The development of the human self is gradual, with each stage rooted in the previous one and having its own pace and rhythm.
At a certain age, people begin to learn to talk and walk, and children around 18 months old are most likely to say, “No, let me do it.” By 3 1/2 years old they will start asking, “Why?” By the age of 15 they want to leave home.
The strength of the “ego boundary” depends on whether the crisis is appropriately resolved during development. If the crisis is resolved and the needs are met, the ego grows strong and healthy.
If the developmental task is not completed, the ego is weakened by not receiving the structure it needs for the next developmental task. If all developmental needs are not met, the ego boundaries will be fragmented.
A child must develop strong ego boundaries in order to successfully enter adolescence. Those who are allowed to be a real child as a child will have a solid foundation on which to enter adolescence and adulthood. If we are not allowed to be a child at a young age, we will become a small adult.
Rousseau states with insight: “Nature wants man to be a child before he grows up. If this natural principle is violated, what will be cultivated will be a premature fruit that is neither ripe nor palatable and will soon rot, and it is foolish beyond belief to demand of children the way adults do.”
As children grow up, what do they need for emotional care and fulfillment?
I. Reaction, empathy and affirmation
A child’s earliest need is to have a warm person by his side to concentrate on responding to and affirming the hopes of his heart.
During the first 15 months of symbiosis, the child needs a face with loving eyes, and what is contained in these eyes will be the core and foundation of the child’s later self-adjustment.
These early inner feelings come from the mother’s feelings for the child. In those days when there are no words, one experiences everything through feelings. A child’s earliest mind is a healthy narcissism, and parents whose own narcissistic needs are not met may use their children to satisfy their own emotional needs after they become parents, and children often cooperate in satisfying their parents emotionally in order to survive.
There was once a girl, let’s call her Jenny. Jenny’s brother passed away when she was less than 1.5 years old, so she grew up with the responsibility of comforting her mother in the loss of her son, and Jenny had to keep a happy face often and had become accustomed to it.
As an adult, she had a horrible marriage that lasted 18 years, but still forced a smile to take care of her drug-addicted husband and children. It was only in the course of psychotherapy that she took off the smile mask she had worn for years and cried uncontrollably.
II. Contact, Warmth and Belonging
If parents’ emotions and spontaneity are repressed, they cannot give their children the contact they need, and touch is a source of trust; lack of physical touch is fatally lacking for infants. Adults, on the other hand, extend the need for physical touch to the level of affection, and emotional soothing includes getting attention and attention, as well as feeling a sense of accomplishment and gaining appreciation for oneself.
Children need to be loved by their parents from the heart, or they are forced to create a fantasy relationship to satisfy themselves in order to give themselves the strength to move forward.
Because emotional comfort is as basic a personal need as food is to the body. Thus, children will seek emotional comfort by any means necessary, even by unhealthy methods, such as getting into trouble, getting into trouble ……, etc. The ultimate goal remains the desire for adult attention and contact on an emotional level.
3. Self-acceptance and self-actualization
A person’s uniqueness needs to be affirmed and accepted. The child needs to see his whole self in the eyes of the adult who is taking care of him.
Only then will a sense of self emerge and a complete inner personality be built. If part of the self is accepted (e.g., the child’s smile, learning to talk) and part of the self is not accepted (e.g., the child’s anger and crying), the part that is not accepted is separated from the self. Every time we get in touch with this unaccepted part of ourselves, we feel the inner parent rejecting them with their eyes and words. And these unaccepted anger, aggression, lust, etc. have to go underground. Yet they are still alive and active outside of our consciousness.
These submerged parts sometimes appear unexpectedly. For example, anger can burst out of the blue without warning. Sometimes we say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.” Or “I’m out of control.” In addition to anger, feelings of sadness and fear can also come on occasion.
I remember growing up not being allowed to be angry because anger is one of the seven deadly sins.
When I was a child, a kind nun once passed around an x-ray of a patient’s lungs and said that this is what a sinful (angry) soul looks like. I was so scared that I swore in my heart that I would never get angry again and that I would be kind to people.
