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Intimate, lifelong relationships are the finishing school for the emotional development of men and women. A person cannot deal with what they have hidden from their view. Families just naturally create blind spots, self-deceptive narratives, closets and cupboards everyone in the family knows are not safe to address. From a child's earliest years, they learn where the minefields are and either tiptoe around them or deny their existence all together. For the individual, what has been vigorously hidden will remain hidden unless their experience introduces a revealing dynamic in the person of a very significant other. Living with another in a Loving relationship will eventually expose whatever familial dysfunction has been hidden, providing the individual an opportunity to deal with and escape the emotional straightjacket specifically tailored for them during their developing years. Far too often, though, the messenger is given responsibility and held culpable for the message, and relationships fall apart. An infant-child’s attachment experience is so powerful a force, grown-ups will accept a distorted reality to achieve relative stability, a familiar and safe status quo. Sadly, true Adulthood is what these individual's sacrifice so as to pay for this false security. For this reason, our paths are littered with the remains of innocent messengers and crying children.
It is worth noting, what is self-compromising for an adult is not self-compromising for a child; at least not in the same manner. In both instances, the compromising behavior indicates unwholesome experience. In both instances, the compromising behavior indicates a plea for help. For the child, however, the behavior indicates a physically helpless person attempting to protect themselves or cope in any manner available to them. The child is not able to defend themselves physically nor are they able to deal with the situation rationally. When a child exhibits a self-compromising behavior, it is in response to behaviors which represent deficits in their caregiver’s experience; deficits which the caregiver has built an artificial reality around as a means of protecting themselves from their painful childhood experience. Being either blind to their own flawed emotional experience, or simply being trapped in their own emotional morass, all too often, when a child behaves in a self-compromising manner, the caregiver is unable to recognize the child’s behavior as a plea for help and punishes the child; which is likely the manner in which their caregivers responded to their childhood self-compromising behaviors. Unless understood and addressed, these patterns of behavior are self-perpetuating.
When a child, misbehaves, they are not being bad; they are not being naughty; they are not trying to cause trouble; they are pleading for help, the only way nature allows them to. They are begging to be heard. If they are punished, they are caused to reject themselves, which only complicates things. If their self-compromising behavior is subjected to behavior modification plans, the wires are snipped; their emotions are suppressed; their mouths are stuffed with rags; the root of the child’s pain is allowed to live and blossom some other day, which only complicates things and explains why there are so many grown-up-children raising children today. No guilt need be felt, though. All previous experience has mathematically determined it should be this way. The question is: How should it look tomorrow? Understanding resulting from knowledge can make the difference.
