This is the first in what I hope will be a series of blogs on what I am calling “the end of” certain things. In all of these blogs we will examine the various things, sometimes behavior, sometimes feelings, sometimes experiences, that plague humanity psychologically including:
- Anger
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Addictions (behavioral and chemical)
- Confusion
- Physical distress
- Relational distress
- Loneliness
- Vocational dissatisfaction
- Lack of sufficient money
- And others (?)
I use the expression “end of” carefully because to have an end of something suggests that there is something wrong. I am primarily interested in suggesting ways that these various maladies that occur with us might come to an end. I will be making a case that these challenges, whether they fit nicely into a formal psychiatric diagnosis or not, are caused largely psychologically and can be successfully dealt with psychologically. My overall perspective of all these various challenges is that they have similar derivations and hence similar ways that they can come to an end. The following is my overall perspective about these various challenges in life:
- There is a lack of development in all of these situations. This means that some portion of one’s nature did not develop sufficiently.
- Most of the time this lack of development was due to inadequate parenting in some way.
- As a result of inadequate parenting and the subsequent lack of development, certain things in life did not work as they were designed to work
- The brain got involved and created a means of facing life without adequate tools to engage the world
- The brain found alternate ways and means of engaging in life as a way of compensating for the lack of development in some area.
- The brain continued to direct the person into alternate means of engaging life despite the fact that these alternatives had deleterious effects
- In most cases the person tried to correct or change these alternatives without success in that endeavor
- The alternatives in life began to dominate the person’s life and ultimately became life-damaging, if not life-threatening
- It appeared that there was no cure for the ailment, i.e. no way for it to end, which became a dominate factor in the person’s life. It also appeared to be unchangeable because the person had lived with the alternative to adequate development all one’s life: anger and/or all the other phenomena that happen to people in this situation
The developmental understanding of distressing and disturbing things
The purpose of these several blogs is to identify the causes of the difficulties we have in life…because we all have them. These difficulties do not come from some kind of vague biological origin, some cultural pattern, or the so-called “choices” we made early in life that set a pattern for some kind of unhappiness. This having been said, know that I am going against the current orientation in psychology, certainly borrowed from psychiatry, which states that the problems we have in life are of primarily biological origins and secondarily from cultural origins. Simply stated (and there is much more that I could say about this), there are both biological and cultural origins for the difficulties we have in life, whether the poverty that many underprivileged people have suffered to the inherited tendencies that we all have toward some kind of functioning the world, and ultimately to both the physical anomalies and the psychological anomalies that we all have. I will not discuss this matter further, mostly because it is out of the arena of what I want to say, but also because it is a very complex matter, namely the interaction of things biological, cultural, and personal.
As we look at the developmental origins of what ails us, we need to look carefully at what is normal, or perhaps ideal, development. Consider the following in the development of children:
- The first year of life is one where the child needs three things: safety, comfort, and nurturance, probably in that order.
- The predominant emotion that an infant feels is fear or the absence of fear. The infant does not feel joy, sadness, or anger. The crying that an infant does is generally without tears, as crying is because of fear, something like, “If you don’t take care of me, I will die.”
- The second year of life is a time of exploration where a child needs a wide berth in her life in order to explore, both the exploration of words and walking and the exploration of the physical world.
- The predominant emotion that a toddler feels is joy. She feels joy because she experiences the rudiments of love: love things, love parents, love exploration. This is also a time where an infant begins to have a rudimentary feeling of “self” and rather enjoys being herself. She talks of the blanket or puppy being “mine” and frequently says “no” as another way of establish herself as a separate being.
- The next three or four years of life are times of experimenting with life as well as wanting, having, and losing. Now the child can walk, talk, run, grab, and perhaps break. During these crucial years of early childhood, the child has ideally had the safety of the first year inside of him, and the experience of having something. Now the child experiences wanting, and he wants much more than he wanted during the first two years of life, which were predominantly safety and experience.
- The predominant emotion that a pre-school child has is anger. He gets angry because he doesn’t get most of what he wants not knowing that his wants have multiplied by 100 because he can walk, talk, and grab things. He wants more, so he gets less of what he wants. Of course, he doesn’t know that he wants more; he just knows that he doesn’t get much of what he wants.
- The next six years of life (and to some degree for the rest of life) are times of experimentation in the world. This means achievement in something, like academics, music, art, athletics, or dance. It also means relationship development, which requires a whole bunch of things that were not necessary during the first six years of life. This is also a time for understanding the acquisition, use, and care of physical property whereas previously parental figures took care of such things, whether changing diapers or providing toys to play with.
- The predominant emotion during these years of life (sometimes called “latency”) is sadness. The child is frequently sad because he/she doesn’t know how to manage the ways of the world, whether in activity, relationships, or property. A child in this time of life loves a lot, whether people, places, or things, and loses a lot. A child who gets through this stage of life learns that all things end, anything that is love is ultimately lost.
When a child does not get to through these stages effectively
It must be obvious that no one gets through theses stages of early childhood unscathed, which means that no child is perfectly loved, cared for, encouraged, challenged, limited, and nurtured. Parents do their best…they always do their best…despite the fact that some parenting is awful. Again, I will not elaborate on this matter as it is out of the purview of the current discussion. More important that the awful parenting that some children get is the good parenting that most people get that is yet inadequate. My primary interest is to look at good parenting that is not good enough and the consequences of such deficiencies:
- Infancy: when a child fails to get the safety, comfort, and nurturance that he needs, this child will retain fear as the predominant emotion in his life.
- Then all the rest of life is based on fear, which includes the other emotions of joy, sadness, and anger. But beyond the emotions, the child who has not overcome the fear of dying will see death at every doorstep, namely with every person, every opportunity, and every experience.
- The result is some form of anxiety
- Toddlerhood: when a child is deprived or indulged in the arenas of exploration and opportunity, this child will retain do one of two things: she will continue to want everything, or she will fail to want anything.
- If she is not given enough of the rudiments of wanting, having, and losing, all the rest of life will where she feels there is no way she can have what she wants.
- If she is given too much of what she wants, she will continue in life expecting that she should be the center of attention as she was when she was a toddler.
- Pre-school: frankly, this is where most disturbances come with most children, and ultimately with most adults. This should be a time, as we noted, where I want a lot, don’t get much of what I want, and get angry at that fact. There are two dangers:
- Not getting enough and not being allowed to be angry (and sad) about not getting what the child wants
- Getting too much of what she wants and failing to realize that in life you want too much, and that fact is simply difficult to accept
- Latency: As noted, with these years that should be devoted to exploration and experimentation that naturally lead to a lot of disappointment, hurt, and sadness. If the child doesn’t get enough experience and experimentation, he will forever want it and not be satisfied. More importantly, he will not have the important ingredient of feeling sad because he wants something but doesn’t get it, and the accompanying experience that he can want something else and have it. The potential problems during this state of life include:
- Not having enough freedom to experience and experiment, which then results in the child not having sufficient experience of wanting, having, and losing
- Having too much freedom, largely without restraint, where the child does not come to value the essential nature of limitations.
As we explore some of the challenges of life as noted above, like anger and addiction, it will be my task to suggest the causes of such maladies, identifying particularly the lack of clarity that people have in their feelings and emotions, and finally suggest courses of action that might be taken to remedy these difficulties and allow them to end. Be it know, however, that allowing such things to come to an end is extremely hard work, something that most people do not want to do. The best example is of a person who says he “wants to lose weight.” I would content that he does not want to lose weight. Rather, he wants to have lost weight because losing weight is extremely hard to do and no one likes the work it takes to do it.
See you soon.