Читать книгу Super Confidence: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence - Gael Lindenfield, Gael Lindenfield - Страница 13

If we look back we will begin to understand.

Some people may need to take longer than others to find the clues. For example, some parents are sophisticated enough to know the ‘right’ way to bring children up and this may seem very praiseworthy on the surface. But then children can feel doubly guilty for not being confident and successful.

Hunting for the double messages, the hidden jealousies, and disguised ‘put-downs’ may be time-consuming, but it is important because it helps us to accept that our lack of confidence is not an integral part of us – it is a learned response. It was learned when we were powerless and were right to feel threatened.

A guilty conscience is the mother of invention. Carolyn Wells

The kind of family we grew up in is perhaps the most important factor of all. Virginia Satir, a world renowned therapist, writes:

I am convinced that there are no genes to carry the feeling of worth. It is learned. And the family is where it is learned . . . an infant coming into the world has no past, no experience in handling himself, no scale on which to judge his own worth. He must rely on the experiences he has with the people around him and the messages they give him about his worth as a person.

We do not need a perfect environment to give us a healthy confidence in ourselves but we do need a ‘good-enough’ one. D W Winnicott, an excellent and well-known psychoanalyst, wrote:

A good enough environment can be said to be that which facilitates the various individual inherited tendencies . . . it requires a high degree of adaptation to individual infant needs.