If we want to know \”how we grew up to be who we are today,\” we must first understand what kind of person our main caregiver (usually our mother) is, and how our main caregiver is related to us in our early years. Interactive. Due to various considerations, I chose to be a stay-at-home mom. During my time as a stay-at-home mother, I stayed away from my parents and in-laws, and my husband and I raised our eldest daughter alone. This life of a family of three with simple relationships and self-reliance also gave me the physical space and opportunity to understand myself, heal myself, and slowly get out of the intergenerational inheritance of my family of origin. Recently, due to various reasons, I have been living with my mother again. After observing the mother closely, I found that she was actually a child. A child who did not receive the love of his parents when he was a child is now extremely easy to feel wronged, cannot stand being left out, and longs for recognition. An old man who is unwilling to admit and accept his own imperfections, always projects \”badness\” onto others, and is full of fear of aging and death. Her mother\’s childhood experiences shaped her parenting style. As a child in her early years, she was fostered in the widow\’s grandmother\’s home after birth. She finally managed to survive until her parents returned to their hometown, but she never expected to have to shoulder the responsibility of taking care of her younger siblings and act as a surrogate mother. My mother told me that at that time, she only attended primary school for one year, and was forced to drop out of school to chop wood, cook, and take care of her younger siblings and her bedridden mother. She was often scolded by her father. In a way, my grandparents used my mother as a free assistant. In other words, my mother had been raised in an environment of functional and emotional neglect. Such a growth experience destined her to become a \”defective\” mother. When she became a mother herself, there were significant signs of emotional neglect and compensation in our parenting. Generally speaking, she is very strict with her three children and does her best to send us to school. She often said with regret that if she could have gone to school, she would have been very promising. So for our three children, as long as we have the ability to go to school, we will give them our full support. Looking back on my childhood, I don\’t remember having a very close interaction with my mother. I remember one time when I was sick and had a stomachache, my sister kept hugging me to sleep and caressing my belly. Thinking about it now still makes me cry. This kind of scene has never happened between me and my mother. For a long time, I suspected that I was a adopted child because I couldn\’t feel my mother\’s love and care for me at all. Sometimes I have conflicts with my mother, but I don’t dare to cry in front of her because she doesn’t want to see me cry. I imagined that I ran away from home and she was very sad. In fact, when I was hiding in a corner, my mother didn\’t care, but when it was time to eat, my sister came to see me. When I was older, I always felt that my mother favored my brother and didn\’t care about me at all. And when I told her that she didn\’t care about me and didn\’t love me, she would vehemently deny it and say that the palms and backs of her hands were all flesh and that she had always been fair. Many times, she will also say that she has been very kind to me and does not dislike me as a girl. If I leave it to others, I will say noIt will be given away early. Every time she hears such words, she never knows how sad I am. When I entered junior high school, my grades improved by leaps and bounds, and my mother\’s attitude towards me changed completely. Perhaps, from then on, I also learned to use being well-behaved and sensible, and using good grades to gain my mother\’s love and recognition for me. And this kind of conditional love and recognition will only make people lose themselves more and more and become more and more insecure. The Effects of an Emotionally Neglected Childhood Since I had children of my own, I discovered that I was afraid of intimacy and didn’t know how to build close relationships with people. After a baby is born, many families worry that the father will carelessly hold the baby down, so the couple sleeps in separate beds. It\’s the opposite in my family. After my eldest daughter was born, I never dared to sleep too close to her. After feeding her, I would sleep on my back and never slept with my arms around the baby. Before the age of three, the father would sleep with the child in his arms. I have always wondered why my husband, who is so careless and a heavy sleeper, is not afraid of pressing the child, and the child always falls asleep and falls asleep in his father\’s arms. It has been like this since he was born. When my child entered kindergarten, one day she suddenly asked me to hold her in my arms while she slept. If I didn\’t, she would cry. In the first few nights when I put my baby to sleep, I felt so uncomfortable. On the one hand, it feels awkward, and on the other hand, my arm hurts. Every time when the child falls asleep, he quickly and quietly takes his hand out. During a supervision training, the supervisor mentioned that one of the inner conflicts among people is the desire to be intimate with others but the fear of intimacy with others. I suddenly recalled that not only did I not like sleeping with my child in my arms, I also didn’t like being hugged by my husband when sleeping. I felt very uncomfortable. Thinking about my friends again, I can\’t seem to find anyone with whom I can maintain a close relationship. Maybe I have been lonely all this time, unable and not knowing how to establish close relationships with others. At the same time, whenever someone gets too close to me, I will always be extremely scared. Sometimes, I talk to my husband about my problem of not knowing how to be intimate with others. My husband said, no wonder you always feel so cold. After my mother came to my house, it was obvious that she liked my eldest daughter very much. My eldest daughter seemed to have a blood relationship with her and would take the initiative to run over and interact with her grandma. For example, one day, after my mother finished eating, she turned on the TV. When my daughter saw it, she ran over and asked, \”Grandma, what are you doing watching TV? I\’m so bored. Can you chat with me?