This article is to encourage you to look at how you are different and how to recognise your uniqueness within the scheme of things. I am emphasising aspects of how you relate to others and how when you enter any new situation it is likely that you will take with you aspects of your history that will influence the dynamics and the way you interact with others in that situation. For example going on a social event where you don’t know anyone else, joining some kind of group activity, starting a new job and so on. You unconsciously take your history with you like a rucksack of silent memories and in that rucksack will be your previous experiences from within the original first relationships for example your family, school, church and so on. This you will unconsciously replay within the process of making changes and dealing with new experiences.
Your first experience of being in some form of a group was the family grouping, belonging to a church, going to school, being in some sort of institution, being put in care etc and your impressions will be formed from that experience.
You will have learned how to relate with others within those first groups, what was expected, what wasn’t tolerated and so on.
In those first groupings you have developed your sense of self in relation to others you have learned what was acceptable to others and what was obviously not. You will have learned what to hide and what to keep within yourself about yourself therefore what is hidden from others and what aspects of yourself have you emphasis in order to fit in?
You will have learned to have certain expectations of others or perhaps on the contrary you have learned to expect very little from other people. Your sense of self will have developed in relation to other people. And you will have some ideas about just what you can and cannot expect from relationships.
When you come into contact with others in life’s various situations they will trigger the memories from your inner child that observed what was going on around you. That child in you that watched and made sense of what went on in all kinds of interaction. Situations in the here and now nudge those early childhood memories that will rise to the surface. Disturbed like mud at the bottom of a pond clouding how you feel in new situations and it will also influence your view of the way others relate both to others and to you. I think it important to show here that you may not literally remember childhood events, these memories are almost a knee jerk reaction, a repeated pattern in your life’s experiences. Sometimes you will wonder why you are saying the things you say, reacting the way your are, doing the things you do. You might ask your self the question, how have I come to be doing this again? You may find yourself repeating patterns of behaviour almost like a clock work toy.
As a child you will even have been influenced by what you saw your other siblings doing in relation to your parents, for example if a brother received beatings for a certain behaviour perhaps you may have managed to manipulate your environment in order to avoid the same treatment. A brother and sister in a household where the mother hates men the brother decides one thing the sister another. What does the boy decide about himself? How does the girl relate to men from then on? There may be an assortment of differing scenarios. Children of differing ages within the same family may have a completely different view of how their parents were both with you and with themselves.
Basically when an individual enters any new situation they come with an organisational system already in their mind, it will be about themselves in relation to you the other and the other in relation to themselves. We all have in our make up a particular frame of reference that will influence the way we will view the world.
Paul had been severely neglected by his mother and father, they had left him in the care of friends and relatives he learned to relate to all these minders in many different ways. As I observed him in group situations he was almost like a chameleon forever changing its colours to suit the environment as a child he had lost sight of himself in his urgency to adapt in order to be liked and excepted by those significant others in his life.
As well as the organisational structure there will be a private structure that is based upon each individuals personal need, experiences wishes and emotions.
Each of you will have your own historical system that fits with the original past relationships as with Paul.
Of course as you move through life, you develop confidence in new relationships and in strange situations you will change in relation to the other person or people. Also you will change in your attitude to strange situations. Like everything in life we become more confident with practice. But sometimes fear of doing things means that you fail to gain the confidence, instead becoming phobic in certain areas of your life.
Think of the things that you wouldn’t do or cannot imagine yourself doing, for example:
Make note of any new situations that trouble you.
There are many areas that you avoid in life and generally if you examine your conscience you may recognise how you limit yourself from making changes or dealing with difference.
Winnocott talked about family as the first experience of a group, he said that of all groupings it is the most influential in the formation of the individual personality. It is where we learn about tolerance, sympathy and it’s our first experience of society and attitudes, prejudices, behaviours, thoughts and feelings which we may take on into adulthood.
What did you learn both in the positive sense and the sense that now gets in the way of you being you within relationships?