Анна Шиман
Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
Personality psychology. Complexes and a person’s psychological growing up. The troubles of an adult who never grew up.
Inspired by the psychological practice of our centre.
Let’s try to paint a portrait of an adult who never quite grew up. Not the utterly infantile, dependent person who is afraid to step away from a parent’s leg and, hiding behind it, timidly peers out at reality. And not the one who lives constantly feeling afraid, like a primitive man at the dawn of civilisation who stared into the darkness of the night, shuddering at mysterious sounds in the dark forest, not daring to step away from the fire.
Let’s take the example of an ordinary person who has complexes that go back to childhood, but who has managed to step away from the parent’s leg (be it mum’s skirt or dad’s trousers) and has made something of themselves in society and in their profession, has a family of their own, and so on.
So what is such a person failing at? — you may ask, and in your own way you will be right.
My answer is that it shows in a lack of wholeness, or even in openly destructive behaviour scripts in one set of life circumstances or another. We will talk about this in more detail on the online course “Freedom from Complexes”.
For example, a person cannot solve the tasks in front of them and starts to fall into hysterics or a stupor, to run away from the situation, to pretend that the problem need not be solved, that it can be forgotten altogether. And if it “won’t be forgotten” by an effort of reason, then, for example, with the help of alcohol or a row (with the chance to withdraw and decide nothing) it will certainly be forgotten.
This damages self-esteem and one’s sense of self, one’s attitude to oneself and to the world; the feeling of having one’s own “place in the sun”, at work and in society, is lost. The respect and recognition of others crumble, and self-actualisation and personal growth become impossible. That is, all the important areas where each of us realises our potential, going through trials and lessons and sitting exams set by life itself.
You coped – well done, you feel great; instead of a medal – happiness and harmony in life.
You didn’t cope – circumstances send you to resit. And so on endlessly, throughout the whole journey of life.
The significant downside of this script – people are not gods, and they do not have an endless supply of time. So destructive scripts are worth changing if you want to know happiness and love in abundance.
So where does the difficulty lie, and what does the adult who never grew up have to do with it?
Behaviour scripts – these are adaptive survival strategies shaped by parents, the immediate circle and society. Their first task was to help the child survive and become a unit in the family system and in society.
And that task is not quite about happiness and harmony.
These scripts are enough for childhood, for the years at college, for side jobs, for work. For first relationships – they also seem to be enough, but, to put it mildly, only just. And the further it goes, the more the scripts that helped the child survive in childhood get in the way of the adult living fully. Not only do they get in the way – they often also stop a person from becoming themselves. After all, if a child’s script of obedience let them stay the beloved child, then in the adult world the same obedience leads to everyone who feels like it climbing onto the person’s neck. If a child for some reason decided that they were responsible for mum’s or dad’s mood and goes into life with this “knowledge”, then, once grown up, they automatically begin to feel responsible for the mood of the people close to them and important in their life. It may be a husband, it may be the boss, or it may be the parents of their other half.
If in childhood “magical thinking” fixed a behaviour script according to which you must behave in a certain way so that your parents stay in a good mood and do not quarrel or get angry, then, once grown up, a person will unconsciously act out the familiar plot in order to get love and support.
For example, it may have happened that a parent came home from work in a bad mood and was unkind, and the child decided that, because of some mischief of their own, they were to blame for the parent’s state, and worked out that they had to behave in a certain way so as not to upset the parent again and to be loved. And after that it made no difference whether the child had done anything wrong on the day the parent came home angry again. The child simply blamed themselves automatically and began treating mum or dad with excessive care. The parent liked this. They praised the child and in doing so reinforced the script, unconsciously making the child act it out again and again. In adulthood such scripts bring constant stress and disappointment in close relationships, work, friends and so on.
In other words, such lines of behaviour take away the chance to fill life with happiness and do not let a person be themselves – they keep the person within the bounds of childhood behaviour.
All the times when you go against yourself add up and spill over into exhaustion, apathy, disturbed sleep, emotional swings and so on. So while one part of childhood experience has been transformed into an adult part and responds adequately to the challenges of reality, something else is meanwhile muddling all the moves and cards on the way to yourself, to harmony and to the growth of an adult personality.
I do not mean that childlike behaviour in adulthood is forbidden: ride the slides and merry-go-rounds, go to play rooms and get into escape rooms and building model ships. But where adult decisions are needed, childhood strategies of adaptation have no business being there.
To learn more about childhood scripts and to grow up psychologically, I invite you to our centre’s events and to the online course “Freedom from Complexes”, where you will find out who you are, get to know the main kinds of psychological complexes and their influence on a person’s life, and learn to choose effective ways of behaving and of fulfilling yourself.
Petro Oleksandrovych Poliashchenko, teacher at the PSYVISION centre.
