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November 7, 2023
Everybody yearns for a place where they can relax and be fully themselves. Ideally, the childhood home was one such place.
And we internalize this feeling from childhood—that of being accepted and welcome—as a fundamental, positive attitude toward life that accompanies us through adulthood: we feel secure in the world and in our own life.
And though people may attempt to repress or, as an adult, downplay childhood experiences of insecurity or rejection, there are moments in everyday life that will reveal how underdeveloped their basic trust remains.
Instead, they hope that others will provide them with these feelings of security, protection, stability, and home.
Those who lack a home on the inside will never find one on the outside.
On the unconscious level, however, our inner child exercises significant sway over our perception, behavior, and ways of feeling and thinking. It’s far stronger than our intellect, in fact.
Our emotional life is attributed to the inner child: our fear, pain, grief, and anger, but also our joy, happiness, and love.
The adult-self behaves consciously and intentionally.
Many beliefs emerge from interactions between the child and its caretakers in the first years of the child’s life. For instance, an inner belief could be “I’m okay” or “I’m not okay.”
Common self-protection strategies include withdrawal, keeping the peace, perfectionism, aggression and attack, or vying for power or control.
the shadow child stands for that part of our self-esteem that is injured and unstable.
The sun child and the shadow child parts of our personality are primarily, if not exclusively, influenced by our first six years of life.
If Daddy yells at or even strikes his child, the little one won’t think, “Daddy is unable to manage his aggression and needs to undergo psychotherapy.” Instead, she associates the beating with her own “badness.”
Generally speaking, the feelings we experience in the first two years of life show us whether we are fundamentally welcome here or not.
Since we are completely at the mercy of our parents’ behaviors in these first two years, it is also during this time that basic trust—or basic mistrust, as the case may be—develops.
These experiences create a deep imprint on body memory.
Neurological studies have now shown that young children who experience a lot of toxic stress—for instance, those who are mistreated in some way—will release higher levels of stress hormones throughout their life.
If left unchecked, feelings of powerlessness and inferiority in particular can cause us to compensate in socially unacceptable ways, exhibiting an excessive thirst for power and recognition.
From the perspective of the shadow child, the “other person” is always bigger than we are, and this difference in stature leads us to assume that the supposed “big guy” has evil intentions,
The four basic psychological needs are: the need for connection, the need for autonomy and control, the need for pleasure or avoidance of displeasure, the need for bolstered self-esteem and acknowledgment.
Beyond the realm of physical care, the need for connection, belonging, and community are also among our basic emotional needs.
Parents can hinder a child’s need for connection by means of neglect, rejection, and/or abuse.
As an adult, this person will either avoid (or habitually destroy) relationships, or develop clingy behavior, depending too heavily on romantic partners and other relationships.
children—like adults—also have a need for autonomy.
Autonomy equals control, and control equals security. When we talk about “control freaks,” this describes the behavior of individuals concerned about their own security, because deep inside (and dictated by their shadow child), they feel insecure. The need for autonomy is associated not only with the desire for security, but the desire for power.
Overly protective, controlling parents who impose too many rules and boundaries will hamper their child’s emerging independence.
Well-intentioned parents who clear their child’s path of too many obstacles can have just as negative an impact on the child’s development. Even as adults, these children remain dependent on others to take responsibility.
This is a basic human conflict that could best be described as the autonomy-dependence conflict.
In people with insecure attachments, the shadow child is marked by deeply damaged trust, whereas in people with secure attachments, the sun child has a far easier time trusting itself and others.
It is essential for survival that people learn to regulate their perception of pleasure and displeasure. They must acquire the ability to tolerate the frustration of delayed gratification and having their urges denied.
Parenting largely hinges on teaching children how to appropriately manage feelings of pleasure and displeasure.
If the needs for pleasure and autonomy are too strictly regulated in their youth, people (or rather, their shadow child) may later develop abstemious and compulsive behaviors that reflect how they were raised.
Discipline is one of the most important requirements for a successful life, and in these days of limitless options and other excesses, it has become increasingly strained.
We have an innate need for acknowledgment. This need is closely interwoven with the need for connection, because if we haven’t been acknowledged by a person, a connection can never form.
When a mother smiles at her child, it’s as if the child is looking into a mirror that shows him his mother is happy he’s there. We develop self-esteem through the behaviors of our guardians.
People with shaky self-esteem—that is, those who often identify with their shadow child—usually require more external approval than self-assured individuals with a highly developed sun child.
If parents are stunted in their capacity to love and/or struggle to empathize with their child, the child will assume responsibility for the success of the relationship.
Parents who have little empathy for their children will have a hard time truly grasping the children’s feelings and needs. This leads kids to think, “What I’m feeling and thinking is wrong,” when what they’re feeling is actually right.
Parents who struggle to empathize with their children have little access to their own feelings, because connection to our own feelings is the prerequisite for empathy.
Children learn how to differentiate and name their feelings from their parents’ empathetic behavior.
Parental empathy is therefore recognized as the most important criterion for parenting. It can be seen as the medium by which we are positively or, as the case may be, negatively shaped.
The problem here is that the shadow child behaves much like a real child: the less attention you give them, the more they clamor for it.
Belief systems are the lens through which we view reality.
Our deep-seated, unconscious beliefs serve as a filter for our perception,
The only person we have the power to influence is ourselves.
The experience they had as children, with their parents, simply feels more real than any thought, no matter how reasonable.
People who had happy childhoods sometimes need to learn the hard way that the world out there isn’t always as good a place as back home with Mom and Dad. Since they tend to have good self-esteem and are often tapped into their sun child, they’re relatively well-equipped to manage this reality check.
