The home we leave, the home we build, the home we heal:
How our childhood experiences affect our adult relationships.
Basic Needs
We are born with inalienable emotional needs for love, safety, acceptance, freedom, attention, validation of our feelings, and physical holding. Healthy identity is based on the fulfillment of these needs. "Only if someone has her arms around the infant... can the 'I am' moment be endured or rather risked," says D.W. Winnicott. The origin of our identity is love.
These needs are felt and remembered cellularly throughout our lives, though we may not always be intellectually aware of them. They were originally experienced in a survival context of dependency. We may still feel, as adults, that our very survival is based on finding someone to fulfill our basic needs.
But early, primal needs can be fulfilled only in childhood (since only then were we fully dependent). In adulthood the needs can be fulfilled only flexibly or partially, since we are interdependent and our needs are no longer connected to survival.
The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Met in Childhood...
- Is satified with reasonable dividends of need-fulfillment in relationships.
- Knows how to love unconditionally and yet tolerates no abuse or stuckness in relationships.
- Changes the locus of trust from others to himself so that he receives loyalty when others show it and handles disappointment when others betray.
The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Not Met in Childhood...
- Exaggerates the needs so that they become insatiable or addictive.
- Creates situations that reenact the original hurts and rejections, seeks relationships that stimulate and maintain self-defeating beliefs rather than relationships that confront and dispel them.
- Refuses to notice how abused or unhappy she is and uses the pretext of hoping for change or of coping with what is unchanging.
- Lets her feelings go underground. "If the only safe thing for me was to let my feelings disappear, how can I now permit the self-exposure and vulnerability it takes to be loved?"
- Repeats the childhood error of equating negative attention with love or neurotic anxiousness with solitude.
- Is afraid to receive the true love, self-disclosure, or generosity of others. In effect: cannot receive now what was not received originally.
The Child Within
Our problem is not that as children our needs were unmet, but that as adults they are still unmourned! The hurt, bereft, betrayed Child is still inside us, wanting to cry for what he missed and wanting thereby to let go of the pain and the stressful present neediness he feels in relationships. In fact, neediness itself tells us nothing about how much we need from others; it tells us how much we need to grieve the irrevocably barren past and evoke our own inner sources of nurturance.
True/False Self: Unconditional/Conditional Self
Our True Self, with all its free energy, impulses, feelings, and creativity, may have threatened our parents. They, after all, may have been victimized in their own childhood and never came to terms with it. They taught us how to behave in accord with their fear-ladden specifications. Some of this led to legitimate socializing. Some of it was violence to our identity.
We then designed a False Self that met with our parents' approval and maintained our role in the family. We felt that safety was possible only within those boundaries. Such "boundaries" became the long-standing habits and patterns that have been our limitations ever since. They were choices that had an origin in wisdom but now may no longer be serving our best interests. They usually please others but diminish us. Alice Miller writes that "the love I gained with such uphill effort and self-defacement was not meant for me at all but for the me I created to please them."
Once we grieve the loss, we release our hidden inner world of unused and unrevealed qualities and notice how much better we thereby feel about ourselves. We lighten up and may even notice that people love us more.
The fear of revealing the True Self is disguised in these words: "If people really knew me, they would not like me." We can change that sentence to read: "I am free enough to want everything I say and do to reveal me as I am. I love being seen as I am."
- David Richo, excerpted from How To Be an Adult: A Handbook on
Psychological and Spiritual Integration
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