First and foremost…..
… to those who celebrate it!
I hope you get to cosy-in, snuggle up and enjoy some hazy hibernation!
And now to another blog post… It’s accidentally quite ‘heavy’. I promise to lighten up at times a tad in 2025!
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It seems quite an established idea that our childhood lays some quite important foundations relating to our long-term self-worth and sense of agency. The ‘quality’ of the attention we received as a baby (and child) is commonly linked to how well we cope with and fully embrace all life has to offer – certainly initially. It’s also agreed that much of this foundation was laid before that which we can remember. So even those of us who believe our childhood was close to perfect, might still have residual coping strategies and behavioural patterns that expertly helped us to survive our childhood, but that do not serve us so well, and can often limit us, in adulthood.
Obviously, there is no such thing as ‘perfect parenting’ but in the frequent absence of any proffered guidance on matters relating to emotions and behaviour, most of us obviously just ‘do our best’. ‘Our best,’ we are told, is usually ‘good enough’. However, I have observed in recent decades that for some, there’s a lot of guilt involved in parenting. This is possibly because we are often left with a sense that we could be doing better at this very important job, without knowing exactly what that ‘better’ is. That said, I do think there is a simple approach that can work towards helping children burst forth into life so they are more likely to thrive, and therefore diminish our guilt, and, surprise, surprise, it’s all about noticing and validating our children’s emotions!
If a child receives attention that validates and shows understanding for how they feel, it’s a simple ‘tool’ that leaves them feeling truly heard, seen, understood and accepted fully as they are. In the case of distressing emotions, the attentive empathy of their significant adults will also help soothe them (and it makes it more likely that they eventually learn how to effectively and healthily soothe themselves).
If the adults in their lives can calmly accept the full range of their child’s emotions without judgement, that full range remains available to the child without complication. They won’t try to suppress sadness and unrealistically strive to always appear cheerful; they won’t put on a brave face and struggle on when they feel really vulnerable and isolated; they won’t feel guilty for feeling angry and they won’t limit the number of emotions they feel they can acceptably express. In other words, their emotions won’t become distorted with a layer of secondary baggage; their emotions will just arrive, be experienced and leave.
This straightforwardness allows the child, and the adult they eventually become, to be free to act authentically, express their needs, wishes and desires and to be able to maintain boundaries without feeling discomfort. They still experience emotions of course, but there are fewer aftershocks, episodes of over-thinking, moments of limiting self-doubt, fewer negative anticipations about how others will respond to them, and less lingering anxiety as situations are navigated with fewer internal complications. They are more likely to plainly trust that their emotions are giving them a simple message, acknowledge and accept their relevance and decide how to respond.
In contrast, when some of our emotions were received with disapproval, we usually started to deny or distort them to maintain the presentation of our emotional selves that gained parental approval. This can leave us doubting our right to feel certain emotions, mean we can bottle things up, make us deflect our experiences of emotions by blaming others for them or leave us with extra layers of agitation and confusion to plough through in situations where emotions have been triggered. Straightforward situations can become complicated by the internal programming about the unacceptability of some emotions our childhood gave us.
Some children whose emotions are never acknowledged or validated are likely to be left (to a greater or lesser extent) with an insatiable neediness. The tendencies they can have, link to never feeling truly seen, heard, understood or soothed as well as being confused about their emotions and how to process them. They might carry around a strong sense of injustice, be anxious in all situations that are anything less than totally harmonious or within their comfort-zone, be prone to anticipating problems with other’s acceptance of them, expect to be misunderstood, anticipate being rejected or hurt more than they actually will and/or assume others will never understand or take their needs into consideration. This can’t help but have a negative impact on them (and often their interactions).
I have also noticed a link between emotional neediness and the tendency of some to always be ‘in a drama’. I have a suspicion that those who seem to go from one drama to the next are not actually unluckier than most, but are thrashing about, in a desperate, repeated and unconscious attempt to get emotional needs met. In a drama a person might typically try urgently to get others ‘onside’, they will complain repetitively about the injustices to anyone who will listen, they might wield intense and/or exaggerated emotions about (sometimes provoking others), they might shout or they might scream! These seem like the (albeit clumsy) behaviours of someone who is hoping to be heard, to have understanding, to be accepted etc. Yet these behaviours can push people away and so their needs remain unmet while they continuously, and often unconsciously, look to others to meet them through creating a stir.
There is, of course another response to our emotional needs being frequently unmet and that is to become avoidant. The avoidant adult had a babyhood where their emotional cries for connection were consistently not met and so the child ‘gave up’ trying. How else to survive (and possibly gain some approval) other than to shut down and deny those needy parts?
There’s much written about avoidant adults but my observations are that while ‘shutting down’ helped someone survive feeling vulnerable and experiencing uncomfortable emotions without support in childhood, it can leave adults so detached from their suppressed emotions, their ability to understand themselves fully is a more difficult journey. It can also make someone seem distant, might lead to a tendency to have bottled up emotions periodically ‘explode’ and they can struggle to acknowledge and manage conflict with a true understanding of what’s going on- amongst other things. It could be argued that the limited emotional repertoire an avoidant adult ends up with, denies them a ‘chunk’ of themselves and the capacity to fully connect with others.
Talking to parents and carers, I’ve realised that although it is easier and ideal to start this ‘acceptance of all emotions’ from an early age, it’s never too late. It has been reported to me a few times that a change of tack towards accepting the full range of their child’s feelings has a beneficial knock-on effect to their behaviour.
Adult attention that is fully accepting or unconditional positive regard (UPR)), that allows a child to express all their emotions without judgement, leads ultimately to healthier self-worth. It’s not always easy, and requires the development of your own self-awareness and regulation as a parent but the benefits are a child who will grow to become able to process their own emotions straightforwardly and as a result be far more likely to thrive. (And I will add that UPR does not mean we don’t help children understand which behaviours are helpful and unhelpful!)
So in reflecting back on the title of this post. I think it’s a rare childhood means a child feels fully seen, heard, understood and fully accepted. We don’t necessarily need all of those to do well in life, but I think they set us up with an optimum start. Nobody is to blame for ‘less than perfect’ parenting as everyone does indeed do their best with what they know and what they have the capacity to give. But the simple tool of validating emotions can go a long way for both children, and adults…
P.S. It was after studying person-centred approaches that I realised that person-centred counselling is almost like re-parenting someone in a positive way. The full acceptance a person feels from the approaches in therapy, can diminish a person’s need to present the inauthentic façade that they have held on to because it’s what they were unconsciously taught would get approval! This can eventually free them to trust their emotions, and any other ‘input’ come to that, without complications.