The Unconscious Mind of Children
Why we shouldn't hit our children.
Smacking a child, or verbally abusing a child, begins a foundation for their personality and characteristics, with no connection to their already pre-determined genomes. The essential human need is for acceptance. The greatest human fear is that of rejection.
Without conscious choice, subliminal beliefs have been scripted in most of us as a result of what is said to be the no don’t syndrome, the response will be to find ways to avoid rejection.
The primitive brain stem is the oldest relation on the block, this primitive part responds to the fight-flight or freeze stimuli automatically via the function of the thalamus, and the autonomic nervous system. The mammalian brain is not evenly adaptable across all circuits, instead, it has a hierarchy of fluidity in which the most ancient parts of the brain, the bits we share with fish and reptiles, forms a working core that evolution cannot tamper with too much?
The cortex is self-organising in response to childhood experiences, rather than genetically designed, so it has many advantages, it has been said it was really the only way of explaining the pain in the first place. For humans the plasticity of the cortex has extra implications it means that the brain must be far more sensitive to environmental and cultural influences than traditionally assumed, it is synthetic stimuli we respond too most now, the result, anxiety, fear, sadness, grief, loss, dysphoria. The modern world “Stress” comes from the old French from the Latin strugere “to draw tight”.
Think of a young baby, toddler and child’s inner mental and emotional stores, if they suffer punishment in their developmental years by a mother father, nursery teacher, school teachers or peers. The infant or child being without logic or reason interprets this painful separation emotionally as rejection.
Many cases of naughty behaviour or sickness goes unnoticed or is punished more, by emotionally immature adults. It can grow into initiating the basic personality conflict of separation versus attachment, and if it’s painful emotion there can be a need to attach intensely in later years into a mother or symbolic representation of her, for example, agoraphobia representing home, food, (Bulimia) cigarettes, alcohol and other such oral comforts. (addiction). Our early developmental years affects Nurture and our view of the world.
Our initiative and response are built upon a perception of others and our need for acceptance and understanding. Thus, behaviour is purely conditional - response learning. In most instances’ choice is only an illusion. Only limited choices exist, and those choices result from the patterns of our conditioning. Most of us have acquired this programming in much the same way as we acquired a basic language.
So, without choice children can become a victim, we know about psychosomatic symptoms the hidden and unexplained illnesses. Rejection leads to feelings of hostility for feeling rejected. Guilt for having hostile feelings especially towards there father or mother, it can also lead to mistrust of love and the feel of rejection again. It can be a sensitivity to criticism, and the need to please and the basic feeling of inadequacy leads to feelings of fear of failure, and perfectionism to then overcome inadequacy. So, we must remember that this can continue into adult life that psychological separation versus separation/ rejection a wound that bleeds.
A young child has not lived long enough to understand what is wrong. Take a four-year-old young girl starting to feel really frightened as a dreadful feeling sweeps over her. It came with a heavy sick pukey sensation in her throat, her stomach becoming sore and heavy and I need a powerful need to be held close and loved. Her Psychosomatic symptoms continued to grow, well into her teenage life, silent asthma lumps in her throat as though she had swallowed chewing gum that had stuck there, then the worst, agoraphobia fear of outside space, and claustrophobia the fear of being enclosed. And then the worst, panic attacks, all this from adults under pressure who took their anger out by smacking the child, under stress and ill-health, adults who themselves were experiencing distress and mental health issues five years of torment after the Second World War.
As a behavioural scientist, psychotherapist there has been many sessions of teaching people to have the ability to tolerate situation rejection, to grow and develop parts of which have been missed. Emotional maturity, or strong mature person, is the change that is necessary, unfortunately not everyone gets the opportunity to mend and repair that broken part within the unconscious mind.
Christine Retson Hogg, Psychotherapy Practitioner trained in 1985 with the National College of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy. Founder member of the United Kingdom Standing Conference for Psychotherapy, in 1989 she became one of the first members. She graduated from Glasgow University in 1996 where she studied philosophy. In 1991 she trained at the Brooke Hospital London in Sophrology, now known by some as a form of Mindfulness. As a West of Scotland Ethics Committee member trained in NHS Good Clinical Practice she sat on the board from 2003 -2013
She published a book about her own childhood trauma, her own story paints a picture of the distress that the child picked up from her parents’ generation after the second world war, possibly today it would identify as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). The consequence of this was the psychosomatic illnesses experienced by some young people in the 1950s.
Today she is an Independent Psychotherapist.
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