The School of Life: An Emotional Education

by The School of Life

Early over-protectiveness inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic. A continually busy, inattentive parent was the catalyst for a personality marked by exhausting attention-seeking behavior. There is always a logic and there is always a history. We can tell that our imbalances date from the past because they reflect the ways of thinking and instincts of the children we once were. Our way of being unbalanced tends toward a fundamental immaturity, bearing the marks of what was once a young person’s attempt to grapple with something utterly beyond their capacities. For example, when they suffer at the hands of an adult, children almost invariably take what happens to them as a reflection of something that must be very wrong with them. If someone humiliates, ignores, or hurts them, it must—so it seems—be because they are, in and of themselves, imbecilic, repugnant, and worth neglecting. It can take many years, and a lot of patient inner exploration, to reach an initially far less plausible conclusion: that the hurt was essentially undeserved and that there were inevitably a lot of other things going on, offstage, in the raging adult’s interior life, for which the child was entirely blameless.