The first thing to say is that the other does not have the power to do anything, you attribute that power to them yourself. The question is to see why if I don’t want that person to have power over me, I give it to them anyway, I can’t help it.
Something they tell us hurts us when we believe it to be true, otherwise it doesn’t affect us. So in reality what we are looking for is for that person to confirm what we already believe and when he confirms it we blame the person for what we already believe about ourselves.
If, for example, a friend of mine has the power to say two words to me and make my afternoon bitter, probably what made my afternoon bitter was something that I already believed about myself and all she did was remind me.
But we must keep the following in mind: that phrase may not be true, we often believe things that are not true.
Let’s see why we sometimes believe in these phrases that make us bitter and are not true.
To explain this I need the help of a philosopher called Immanuel Kant. He was talking about something called the “categorical assumption.”
There are categorical assumptions that we do not doubt, for example: “the sun rises in the East and sets in the West”, it is assumed because it talks about something that is going to happen tomorrow and it is a truth that I do not doubt. So on the one hand we are going to have categorical assumptions taken from external reality, and on the other we are going to have categorical assumptions taken from our internal reality, we are going to see them.
Let’s compare ourselves for a moment with children and see the following: they have categorical assumptions that we as adults do not have, for example “Santa Claus exists.”
Let us keep in mind that these categorical assumptions are present in all children, therefore they were also present in us and at an unconscious level they are often still active. So let’s take one that is very important for our explanation: “dad and mom are ALWAYS good dads and moms.” Every little boy believes that about his parents. Categorical assumptions are not doubted, they function as truth.
Let me bring another concept that will be useful for our little investigation, it is the “principle of logical non-contradiction” and it says: “a thing, situation, person, assumption, place, can never be its opposite at the same time and place” . What does that mean? If, for example, I have a red lamp, I bring paint and paint it green, it will become green in the time it takes me to paint it, but it can never be red and green at the same time, or it is red or it is green.
So let’s go back to observing the children with their categorical assumption of “mom and dad are always good” working. Now, there are moments in life where dad and mom are not “good”, what happens when that contradiction appears between reality and the supposed truth?
When a child believes that his father and mother are always good, but his father or mother attacks him, mistreats him, mistreats him, hurts him, this is opposed to his truth.
The child can never give up his truth and cannot deny reality, so he encounters a conflict, how does he resolve it? He always solves it the same way.
He believes that his parents are good, he does not deny the reality that they are not and says: “dad and mom are good and if they are not being good to me it is because I do not deserve it, because I am not worthy of this good dad.” be with me.”
Then a third truth is created: “I am not deserving of the good in life.”
Later that child grows up, becomes an adult and goes to seek to confirm that third truth that was inscribed and active in the unconscious. Then he is going to get involved with a partner who mistreats him, for example. And when that adult meets a partner who treats him well, he is going to leave her because he is not going to believe that person, he is going to ask himself: “why does he treat me well?” detracting from any attitude of care or affection.
Thus, as a result of this phrase that was created as a truth, this hypothetical adult ends up mistreating the person who treats him well and treating the person who mistreats him well just to preserve this: “dad and mom were good and if reality showed that they were not, it was because I was not a good son. I was not worthy of them being good to me.”
Let me clarify that we are talking about an experience that we all go through, it is structural, simply because our parents, or the people who took care of us, are human and there are times when they are not up to our needs, they make mistakes. And at that moment, when our parents are not up to the task, we, as children, do not believe that our parents are bad parents, there is no one who makes us believe that they are bad parents, what we believe is that we do not deserve them to be good with us.
Of course there are more or less serious cases, but no one is exempt from this experience.
How to solve it
What you have to do is emotionally go to hug that child and tell him what they didn’t tell him: “you deserve it” and understand that mom and dad were neither bad nor good, they were little, they couldn’t, they only gave what they needed. They could and sometimes what they can is insufficient.
Sometimes this lack is so painful that one cannot do this experience alone, one cannot go directly to the source of pain, we all have a different tolerance threshold in relation to how close we can get to our own pain. That is why prior work becomes important, in the company of a professional, to create the conditions that allow access to that emotional place of pain and heal it. The psychologist does not cure, he helps create the conditions so that we can access our pain and so that the wounds can heal.
So we already discovered that those phrases that hurt us and can ruin our day do not just come from outside, they are a reflection of what hurts us inside, so the invitation is to work with the beliefs about ourselves that form self-esteem.
