How To Make Friends With Your Inner Child And Become More Confident - Self-development

Every person needs a place where they feel secure and confident. Everyone is looking for a space where they can relax and be themselves. Ideally, such a place should be the parental home. If we felt loved by our parents, if they accepted us as we are, we had a “warm” family. But what if the memories of childhood do not warm, but traumatize?

Focuses of Primary Trust

We transform the childish feeling - to be accepted and loved - into the fundamental life attitude that accompanies us in adulthood: we feel safe in the world around us. We have confidence in ourselves, and therefore trust in other people. In this case, they talk about primary trust.

Primary trust is a home within us because it gives us inner support and protection

However, many people associate unpleasant memories, sometimes even traumatic ones, with their childhood. Some had unhappy early years, the memories of which they tried to erase from memory.

Others, on the contrary, insist that their childhood was "normal" or even "happy", but upon closer examination it becomes obvious that their position is nothing more than self-deception.

Be that as it may, if a person has displaced a childhood negative experience from his memory or, as an adult, tries to diminish the significance of those impressions, his primary trust is not clearly expressed.

Such people have problems with self-esteem, they constantly doubt whether their partner, boss, friends need them, whether they are pleasant to them. This is because they do not really love themselves, feel insecure and often have difficulty in interpersonal communication

Primary trust cannot be developed artificially, and this, in turn, becomes the reason for the lack of an inner core. Instead, they want to receive a sense of security and safety from others. Other people should become their home for them: colleagues, partners, acquaintances, or even just cashiers in a supermarket. And they get disappointed again and again if their expectations are not met. They do not notice that they are trapped - who does not have a home inside, he cannot find it in the outside world.

How childhood experiences create difficulties for adults

When we talk about the manifestations of childhood experiences, which, along with genetic characteristics, determine our essence and self-esteem, we are talking about a part of the personality that is defined in psychology as an "inner child". The inner child is, in a way, the sum of our childhood experiences, both good and bad, that we learned through our parents and other close people.

Most of these memories are in the unconscious area. Therefore, it can be argued that the inner child is an essential part of the unconscious. These are our fears, needs and experiences that we experienced as children. But these are all positive impressions from the past too.

And yet, in the first place, negative manifestations of childhood experiences create difficulties in adulthood. Because the child in us tries to do everything possible so that the insults and traumas inflicted on him in childhood do not happen again in his life

On a conscious level, we think of ourselves as independent adults in control of our lives. However, on an unconscious level, our inner child has a rather tangible influence on the worldview, feelings, thoughts and actions. Sometimes even much more than reason. It has been scientifically proven that the subconscious mind is a powerful mental apparatus that controls 80-90 percent of our actions and experiences.

Even those people who in childhood mostly felt happy and formed primary trust, are not devoid of life's difficulties and problems. And their inner child experienced certain traumas, because ideal parents and childhood do not exist in principle.

Along with positive impressions, even relatively happy children adopt various negative experiences of their parents, which can later become the cause of life problems. They can live according to the principle: "Better a bird in the hand than a pie in the sky."

In any case, negative manifestations from childhood impose restrictions on our development and can interfere with relationships with people around us

Ultimately, for each of us, the statement will be true: only when we get to know better and make friends with our inner child, we will be able to find out what trauma and experiences we have in ourselves.

Models of our personality

In our superficial consciousness, personal problems sometimes seem unclear and difficult to solve. We also sometimes find it difficult to understand the actions and feelings of others. We cannot properly understand either ourselves or the people around us. At the same time, the human psyche is by no means so complicated. Simply put, the structure of the personality is divided into several parts. So, in us there are child and adult manifestations of personality, as well as the conscious and unconscious levels of the psyche. Knowing the structure of the personality, you can work with it consciously and solve many problems that previously seemed insoluble.

Knowing the structure of the personality, you can work with it consciously and solve many problems that previously seemed insoluble

The “inner child” is a metaphor for the unconscious parts of our personality that bear the imprint of childhood. Feelings are subordinated to the inner child: fear, pain, sadness, rage, joy, happiness and love. Thus, along with the positive component, this part of our psyche has negative and sad sides.