Like most men, I was taught to “not cry” and “not to be afraid.
Even when I was happy, I couldn’t be happy for too long because my parents would say, “Why are you happy when the children in Africa are starving to death?” If you can neither be happy nor angry, sad or afraid, you are probably on the verge of becoming numb and heartless!
In such a situation, the true self must be closed and replaced by the false self that appears. The false self can conform to all the requirements of the parents and maintain the balance of the family system.
Fossum and Mason in Facing shame (Facing
shame) said, “When children close off their feelings in order to satisfy their parents, they lose confidence in their own emotions and rely on their parents’ thoughts and feelings to live. At first consciously agreeing with their parents, then unconsciously attaching to them, and eventually will turn such dependence to other people and the outside world, becoming impressionable and without self.”
IV. Autonomy, uniqueness, space and separation
Children want to be different and also need physical space. Physical space is the foundation for establishing physical boundaries.
None of my 3 children will follow my directions and demonstrations exactly, as they will always add their own ways and styles. Even if they make mistakes or are frustrated by it, it is a way of learning and an opportunity for them to grow by God’s permission and nature.
Each person is unique in this world and cannot be compared at all. Each person also needs autonomy. The need for autonomy emerges at the age of one and a half years, and that is when the individual begins to psychologically leave his parents and seek autonomy. By then, the symbiotic period has expired and the individual ends his or her total dependence on the parents, a painful process.
Two year olds love to say, “No.”
If we allowed children the right to say no, there might not be so many people today who have trouble resisting and saying no when they are sexually molested and faced with the temptations of alcohol and drug abuse.
Child rapists are very much like hunters looking for prey, and they are good at recognizing where the best-behaved children are.
The greatest crisis in the development of autonomy is shame. Children must learn to live with shame and doubt, which are good feelings that help us understand our limits and know that we can make mistakes and are not omnipotent. Yet excessive shame distorts the power of the child’s will, turning the ability to manipulate the environment to use it against itself.
E. Erikson, in his book “Children and Society,” says, “Shame constrains one’s thoughts and actions at every turn, and leads to a closed, pathological self. He does things repeatedly, not by being interested in things and doing them willingly, but by being himself long numbed to repeated actions, indulging in them and not being able to extricate himself from them, and he tends to gain a sense of power by means of stubbornness, or control over trivial things ……
”This superficial triumph is entirely a continuation of the compulsive behavior of the infant model, which is the reason why he later focuses on the performance of things at the expense of the spiritual content.”
Shame is transmissive between parent and child. Parents who are compulsively controlling are the ones who shame their children the most, and the children grow up with an immature mindset of compulsive control.
How can such parents, who provide the best model of shame, teach their children self-love?
The most damaging aspect of shame is the process it triggers. It starts out as a subjective feeling, but then it transforms into a real habitual feeling in the mind.
For example, when I am angry, I feel as if I am committing a crime and feel bad about myself. Likewise, when I was afraid, sad and happy.
In the family I grew up in, the only feeling that did not trigger shame was guilt.
Guilt is an important emotion. In a healthy family, guilt forms the conscience that allows the individual to become reliable and responsible. Guilt is more mature than shame in personality development because it presupposes that certain internalized values are already in place. It allows a person to feel regret when he or she does something that violates a value principle.
Fossum and Mason say, “Guilt is a painful feeling directed at one’s behavior, expressing regret and responsibility for one’s actions. Shame, however, is a painful feeling directed at oneself as a person.”
If there is an unchangeable self involved and a wrongdoing that cannot be undone, no amount of reparation or admission of fault can change the feelings of shame and self-deprecation.
In a dysfunctional family, guilt is unhealthy. Here the members of the family give up their uniqueness and play only the roles they are supposed to play in order to maintain the balance of the closed system. Anyone who tries to break away from the system, to give up rigid roles, to pursue independence and uniqueness, faces the anger and rejection of the system, and is under heavy pressure of guilt. We must understand that this guilt is a symptom of a sick system.
