It is a
child’s job to receive love.
That’s what
they are designed to do.
From the
moment a child is born, they are completely reliant on their parents and
caregivers to care for them, nurture them, and provide for their every need.
Of all the
creatures born on planet Earth, human beings are born the most helpless, the
most vulnerable. Yet, they rise up to become the completely dominant masters of
the planet, dominating the food chain. With folded brain and exceptional
cleverness they create tools to solve problems and make their lives easier. How
ironic that such a fragile creature could become so dominant.
In the years
following their birth, human babies are dependent. This dependence means that
their formation of their identity, that is who they are, is based on their
parents and carers. How a baby learns to see themselves, is a reflection of
their own parents way they see themselves and the world.
If a child
is treated with love and kindness, respect and opportunities, and firm loving
boundaries, they will grow into healthy adults. If not, it can set the child up
to live a life of pain, based on a malformed personal identity.
These
tortured little children grow up to be adults who become desperate to hide
their dysfunction away from the world. They believe if you could see that they
are dysfunctional, then you would reject them, and they would not belong. This
would mean that they are not loveable. So people go out of their way to hide
who they really are.
The worst
thing is, when people actually think they succeed with keeping their broken
selves hidden, it creates the worst pain imaginable. Let us call it suffering.
They live in hell, too frightened and ashamed to reveal their vulnerability.
Such people usually describe ‘vulnerability’ as ‘weakness’.
Often these
kind of people will be out to prove themselves. Prove their superiority, Prove
their adequacy, their importance, their significance. They could achieve great
power, or wealth, or fame, or dominance, and it still will not quell the
desperate loneliness they feel inside, cut off from their own humanity.
Because if
you do not love a child, that child will grow up to feel unloveable.
If a child
does not feel or believe that they are being loved, then they are at risk of
‘splitting-off’.
All children
are born naturally beautiful and wonderful. They are exploration machines,
ready to discover everything about life, read to learn from able and willing
teachers. And they need to be treasured and adored, loved wholly and completely.
If a child feels that a parent is somehow distracted, preoccupied with the
happenings of their own life, then that child may risk splitting-off, away from
that natural beautiful self, to become something or someone else in order to
somehow regain that attention, regain that love. Splitting-off means becoming
someone who they are not, in order to somehow be loved.
It does not
make sense in any kind of adult logic, but to a child it is essential, to a
child it is life itself. They can split-off to become an achiever, a rebel, a
leader, a clown, the responsible one, the scapegoat, the bully, the victim,
helpless, hopeless, miserable, golden child, academic, sports star, politician,
surgeon, and of course… parent. All these roles, just to avoid feeling the deep
inner pain of not being who they really are.
Just to make
it even more complicated, when a parent is not aware of this within themselves,
and when they choose not to do anything about facing their real selves, they
risk inadvertently passing on all of their own unresolved emotional baggage on
to the child. So many children, or children in adults body, walk around
carrying guilt and shame about who they are, that doesn’t even belong to them.
It may be a legacy of their parents, or their parents parents, or their parents
parents parents, ad infinitum.
Perhaps if
we were to look at parenting with whole new eyes then, a great place to start
would be with ourselves as parents. What are the things in us that block our
children from feeling loved? How often do we say to our children, with our
words or our actions; “Do as I say, not as I do.” What if instead we could
start to say: “The more I love myself, and live in that love, the more that my
child will learn to love themselves in turn.”
The greatest gift that any parent can ever give to their child, is to live to their fullest potential.
Are you living to yours?
