The search can be difficult and painful, since it relates to a situation that belongs binded to the past.
So many people fear if they be themselves they will lose attachment from the relationships that are important to them.
How many of us were raised in a home that granted us the freedom to be ourselves?
How can we live authentically if we continually search for what our own parents could not give us during childhood?
As adults, we must free ourselves from these illusions, even if the truth seems unbearable to us. This truth may cause us pain before giving us the freedom to be who we truly are.
The goal is to have parents understand their own repression in order to minimize the exploitation of the children who depend on them, to meet their unmet needs.
No one can heal by maintaining the illusion.
As a child you can be happy or sad, you don’t have to suppress your anxiety or look happy to fit other people’s needs.
You find out that it is costly for your relationships to be authentic. You adapt to what your parents say in order to survive.
You become programmed to hate a part of yourself and this is the part of your personality that has adapted to those threats. Threats of abandonment, punishment, and the withdrawal of love in order to get compliance.
As you get older you struggle to fulfill old and repressed needs with external validation. You suppress your feelings, but pay the price later on in life with addictions, mental illness, and physical ailments. Whatever you are forced to suppress in childhood gets distorted with who you become in the future.
Why do we mask this pain?
You were probably raised in a home where your parents reacted negatively to your honest feelings. By sharing genuine preferences as a child, you forced your parents to assess their preferences and positions, which if they’d never created a genuine self, would cause internal conflicts within themselves. This would be projected negatively upon the child, creating a negative loop of repression.
This is done unconsciously because your parents simply replicate what was done to them. If the repression stays unresolved, the parents’ childhood tragedy is continued onto their children and this is how the cycle continues to go unresolved.
No longer is truth questioned and reality is distorted to fit the parents narrative.
Since every child needs safety and security you disconnect from your true self in order to be taken care of. You develop a personality based on your parents’ needs, and although this certainly saves your life at the time, it prevents you from accepting yourself. Later on in life you deal with depression, emptiness, and loneliness because of this tragic loss of the self in childhood. This inevitably creates total alienation from the self as an adult.
The true self cannot communicate because it has been ignored and underdeveloped, in its internal prison.
There are many children who have not been free from the beginning of their life. No longer should we treat children as if they don’t deserve respect and are just the parents property. We need to be aware that they cannot be ignored, mistreated, and threatened without any consequences.
Depression consists of denial of one’s true emotions and is facilitated through this mistreatment.
If we never mourn this loss in our own childhood then we will easily fail to recognise the needs of our own children. This is a need that can never be fulfilled later on in life.
Connection cannot happen from a position of authority.
When connection is created you have a child who is free to discover his true self. He is allowed to experience his feelings of sadness and ask for help without making his father insecure. He can be afraid if threatened or angry with himself if expectations are not reached. He is able to express his wants, irrespective of whether he will be loved or hated for it.
The desire of all human beings is to be connected. As fathers we have the power to create a household that displays the importance of being accepted and loved. When your child knows that he can express himself openly without being afraid of the withdrawal or betrayal of his father’s unconditional love.
You want your child to behave well not because they have been threatened, but because they genuinely want to do good.
Allow your child to freely be himself and know he will be loved regardless of your emotional attachment to a situation. This love is what will create the feeling of him being whole, and this is how we, as parents, can return to our true selves as well as set our children up to never lose it.
The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around.