It is important to understand that in a dysfunctional family, it is the members who live for the family, not the family who lives for the members.
Shame can be internalized because the individual’s tendencies are shamed and devalued. A curious three-year-old explores his body. That is a normal tendency, and we can imagine the following scenario.
One day Xiaohua discovers his nose and names it, and his mother is so pleased that she asks his grandmother to come and see the nose he identified. He received a lot of appreciation for this. Then he pointed out his ears, hands, fingers, etc., and received the same praise from his family.
One Sunday, when the whole family was in the living room (perhaps with guests), Hwa pointed out his sexual organs and expected the same applause, but this time there was none. Mom quickly carried him out of the living room. He had never seen his mom look so bad, even when he had smeared his poop on the bathroom wall.
So he learned, “We don’t have anything like a sex organ in the house.” Since then his sexuality and sexual tendencies have been humiliated and he has had to face his sexual growth in secret.
This is certainly not what an open and dynamic family should have. It is no wonder that according to a survey, 68% of couples have difficulties in their sexual relationship, the most common being “sexual dysfunction”. Imagine how a person who has lived for 20 years in a family where sex is a taboo can become sexually open and energetic after marriage? Some people are only excited by secret and illicit sexual experiences, and once it is legal and part of family life, the desire immediately disappears.
The child’s tendency to attack may be humiliated, even during potty training, the child’s tendency to defecate may be so unconsciously humiliated by adults that they will later become like me when I am in the bathroom and have to turn on the bathroom sink so that people don’t know I am pooping.
Once the desire has been shamed, every time the desire arises, and feel a natural tendency to be ashamed of it.
The same can happen to other desires. If a person has not been hugged and touched since childhood, and in his desire to go close to people and want to be touched by someone was humiliated, later whenever he has this desire, will feel very humiliated.
Many young boys have been teased for their desire to be hugged and have learned to repress these needs with diversion or self-defense, thinking that men should not need them. Thus, while men tend to resort to “sex” for their intimacy needs, women tend to over-emotionalize and over-emotionalize their intimacy needs.
When a man needs intimacy, he often uses sex to cover it up, saying, “Sex gives me a sense of intimacy I’ve never felt before.” In fact, intimacy and sex are two entirely different things. In the long run, a man will thus reduce his desire for sex. Women, however, are more shy and uncomfortable than men because of the need for sex, so they take advantage of tender and loving behavior to conceal their sexual desires.
The need for intimacy and sexual desire are both normal, but in a dysfunctional family, all needs can be labeled as unpleasant. A child who can’t be himself and has no one to support him, any of his feelings and needs seem to be all out of place.
V. Pleasure, pain and excitement
Children need fun and play, they need age-appropriate and challenging stimulation, and they need to experience appropriate pain and suffering.
To spoil a child is to deprive him or her of the opportunity to learn from the normal pain of life. Pain is a source of growth and wisdom.
There is a song that says, “An unbroken heart is hollow; the deeper your grief, the richer your joy.” To take away these wellsprings of courage and wisdom from a child could almost be considered inhumane.
Perfectionist and strict parents then deprive children of the smiles and innocence that belong to childhood, and overly serious religious families can easily suppress their children’s natural emotions. Religion is supposed to bring peace, joy, freedom and celebration of life. I am perplexed as to why some families would use the “good news of salvation” to stifle the joy of a child’s childhood. The spirit of Christian faith should not be like this.
Trust and Dependence and Self-Prediction
Children need parents they can trust and rely on to test their limits. Such tests are self-imposed.
Only a parent who can be relied upon and is psychologically balanced will allow a child to explore his or her world with confidence.
As a two-year-old explores the world and develops autonomy, he needs his parents to be with him and to do what he wants to do within sight of them. He must find his limits and self within the safety of his own.
In adolescence, as the child expands his life and explores further, he needs a confident parent to support him. If the father is too immature and needs his son to be grateful to him at all times, the son will not be able to pursue himself to the best of his ability and will need to take care of his less confident father.
