Читать книгу When You Think You're Not Enough - Daphne Rose Kingma - Страница 14

Everybody has a life theme, a significant psychological issue which they are working out in this life. Your life theme is created when a powerful emotional chord is struck in your childhood, and it is reinforced when similar events—events which carry the same emotional charge— reoccur throughout your life.

If, as an infant, you were left out screaming on the porch because your mother thought you'd grow up spoiled if you got attention every time you wanted it, you very likely experienced feelings of abandonment you couldn't put into words. It may have been years—many experiences or many relationships later—before you realized how deeply affected you were. But fast-forward a few years, when your boyfriend takes his third business trip in a month and then forgets your birthday and you “suddenly” feel like screaming because you feel so abandoned. When this happens, you are experiencing your life theme—abandonment—at work.

Your particular life theme may stem from the configuration of your family, the particular characteristics and limitations of your parents, the emotional dynamics between you and your siblings, or other circumstances of your life. But no matter what your theme, it will profoundly affect your sense of your own value and your capacity to love yourself.

Although each of us has our own personal variation, life themes fall into six broad categories, and generally, a single theme is most significant to your development. The major life themes are:

 Neglect

 Abandonment

 Abuse

 Rejection

 Emotional Suffocation

 Deprivation

Each of these themes has a powerful effect on how you feel about yourself. In childhood, as we have seen, it was the reason you thought you didn't deserve to be loved; in adulthood, it becomes the basis for your inability to love yourself.

Just as a life theme evolves over time, your sense of your own value is also incrementally created. Abuse by abuse, disappointment by disappointment, you create a self-concept based on your life theme and in time you will confirm your life theme by doing to yourself as an adult exactly the thing that was done to you as a child.