Tinaye Agere
Mertha Mo Nyamande
GROWING up is hard, especially when the adults have a limited understanding of the stages that need to be satisfied to have a healthy and secure individual with a strong sense of self.
This also makes parenting equally hard.
When we see a lot of teenagers struggling with self-esteem issues, this is a telling sign that there has been less than good enough parenting. However, this is not to ascribe blame to the parents because they would have done the best they could under the circumstances.
Often, they would have simply rewritten the book their own parents read to them as gospel, essentially copied and pasted.
As children are growing up, everything you expose them to is normalised, and that is what they will hold on to and value, especially if it is routinely habituated.
So, if you are violent, harsh and rigid to them, they will internalise that as normal. As painful as that might be for them initially, they will quickly get used to it or find ways to cope with it.
In the early years, children just absorb everything given to them. They are like little sponges that sap up anything that comes their way. This happens until they are about three years old, when they feel the need to start organising all this data that has been gathering in their minds over the few years.
They will start posing the question “why” on almost everything you ask of them. Parents or guardians may feel they are just being naughty or stubborn, but they genuinely want to know so that they organise all that information in ways that will make it easy for them to access later if needed.
This is how some of the information is discarded and forgotten, while some is engraved in their psyches.
This happens for about three years, but gets more and more subtle with time.
By the time they turn six, they would have mostly completed sorting all the information they had stored, and this forms what is known as the core schemas. These are the ways we have learnt that if something like this happens, this is how my mum, dad, sister, brother or my friends would respond.
Essentially, we expose ourselves to situations that validate what we hold in our minds to be true. Thus, if a certain child was allowed to express themselves and speak freely, ask questions and afforded quality time to respond to questions, they will feel valued and likely to value themselves and those around them. The reverse is also true.
What we seek is often what we find, even when we are not conscious that this is what we are looking for.
The world is full of all sorts of things, but those we seek are the ones that we attract. The natural law of attraction would be at play here.
When we go out to look for a piece of wire, it does not mean we do not see stones, grass, soil and so on before we eventually find the wire. This is also true of how our minds and choices work.
If we believe people are bad, we tend to ignore all the good they do until they do bad, then we feel validated in what we initially thought of them. It is important that we are conscious of the things we seek so that we are clear those are really the ones we want to end up with.
Most people end up with difficult relationships, jobs and neighbourhoods, among other things, because it is what they attract.
Things that we attract often mean something fundamental to us. They may be a source of pain, but there is a reason we seek them — as a way of conquering them so that we can achieve a sense of joy and strength. The problem with most people is that whenever they face those fears, they run away and hide, unaware that the more we avoid them, the longer they will pursue us until we eventually address them.
Most of these difficulties would have become engrained because when they initially happened, we did not have the resources, the language, strength or skills to deal with them. So, we park them until we grow older and stronger to deal with the issues.
But often, when we are older, we would have become too scared to revisit the challenges, so we prefer to just pretend they are not there or that they will just go away on their own.
Mainly, it goes back to the schemas — whether we learnt to confront or avoid things.
Nothing ever goes away until we take the courage to process it. Even when we die, those issues do not disappear. They are passed on to those alive to deal with.
Mertha Mo Nyamande is a psychotherapist. He can be contacted on: [email protected] or @ www.i-wellbeing.weebly.com
Online Reporter