Predictability is very meaningful to children. Children need stable and predictable parents. In unhealthy families, children often don’t know what their parents will do next: the father may come home drunk, the mother may have a mood or complain about not feeling well. Children have to tremble and be careful because they don’t know what’s going to happen next, perhaps a sudden outburst from a bad-tempered dad.
The immature adult expects the child to fulfill their never-ending, conflicted and impossible wishes.
In this situation, the child has no time to care for his or her own feelings and must be constantly on alert to detect what is going to happen in the family.
There is a subtle and deep emotional abuse in such families, including conflicting double-bind messages and extreme cold torture.
I believe that a parent’s primary responsibility is to be able to give themselves to their children when they need them. Therefore, I personally advocate that one not have children before the age of 30. I also look forward to developing detailed mental health tests and learning parenting skills as a pre-requisite for parenthood.
There is no such thing as a “bad child” in this world. Children are all born precious and unique, so we should ensure that every child has a normal and happy childhood.
I certainly don’t believe that everyone is always good, because evil is an obvious fact of life in the universe. There are bad people in the world, but if children are allowed to grow up in a healthy and normal environment, there will inevitably be fewer bad people in the world.
When children are young, they are often confused by the moral codes placed upon them. Sometimes we ask a two-year-old, “Do you want to be a good boy?”
In fact, we call children good when they are well-behaved and pleasing, and bad when they are not. This distinction between good and bad may be a reflection of parents’ own preconceived beliefs that are inherited from toxic dogma.
Harvard University’s Kohlberg (kohlberg) has spent a lot of time studying child development. His research is based on the monumental results of Piaget’s 50 years of accumulated work on children’s intellectual development.
Kolberg pointed out that “from birth to age 7, the pre-moral period, when what is good is what the child likes and wants, and after age 7, when the child begins to do limited concrete logical thinking, what is good is For example, if you scratch an itch for me, I will scratch an itch for you. It is only in adolescence that altruistic ideas begin to emerge, and the morality in this stage is determined by the relationships around him. It is only when we are much older that we are able to think maturely enough to see good deeds as intrinsically meaningful and worth performing. At this point, a person will perform good deeds because of the principles and beliefs he or she holds. However, it takes at least 25 years to reach this stage, and many people do not reach this stage in their lifetime.
Of course, not everyone has the same results as the study, but they do provide a good model to follow. Parents who teach well by example and also point out the consequences of their children’s bad behavior are far more likely to provide a solid foundation for moral development than parents who routinely punish, scold, and label their children badly.
Labeling children before the age of 7 as bad is really psychologically abusive and can hurt their self-esteem. Calling children bad when they do something wrong and punishing them with a severe beating will only create low self-esteem, self-depreciation and shame; self-deprecating people believe they are bad. If a person acts immorally, then the biggest factor must be self-deprecation and unhealthy shame.
The following are the effects of emotionally abusive experiences that you may wish to use for self-examination.
Fear of abandonment – you can’t let go of things and it’s hard to leave people, you want to maintain certain relationships for a long time, even if they are outdated or unhealthy, or you collect many things and don’t want to throw them away.
2. Delusion or denial of facts – If someone criticizes your parents, you must stand up for them, you have a good impression of your family. You keep pleasing your parents and trying to win their liking, but no matter what you do, they never seem to be satisfied.
3. Undifferentiated emotions – You can’t figure out how you feel and you don’t know how to express your emotions properly. Crying when you are angry, angry when you are afraid in your heart, maybe your emotions become physical, often have unexplained illnesses, or need to go through others to feel yourself.
4. Loneliness and isolation – you have little contact with the outside world, so sometimes you lose a sense of reality around you, you are lonely and lack a sense of belonging.
5. Confused or deviant thoughts – You speak with too much detail, making it boring. You compulsively worry about things that are impossible to change, such as world peace, social security, and so on. A little thing can make you anxious, but you tend to stay in the thinking stage, rarely put into action; you love to analyze their problems, but rarely do to solve the problem.
