then its long-term prospect is that of a life dominated by negativity and regular episodes of distress and failure. The feature that determines the eventual outcome of childhood is factor (e), or how the child responds to any experience of psychological trauma.

If the adult decides to seek suitable psychological therapy, it may enable him to understand the reasons for his difficult and unhappy life. What understanding achieves is that it enables the person to stop looking at himself as a victim, so that he no longer needs to blame either himself or his parents.

[¹]. To understand the pain of reincarnation, see preceding article Philosophy of Nihilism. [1]

[²]. See article Transference in another book. [2]

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