Together with the inner child, there is an adult self, the so-called “inner adult”. This mental structure includes everything rational and reasonable, that is, our thinking. In the adult self mode, we can take responsibility, plan our actions, act prudently, weigh the risks and, of course, regulate the manifestations of the child self. The adult self acts consciously and deliberately.

Sigmund Freud, by the way, was the first to single out different parts of the personality structure. The Adult I was simply called “I” by Freud. In addition, he singled out the so-called "Super-I". The latter is a kind of moral structure within us, which in modern psychology is called the parental "I" or "inner critic". When the “inner critic” speaks in us, we often think: “Don't play the fool! You are nothing and you can do nothing! You will never do that!"

New therapeutic approaches, one of which is schematic (schematic) therapy, subdivide these three main structures of the child, adult and parent "I" into additional parts, such as "traumatized inner child", "joyful inner child", "angry inner child". "Punishing" and "benevolent" parental "I". The famous Hamburg psychologist Schulz von Thun developed a number of subpersonalities that live inside a person and coined the term "inner team".

How loved ones shape our beliefs

Our subconscious attitudes have a great influence on this. In psychology, an attitude is understood as a deeply rooted belief, which is expressed in relation to oneself or in interpersonal relationships.

Many beliefs arise in the first years of life during the interaction of the child and loved ones. It may sound, for example, like this: "I'm done!", Or vice versa: "Something is wrong with me!" As a rule, throughout childhood and later life, we learn both positive and negative attitudes. Positive ones like “I’m done well” appeared in situations where we felt that we were loved by our loved ones and accepted for who we are. Attitudes like these make us stronger. On the contrary, negative beliefs such as “Something is wrong with me” arose in situations where we felt rejected and unrecognized. They make us weaker.

Recent neurobiological studies have shown that children who experience severe stress in the first years of life, for example, in the form of indifferent treatment to them, have increased levels of stress hormones throughout their life

And this makes adults vulnerable to life's troubles of various scales: they react more strongly and sharply to stressors and therefore mentally less resilient than people who more often experienced a sense of confidence and security in childhood.

Of course, the subsequent years of personality development are of great importance and leave their imprints. And, of course, besides parents, other people appear who can influence us: grandparents, teachers and classmates. But I would like to limit myself in this book only to the influence of parents or other main close people on the formation of personality, because otherwise the book will become very voluminous.

Our conscious part of the mind is not able to preserve the first two years of life in the memory of the adult I, even though they leave their traces in the subconscious. Most people remember themselves from the age when they went to kindergarten or later. From that time on, we consciously remember how mom and dad treated us and what our attitude was towards them.

Why Self-Knowledge Can Help Solve Problems

Reflection and analysis are the favorite words of psychologists, and for good reason. A reflexive person has good access to his inner motives, feelings and thoughts and can find their psychological relationships with actions. Since he takes into account his dark sides, he can consciously manage them.

For example, he may notice in time that the lack of sympathy for a colleague is less due to his unpleasant qualities and is more likely due to envy of his success. Once a person admits this to himself, he is likely to come to the conclusion that it would be unfair to harm a colleague. He has a good chance of maintaining good relationships at work and managing his envy from the inside.

It is through understanding this feeling that he can find a positive way out of this situation. Perhaps by focusing on your accomplishments and other reasons to be grateful. If this person did not acknowledge the fact that the other’s successes hurt his own ego, then he would unconsciously seek to belittle the more successful colleague in the eyes of others.

This small example shows that it is important not only to find a solution to your problems, but also to behave consciously in society. Self-knowledge and reflection are not only important for an individual, but also of social value

This, first of all, concerns such feelings as powerlessness and failure. If left unanalyzed, they can degenerate into an exaggerated desire for power and recognition. In some situations, due to lack of introspection, politicians may display a lust for power that can destroy entire nations.

Therefore, my intention is to prove to readers that self-knowledge is not only the shortest way to get rid of personal problems, but also a great opportunity to become better.

Self-knowledge is not only the shortest way to get rid of personal problems, but also a great opportunity to become better

Read more: Stefanie Stahl. The child in you must find a home. The key to solving (almost) all problems. Moscow: Bombora, 2019.