6. compulsive / addictive problems – you use alcohol or drugs to get rid of uncomfortable emotions, you keep yourself busy so that you do not have to think about unpleasant things.
7. High anxiety – you feel anxious for a long time without knowing what you are afraid of, always thinking the worst of things and worrying about the coming disaster.
8. Inability to build intimate relationships – When you feel intimate with someone, you unconsciously sabotage each other. You are often attracted to people who actually won’t really love you and don’t care about sound intimate relationships.
9. Loss of emotional vitality – Some would say you are cold and schematic. You are not on the same page. You say you are excited, but you are not; you say you are angry, but you are not so much, and in fact you are emotionally numb.
10. you feel ashamed of your needs and tendencies – whenever your sexual desire rises, craves intimacy or has other needs.
11. A cycle of disgust and guilt – You hate having to shoulder many responsibilities for your family, but you are filled with guilt if you don’t do your best to take care of them. You can’t pursue your own pleasures, but once you plan for your own rights, you feel uneasy.
12. Mix emotions and shame – every time something emotional happens, it’s followed by shame.
13. There is a rule: do not show emotions – you grow up in a home where you are not allowed to show emotions, you should know without saying that your parents love you. Family members will never say their anger, fear, heartache and sadness, and you certainly will not say what you feel inside.
14. Coercive control desire – You try to control everyone and everything around you, including the behavior of others. You also want to control the things you can’t control. If your emotions get out of control, you feel ashamed.
15. False Self – You disguise yourself to achieve a set image. You wear a mask to hide your emotions and play a rigid role. When you are sad, you smile and say, “I’m fine.” And when you’re angry and shaking you say, “It’s fine.”
16. Empty dissatisfaction – You have not had a narcissistic mindset since childhood and feel empty, constantly trying things without feeling fulfilled and satisfied.
17. playing mind games and manipulating others – you spend a lot of energy playing mind games and trying to manipulate others because you don’t know how to meet your own needs in an honest way.
18. Indulge yourself – You are sometimes very indulgent and angry that others do not meet your hopes. You are authoritarian, lack patience and want others to understand your needs quickly. When things go wrong in life, the fault is to be attributed to others and you do not think you should also be responsible for things.
19. Often afflicted by fright – You are often in fear and easily frightened.
20. An unsatisfied and immature child in your heart – You look and act like an adult, but inside you have the mind of a child.
21. Authoritarian and demanding – you work hard, monitor yourself strictly, and demand faultlessly.
22. Poor and inexhaustible – You are dry and poor inside and expect someone to nourish and satisfy you. You came into marriage expecting someone to take good care of you, but your needs are like a bottomless pit, and you may not know what you really want.
23. have suffered sexual violence, physical abuse, or both.
24. Lack of ability to deal with emotions and communication skills – strong emotions often overwhelm you and you are afraid of strong emotions from others, you are unable to communicate your feelings and it is difficult to understand how others are feeling.
25. Internalized anger, sadness, fear, shame, happiness and guilt – You are full of anger but don’t feel it, you are sad but don’t realize it. Internalizing feelings means that those emotions no longer literally ebb and flow, like a stuck switch that is inelastic. When you internalize shame as well, all emotions are wrapped up in shame.
26. Being both a persecutor and a victim – In your relationships, you take turns playing the role of victim and persecutor.
27. Losing inner unity – Feelings that you have neglected and isolated sometimes pop up. For example, unexpectedly lashing out, you may say, “I don’t know what’s gotten into me!”
28. overly concerned about the feelings of others – sensitive to the feelings of others and always trying to comfort them. If others are angry, you will change your behavior to calm them down; if others are grieving, you will try to ease their hurt.
29. “Now” phobia – You regret the past and wish to start over. You live in the past and the future instead of the present; memories and fantasies are your way to escape from the “here and now”.
30. Fear of being led astray by others – You do not easily trust others and are somewhat suspicious. You feel that you should benefit from others, and fear that those who are not as good as you will give you a bad influence, and do not care to be with them.