Personal ResponsibilityI am a healing therapist and like many therapists we are having to deal with adult problems caused by the innocent or malicious actions of parents.
Take the lady who was afraid of the dark, a typical phobia. It all went back to a caring remark by her father when she was a little girl. Holding fathers hand and walking in the dark he lovingly said to his nervous little girl ‘no need to be afraid of the dark’. The immediate thought that went through her mind was ‘then there must be something to be afraid of’ and when past the age of puberty, when the sub-conscious begins to prevent a repeat of childhood trauma, the phobia reaction set in, to be afraid of the dark.
Then there are the malicious situations when parents deliberately say or do things to train the child into a belief system that suits the adults thinking.
This time a lady who has no trust in people, especially men. There can be many reasons why such a phobia begins but a typical one is where the parents have divorced and the mother has been left alone with a little girl to care for. All mothers love goes into her little girl but also does her hate and anger for the man who treated her so badly. The little girl sees mother crying and mother repeatedly tells her, never trust a man. The result is obvious, an adult who has relationship problems because of mother’s experience. an inability to trust.
The point I am making is that we are all a product of some other adult’s words or actions when we were little. Attitudes, fears, panics even pains are often caused knowingly and unknowingly by the adults into whose trust we were born. Of course our problems can be caused by adults outside the family circle. The possibilities for wrongly programming the mind of the potential adult are overwhelming. I believe there is not an adult alive who is totally free to live their life without some thought or action that was planted in their childhood thoughts.
We are all programmed by the adults around us in the pre puberty years; we then spend the rest of our lives trying to undo the program so that our real self can express itself. Even the very best of parents sometimes say or do the wrong thing at the wrong moment. Then when the child becomes an adult and realize that they are not who they want to be or have emotional problems caused by parenting they immediately blame the parent or whoever is responsible, for the character fault.
But this is an excuse, except in the more serious cases of child abuse which I am not including here. It is so easy to say, my mother, father, caused this anger, this dislike of men and so on. We too easily forget that we chose our parents, they did not choose us. The parent got the child they were given and the child knew, in most cases, exactly what that early life was going to be like. It is as we chose the parent who would create the problems in our adult thinking so we can grow by undoing the training. I am mainly referring to character faults, no one is free of them, and there comes a time when we have to take a good look at ourselves and say,’ I can no longer blame my parents for acting like this, ‘I’ must somehow change what I don’t like in myself.’ The therapist can help find the cause of what you want to change but they cannot make the change for you and it never helps to blame your parents for who you are. We can never know what made the parent act the way they did, we don’t know what happened in their childhood. All we can do is say ‘now I know the problem I must do something about it. I don’t like myself the way I am so I must change it.’ No one else is going to do it for us. It does not matter what the problem is, the only person who can make the change is the one with the problem.
Everyone is on a personal path of growth. We are here to create our own personality, to grow spiritually. This applies to everyone, no one, no matter what their status in life, can say they are perfect. To only look at the good in ourselves or listen to the nice things people say about us is wasting precious time. Life is limited and we need to use it to improve those areas in need of improvement and not bathe in the light of our achievements. Neither should we be concerned about the faults of others. It is all too easy to avoid our own faults by searching for them in others.
We build who we become through a succession of lives and we only achieve who we want to become if we accept personal responsibility for change and don’t blame others for who we are.
Malcolm S. Southwood
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