Criticism when you've had a bad childhood

criticism is never easy to learn that others judges to be foolish perverse ugly or unpleasant is one of the most challenging aspects of any life however the impact of criticism is hugely variable and depends ultimately on a rather unexpected detail what sort of childhood we have had the clue as to whether criticism will be experienced as merely unpleasant or wholly catastrophic lies in what happened to us many decades ago in the hands of our earliest caregivers what is meant by a bad childhood is here a matter rather simply of love an infant arrives in the world with a very limited capacity to endure their own being it is the tolerance enthusiasm and forgiveness of another person that gradually acclimatize --is us to existence our caregivers characteristic way of looking at us becomes the way we consider ourselves it's by being loved by another that we acquire the art of looking sympathetically on our craft in troublesome beings it's simply not in our remit to believe in ourselves on our own we are utterly reliant on an inner sense of having been valued inordinately by another person at the start as a protection against the subsequent neglect of the world we don't need to be loved by many one will do and twelve years might be enough sixteen ideally but without it the eternal admiration of millions would ever be able to convince us of our goodness and with such a love the scorn of millions will ever need to be fatal bad childhoods have an unfortunate tendency to drive us to seek out situations in which there is a theoretical possibility of receiving outsized which also means along the way a high risk of encountering outsized disapproval the emotionally deprived return almost manically to the question never really settled of do I deserve to exist and this is why they typically put unusual efforts into attempts to be famous and visibly successful but of course the world at large will never give the emotionally nervous the unqualified confirmation they seek there will always be dissenters and critics people too bashed about by their own pasts to be able to be kind to others and it's too these voices that those with bad childhoods will be accused however enthusiastic the crowd as a whole might be we can observe along the way that the chief marker of being a good parent is that once child simply has zero interest in being liked by large numbers of strangers we don't all hear the same thing when we are criticised some of us the lucky ones hear just the surface message from the here and now for example that our work fell short of expectations that we must try harder with our assignments that our book film or song wasn't excellent this can be bearable but the more wounded among us if the farm criticism takes them straight back to the primordial injury an attack now becomes entwined with the attacks of the past and grows enormous and unmanageable in its intensity the boss or unfriendly colleague becomes the parent who let us down everything is pulled into question not only was the work subpar we are a wrench and undeserved being a piece of excrement the worst person in the world for that's how it will felt back then in a fragile defenseless infant mind knowing more about our tricky childhoods provides us with a vital line of defense against the effects of criticism it means that we can be on our guard when we are attacked against raising the stakes unnecessarily we can learn to separate out the verdict of today from the emotional verdict we are carrying around with us and always seeking to confirm with the use of current events we can learn that however sad the attacks we are facing they are as nothing next to the real tragedy and the effective cause of our sadness that things went wrong back then and so we can direct our attention to where it really belongs away from today's critics and towards the unconvinced parent of yesteryear we can forgive ourselves for being in this area through no fault of our own faithfully sensitive and in essence mentally unwell we cannot stop the attacks of the world but we can through an exploration of our histories change what they mean to us we can also importantly get a second chance we can go back and correct the original verdict of the world we can take measures to expose ourselves to the gaze of friends all more ideally of a talented psychotherapist who can hold up a more benign mirror and teach us a lesson that should have been gifted us from the start that like every human whatever our flaws we deserve to be here at the school of life we believe that confidence is a skill we can learn our confidence prompt cards are designed to help us master this mysterious art click now to learn more

Channel: The School of Life

Views: 1,411,943

Rating: 4.9505129 out of 5

Keywords: the school of life, alain de botton, self, improvement, big questions, love, wellness, mindfullness, psychology, schooloflife, mental health, how to, growing up, criticism, bad childhood, PL-TSOL, 当你有一个不好的童年时的批评, Crítica quando você teve uma infância ruim, Critique quand vous avez eu une mauvaise enfance, Kritik wenn Sie eine schlechte Kindheit hatten, Crítica cuando has tenido una mala infancia, आलोचना जब आपको बुरे बचपन पड़ा है

Id: BTzW1ol5vkc

Length: 5min 56sec (356 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/_kushagra]

Especially the iceberg of criticism scene

[u/[deleted]]

I dislike the blaming of the parents here in ALL CASES.

My parents were amazing. My anxiety and lack of self-confidence came from BULLIES.

It's really dangerous and highly irresponsible to blanket-statement that ALL cases of high self-criticism came from parents.

EDIT: Oh, it's School of Life. Par for the course, I guess.

[u/orean612]

I can relate

[u/linh5494]

I have had enough with The School of Life's bullshit pseudo-intellectualism.

[u/TacticalHog]

great vid, animation style and sounds really remind me of The Missing Scarf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxepnIG1yQQ