Читать книгу When You Think You're Not Enough - Daphne Rose Kingma - Страница 23

As we have seen, there are many events and experiences in your early childhood that combine to create your life theme. Your theme profoundly affects the way you feel about yourself. It also leads to the creation of a whole slew of behaviors you don't even realize you're developing. That's because one way or another, you start adjusting your behavior in response to your theme.

In psychological terms, this process is called compensation. Some children compensate for the fact that they're being treated imperfectly by trying to be better and better, by saying, in effect, I'll do everything my mother and father want—maybe that way they'll love me, maybe that way our life will improve. Now that Daddy's died, I'll take care of Mommy. If I'm really quiet, maybe Daddy will stop drinking. If I give them all my baby-sitting money, maybe we won't be so poor. If I do all the chores, maybe Mommy won't die of cancer. This is compensation in a positive direction. People who compensate in this way try to perfect their behavior in order to get loved, to resolve the painful issues that have contributed to their life theme.

But some children take another tack. They go along with the way they think their parents feel, and decide that their parents are right—they're not worth loving. In this kind of compensation, this child adopts a damaged and unloving view of himself. Instead of striving to gain parental approval, this child internalizes what he perceives to be his or her parents' view: They think I'm stupid, they're right, I'm not even going to try. That's right, there are too many children, I never should have been born. It's true, I'm not pretty, I'm a dog, I'll dye my hair green and mutilate my body. It's true, I do wreck everything they give me, I don't deserve a new bike. The problem with all this behavior, of course, is that it, too, is unloving. It often results in people giving up on themselves—acting out, becoming rebellious or self-destructive.

Whatever your form of adaptation, whether in a positive or a negative direction, instead of retaining the sense of yourself as whole and worthy of life and love, you have compensated for the fact that you were treated imperfectly. By trying to be better and better and better—or by giving up—you've learned very well how not to love yourself.

In this way your childhood, and especially your life theme, has set a pattern that can make it very difficult indeed for you to love yourself. But remarkably and wonderfully, this pattern can be changed. Let's see how.