An interesting perspective especially when we work on the family system, our inner child and family orders.
We are, in part, the result of an endless number of parental crosses that deposited in us their legacy, not only patrimonial. Most of the people who suffer some kind of emotional pain find the causes of it going back to the years of family coexistence or, as we now know, to codes inscribed in their family tree.
Culturally we have elevated the family to the paradigm of affective well-being, the basis of a country's sustenance and even as a sacrosanct divine commandment. Who is the handsome one who dares to question its value? And here appears the paradox: how to unravel its perversions when it is the absolute value of a society and the affective basis of a person? How to formalize the exit of a family that may be mistreating us, neurotizing us or drowning us, if the blood bond is for life? We cannot be against the family, but does it mean to justify it in everything?
As soon as we arrive in this world, we have the task of finding proximity to an adult with the capacity to care for and protect us. This is the origin of attachment. If there is no satisfactory response, we tend to develop a secondary strategy: either the attachment will be hyperactivated (demand for attention or what we popularly call being glued to the mother's skirts) or it will be deactivated (emotional inhibition). Thus an affective style is born, a way of loving and being loved. Simplifying it a lot, we will tend to be promoters of love or, on the contrary, affective beggars who will let ourselves be loved, or we will run away frightened for fear of losing ourselves in the other.
The security of the bond has another major function: it allows us to explore our environment. We see it every day, when those little ones show off their first steps. The degree of trust or distrust we have in life and others and our self-esteem will have a lot to do with the strength of that bond and its two conditions: that it be stable and lasting, based on affection and love. Of course, no one understands affection and love in the same way.
Now let's imagine parents who, out of fear and excessive control, keep that little person in a protective bubble. Instead of reinforcing their trust system, they are depositing huge amounts of future fears and phobias. Similarly, careless parents will subject their children to unnecessary dangers and stressful situations that can lead to trauma. Or those who, with the best of intentions, have showered their children with everything they wanted, when they wanted it. Many regret after having raised narcissistic little tyrants. How difficult to know what is most appropriate!
Mary Ainsworth, attachment researcher based on the theory incubated by John Bowlby, found the key: the sensitive response. It consists of the ability of parents or caregivers to understand and adequately interpret the infant's demand signals. This sensitivity is no small thing; it becomes a psychic organizer in the child's development, i.e., its emotional architecture (beliefs and expectations about itself and others). The sensitive response obeys the operative models of the parents, which in turn depend on the quality of their own affective history. Many end up doing to their children what they did to them, thus anchoring moral values that are already expressed in the first three years of life.
There is great agreement in highlighting the importance of our first years of life: the master walls of our psychic structure are built. They will condition us, undoubtedly, but they will not determine us. As Punset likes to say, we come into the world with a certain collection of switches and then life takes care of activating some of them and leaving others in oblivion.
In a family there may be this sensitive response or it may also be conditioned by multiple factors: the existence of other siblings, the place occupied among them, or being an only child, or the fit between work and family, fashions, relationships at school, an economic crisis that prioritizes survival. It is not a question of blaming anyone, but of understanding the sensitive construction of each relationship.
The emotional architecture, developed in the attachment stage, will have other tests: the search for one's own identity, the sense of self-efficacy and the development of innate skills and talents. This gives rise to multiple misunderstandings, projections of one's own parents and blackmail that stifle personal growth. Instead of being supportive, of being an affective safety net, the family then becomes a nightmare, in the always frustrating and angry combination between love and hate, between rejection and thirst for belonging, between abandonment and affective need. Perhaps that is why Simone de Beauvoir exclaimed that the family is a nest of perversions.
Depending on the relational dynamics of its members, the family can grow or be destroyed. It can have peace and balance, war, resentment, laziness, joy, sweetness. It can be paradise or hell. It may be a loving bond, or it may be limited to managing interests. We all walk between these extremes, proclaiming a belief that has already become universal: the family is the family. In its bosom everything happens, although not everything should be justified.
Now that many people are returning home, it is a good opportunity to mend broken, wounded or abandoned ties, if there are any. If it only serves to pay debts, provide food and a place to sleep, we forget that its function is, above all, to create bonds of affection and not to suffocate them. The family is our first community of welcome, and no one forces us to love it if there has been no love. Then comes the chosen family. It is there that the sensitive response begins to be forged.
The country. 21.04.2013
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