(((seesaw)))


All of this? This is reflecting your own personal struggle when it came to your trying very hard to find a structured personal pathway in your mind where you felt safe in having your "own" identity. We are all very dependent when it comes to being exposed to a presence that nurtures each of us to slowly make gains on being allowed to develop our own personal identity. The way you are treated by others is a reflection of what others know and what they don't know and what their unmet needs are. Unfortunately, when we are young we don't understand this about others and this makes us very vulnerable and this is when a lot of these symptoms begin to take shape in each of us.

I spent years teaching very young children and I most definitely learned a lot from working with all different children. One child in particular really puzzled me and this child would pay attention for a few minutes and then state that she needed to rest a bit before she could do more. I taught very young children beginning at age 4 how to ride my ponies. This little girl would act out being tired and would ask to rest and I watched her sit there for a certain length of time and then state it was ok to do some more. This little girl talked about how some day she would have her own pony to ride and I began to tell her that the only way she would get that is if made it a point to pay attention and learn more and learn how to keep engaging even if she felt she needed this "rest" she kept asking for. Well, this was a challenge for me to break and oddly enough a challenge for this little girl too. After a while I finally found out how this "need" developed in this little girl, a need her own mother failed to see and tended to describe this little girl as not very athletic which was not the problem. Instead when this little girl was much younger her mother found out she had breast cancer and had to go through treatment and with that this girl's mother would engage her for a little while but then say to this little girl, "ok, mommy needs to rest now for a while". That is what this little girl was showing me she had learned to do herself and the mother had no idea she was teaching this to her little girl either.

I have watched mothers turn around to a crying baby and literally say to that "baby", grrr, sigh, rolling eyes and say " not today because mommy is not in the mood today for this so gimme a break already". So basically this mother is engaging this little baby as if this baby can actually understand what she is saying like an adult would.

The worst flashback I experienced that was extremely painful for me and scared me the most was of me being in my crib crying and crying and shivering badly and my stomach was in horrific pain. I would relive that pain in my stomach where it was so bad I felt my stomach was going to explode or something. I was so lucky that not only did I have a therapist that could talk me through that flashback with his calm and caring gentle voice, but that he talked about how babies wake up wet, cold, and hungry and that they experience so much stomach pain that it makes them cry out. That helped me think about this experience in way where I did remember how my mother had two other small children and that I probably woke up cold, wet, and extremely hungry and I had to wait with these stomach pains until she finally came to me and made these problems go away. I have a feeling I experienced this challenge more than once too.

However, one of the things I NEVER let happen with my own baby was to let her experience being hungry where she was left to cry. It really bothered me and it was not until I struggled with this flashback that I realized this. So, it's important to realize just how early in life we are learning and needing and how our own life experience from such a young age is stored before we even realize it. Actually we are all basically living computers and we begin filling our data base at a very young age. This includes the foods we eat that provide us with a sense of nourishment and help us feel good.

Here is an example of that too, my mother grew up and lived through the depression and the one thing she grew to feel "full" and comforted by in terms of food was "potatoes" that were prepared in different ways. The other thing that she grew to understand as VERY SPECIAL was when she got to have "meat" and often that meant ground beef in a stew with "potatoes". Her favorite food throughout her life remained "hamburg and potatoes". My father always picked on her for wanting this and considering this meal so special, he even tried to make her "feel" guilty about it too. Yet, if you really think about it, he was making fun of her and making her feel bad for something that really became deeply important to her and provided her with something that really did bring her a deep sense of comfort. What he did was "disrespect" this about her instead of respecting what this really meant to her as a human being. This is how a human being can hurt another human being without realizing how they are hurting this other human being.

I believe you, it's happened to me too. There is often little you can do to change that other person, but you can learn to understand how that other person is practicing this kind of behavior because that other person is missing something and all they learned to do is develop a behavior that is toxic so they at least feel "heard" in some way.