\” However, my mother acts like a fool and doesn’t know how to interact with her children. I just keep saying, child, you are beautiful and you are very smart. Whenever the child throws a tantrum or something, she is frightened and either steps back, freezes there, or says that the child has a really bad temper. She would get irritable when the children made noises, which was completely different from the kind and tolerant old man described in the books. Seeing my mother interact with my children reminds me again of my interactions with her when I was a child, and I finally understand who I am today. Over the past few years, I slowly realized that my mother had learned to isolate her emotions and feelings since she was a child. In order to gain her father\’s approval, she used herself as a tool to support the family every day. So when raising us, she alsoUnable to give us the emotional attention and warmth we need because she has learned to ignore emotions and feelings in order to protect herself from harm. And when I tried my best to ask for love and care from her, she was confused on the one hand. She obviously paid a lot for me, but why I couldn\’t feel it. On the other hand, she often gets scared and angry inside when she sees me sad and crying. Because my crying would trigger the pain of her early childhood of abandonment and neglect. Nowadays, when I see that my mother is only interested in playing cards, watching TV, telling others about her old stories, and gesticulating about her children to show that she is great, I no longer blindly think that she is only interested in herself. , only care about yourself. Instead, I felt a little heartbroken and pitiful for her, feeling sorry that she couldn\’t communicate with others. More importantly, I no longer expected to get emotional warmth and comfort from her. Because I know it’s not that she doesn’t want to give it, but that she can’t give it. This saves a lot of trouble and frustration. After I figured out my shortcomings in the issue of \”intimacy\” when I was a child, and began to consciously learn how to be intimate with others, I recently became particularly fond of sleeping with my eldest child in my arms, and also when my husband hugged me. I feel very happy. Although sometimes I feel vaguely worried that this beautiful intimacy cannot last forever. The impact of my mother\’s conditional love on me. Looking back now, the love my mother gave me has two characteristics: conditional, illusory and perfect love. Ever since I became her ideal child who studies well, is obedient and sensible, she has treated me like an emperor. This kind of love actually made me live my life as a tool for learning. On the other hand, I lost the opportunity to experience real love, so my mental age was always in an infantile state. Longing for pure, undivided attention and love from the people closest to me brought all kinds of misery to my married life. When my eldest child was almost one year old, my husband started to \”lazy\” in various ways. He no longer hung around me and the child as soon as he got off work as he did at first. At that moment, I felt that he no longer loved me and the children, and I felt very aggrieved and angry. Many times, when my husband does not treat me well according to my inner standards and requirements, I will extend it to \”he doesn\’t love me, he looks down on me\”, so I quarrel and lose my temper with my husband, and I also feel the same in my heart. I was in extreme pain and felt that my life was worthless. When I was pregnant with my second child, my husband suddenly started taking care of me in various ways. I asked him why he had \”made the same mistake again\”? He said that when I need his care, of course he has to take good care of me and be considerate of me, and he can leave when I am able to take care of myself. In fact, he had told me this before, but I didn\’t believe it at all. But now I believe it, because my experience as a mother in the past few years has made me realize that everyone is tired sometimes, and every kind of love contains selfish elements. So I began to understand that it wasn’t that my husband didn’t love and care about me as much as he did after giving birth, but because the child was older. On the one hand, he was indeed a little tired, and on the other hand, he felt that I could take on the responsibility of taking care of the child on my own. , and at the same time he also needsI took time away from my family to focus on my hobbies and personal relationships. This time, after my mother came to my home, she continued to instill that \”illusory and perfect love\” into me, not letting me do any work, hoping that I could be pampered and raise the baby. Perhaps this is because she is eager to make up for herself, the confinement life she once had when no one cared about her or cared for her. What she didn\’t have, she longed for me to have. How could she let me get something that she didn\’t even get? When she took care of my first confinement, I almost suffered from depression. Now not only is she unable to take care of me, she also needs my husband and me to take care of her when she is sick. In the past, I might have resented my husband because I wanted to get the illusory and perfect care and attention my mother wanted to give me. I felt that my husband was not capable of providing me with a pampered pregnancy life, and I felt aggrieved and myself. Not being taken seriously. But now, I am very grateful. I feel that it is not easy for my husband to support the whole family on his own. I am glad that I can continue to stay at home and do not have to go out to work. More importantly, I feel that working more during pregnancy is good for me and the child. The most important thing is that my heart has gradually grown from a baby waiting to be fed to an adult. I have given up the need for complete care and attention like a baby craves. I talked about my insurance with my husband at noon. When he refused to buy insurance for me again, I no longer felt aggrieved and sad as before. I no longer extended this to the fact that he no longer loves me and does not value me. . Because now, I have realized and accepted that \”choosing to take care of my baby at home is my own choice; buying insurance is also my own business.\” I need to take responsibility for myself, and I can take responsibility for myself. In a sense, I have grown into an adult who can sit on equal terms with my husband and take responsibility for myself and my family. I am no longer the child in adult guise who entrusted myself to my husband. With psychological maturity, I have slowly come out of the passive, powerless and dependent state of a baby. I no longer long for that kind of unconditional attention and love, I no longer idealize my husband, and therefore no longer have ideal requirements and expectations for him. Be able to recognize his limitations, accept that he also has a selfish and stingy side, and at the same time be able to see and believe in his own power. What this kind of change has brought about is that when faced with negation and rejection, the level of pain in my heart has been greatly reduced, or I will still be painful at the moment of being rejected, but I will soon be able to get rid of that painful and powerless state. Get free. I began to be able to realize that when I was rejected, it was not because I was bad or unworthy of love, but because there were various other possibilities, such as the limitations of the other person\’s ability, etc.
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