How A Messed Up Childhood Affects You In Adulthood

we are all of us beautifully crazy or to put it in gentler terms fascinatingly unbalanced our childhoods even the apparently benign ones leave us no option but to be anything else as a result of our childhoods we tend over most issues to list like a sailing yacht in high wind far too much in one direction or another we're too timid or too assertive too rigid or too accommodating too focused on material success or excessively lackadaisical we are obsessively eager around sex or painfully weary and nervous in the face of our own erotic impulses with dreamily naive or sourly down-to-earth we recoil from risk or embrace it recklessly we have emerged into adult life determined never to rely on anyone or as desperate for another to complete us we are overly intellectual or unduly resistant to ideas the encyclopedia of emotional imbalances is a volume more or less without end what is certain is that these imbalances come at a huge cost rendering us less able to exploit our talents and opportunities less able to lead satisfying lives and a great deal less fun to be around yet because we are reluctant historians of our emotional pasts we easily assume that these imbalances aren't things we could ever change they are fundamentally innate it's just how we were made we say we simply are in and of ourselves people who micromanage or can't get much pleasure out of sex scream a lot when someone contradicts us or run away from lovers who are too kind to us it may not be easy we concede but nor is it alterable or even up for inquiry but the truth is likely to be more hopeful though in the short term more challenging our imbalances are invariably responses to something that happened in the past we are a certain way now because we were knocked off a more fulfilling trajectory years ago by a primal wound perhaps in the face of a viciously competitive parent we took refuge in underachievement or having live a parent disgusted by the body sex became frightening or surrounded by material unreliability we had to overachieve around money and social prestige or hurt by a dismissive parent we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance a volatile parent may have pushed us towards our present meekness and inability to make a fuss early overprotectiveness may have inspired timidity and around any complex situation panic attacks there is always a logic and there is always a history we can tell that our imbalances date from the past because they reflect the way of thinking and instincts of the children we once were without anything pejorative being meant by this our way of being unbalanced tends towards a fundamental immaturity bearing the marks of what was once a young person's attempt to grapple with something utterly beyond their capacities for example when they suffer at the hands of an adult children almost invariably take what happens to them as a reflection of something that must be very wrong with them if someone humiliates ignores or hurts them it must so it seems because they are in and off themselves imbecilic repugnant worth neglecting it can take many years and a lot of patient inner exploration to reach an initially far less plausible conclusion that the hurt was essentially undeserved and that there were inevitably a lot of other things going on offstage in the raging adults interior life for which the child was entirely blameless similarly because children cannot easily leave an offending situation they are prey to powerful limitless longings to try to fix the broken person they so completely depend upon it becomes in the infantile imagination the child's responsibility to mend all the anger addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore it may be the work of decades to develop an adult power to feel sad about rather than eternally responsible for those we cannot change communication patterns can be beset by comparable childhood legacies when something is very wrong children have no innate capacity to explain their cause they lack the confidence poise and verbal dexterity to get their points across with a calm and authority required they tend to dramatic over reactions instead insisting nagging exploding screaming or else excessive under reactions sulking sullen silence and avoidance we may be well into middle-age before we can shed our first impulse is to explode out or flee from those who misunderstand our needs and more carefully and serenely try to explain them instead it's another feature of the emotional wounds of childhood that they tend to provoke Wood are in effect large-scale generalizations our wounds may have occurred in highly individual contexts with one particular adult who hid their particular partner late at night or the wound may have been caused by one specific parent who responded with intense contempt after a specific job loss from one specific factory but these events give rise to expectations of other people and of life more broadly we grow to expect that everyone will turn violent that every partner may turn on us and every money problem will unleash disaster the character traits and mentalities that were formed in response to one or two central actors of childhood become a habitual templates for interpreting pretty much anyone for example the always jokey and slightly manic way of being that we evolved so as to keep a depressed listless mother engaged becomes our second nature even when she is long gone we remain people who need to shine at every meeting who require a partner to be continually focused on us and who cannot listen to negative or dispiriting information of any kind we are living the wide open present through the narrow drama of the fast we suffer because we are at huge cost to loyal to the early difficult years we should where we can dare to leave home if you liked this film please subscribe to our channel and click the Bell icon to turn on notifications you

Channel: The School of Life

Views: 1,172,824

Rating: 4.9121733 out of 5

Keywords: the school of life, alain de botton, philosophy, wellness, psychology, school of life, childhood, adulthood, childhood trauma and brain development, developmental disorders, why we are the way we are, PL-SELF, कैसे खराब हो जाता है बचपन आपको वयस्कता में प्रभावित कर सकता है, Cómo la infancia puede afectarlo en la edad adulta, Wie Kindheit dich im Erwachsenenalter beeinflussen kann, Comment l'enfance peut vous affecter à l'âge adulte, Como a infância pode afetá-lo como adulto, 童年如何影响你作为一个成年人

Id: IgUlowmSeHo

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Prince_Kurry]

Holy fuck did anyone else relate hardcore to any of the random things he mentioned ?

I did like 3 times

[u/ninjia1]

i'm at work and watched this as a silent film, and had to hold my tears in. i can only imagine how much i will cry when i watch it with sound. i just relate so much. it sucks.

[u/tysons23]

I don't know about the rest of you guys but this video does make some good points (in a generalized way) about what troubled childhoods can do