deeply and firmly into the child’s unconsciousness. I have heard so many adults, overcome by a life crisis, recalling what they were told as a child: ‘I’m so useless, I know I am’.
Psychologists, like many professional groups, tend to complicate things just a little, and call these statements ‘attributions’. These attributions crop up again and again in adult life.
‘Why don’t you apply for that promotion?’
‘No, I’m not good enough.’
‘But he’s just like your last husband. Why did you marry him?’
‘I’m just stupid, I guess.’
‘Why do you let them push you around like that?’
‘That’s the story of my life.’
These words – ‘not good enough’, ‘just stupid’, did not come out of the blue. They are recorded in people’s brains because they were said to them at an age when they were unable to question their truthfulness. ‘But surely,’ I can hear you saying, ‘children must disagree with the “you” messages they are given?’
Certainly children think about the things that are said to them, checking for accuracy. But they may have no comparisons. At times we are all lazy, selfish, untidy, stupid, forgetful, mischievous, and so on. The preacher in the old-time church was on a sure thing when he thundered out, ‘You have sinned!’ – everyone had!
‘Adults know everything; they can even read your mind.’ Such are the thoughts of a child. So when a child is told ‘You’re clumsy’, he or she becomes nervous, and is clumsy. The child told ‘You’re a pest’ feels the rejection, becomes desperate for reassurance and so does pester. The child told ‘You’re an idiot’ may violently disagree on the outside, but inside can only sadly agree. You’re the adult, so you must be right.
‘You’ messages work at both the conscious and unconscious levels. In our work we’ve often asked children to describe themselves, and they will say things like ‘I’m a bad kid’, ‘I’m a nuisance’.
Others, though, will show evidence of confusion – ‘Mum and Dad say they love me, but I don’t think they do’. Consciously they hear the words, but unconsciously they hear/see/smell the feeling behind the words.
It’s all in the way we say it. We can choose to say to children, ‘I’m angry with you and I want you to tidy up your toys NOW!’ and have no fears about lasting effects. If we say, ‘You lazy little brat, why don’t you ever do what you’re told?’ and repeat this kind of message when-ever conflict occurs, then the result will come as no surprise.
Don’t pretend to be happy or loving when you aren’t feeling that way – it’s confusing and can make children become evasive and in time quite disturbed. We can be honest about our feelings, without putting children down. They can handle ‘I’m really tired today’, or ‘Right now I’m too angry…’ especially if this matches what they have sensed all along. It helps them realise that you are human too, which has got to be a good thing.
At a large parents’ meeting I once addressed, I asked if people would call out the ‘you’ messages they remembered hearing as children. I wrote them on a blackboard and this is what we came up with:
The examples came in little rushes at first, as people’s memories were triggered, but by the end the blackboard was covered and the room was almost in a state of riot. The sense of relief and release was very evident in the large hall as people spoke aloud the words that had hurt them so long ago.
Very few people felt their parents had been deliberately destructive or malicious – it was simply that this was the way children were corrected. ‘Tell them they’re bad and that makes them good!’ Those were the Dark Ages of child-rearing: we’re just beginning to escape.
Your mind remembers everything that ever happened to you
In the 1950s people with epilepsy had a bad time because the medications we now use had not been developed. A man called Penfield found that an operation could be used to help the more severe cases. By making small cuts on the surface of a person’s brain, he could sometimes reduce or even halt the ‘electrical storms’ which cause epileptic seizures.
The interesting part – I hope you’re sitting down as you read this – is that the patients were required, for safety reasons, to be conscious, and the operation was done under only a local anaesthetic. The surgeon removed a small piece of skull, made the cuts and then put back the piece and sewed up the skin. It makes me shudder, too, but it was better than the disease!
During the operation the patients experienced something very surprising. As the doctor, using a fine probe, made tiny contacts with the surface of the brain, the patient would suddenly have vivid recollections – watching Gone with the Wind years earlier, complete with the smell of cheap perfume in the cinema and the beehive hairstyle of the person in front! When the doctor moved the probe to another spot, the person would see before him his fourth birthday party – even though he was wide awake and sitting in the operating chair. It was the same with every patient, though of course the memories were different.
Subsequent research backed up this remarkable discovery: that everything – every sight, sound and spoken word – is stored in our brain. It is often difficult to remember but nevertheless it is there, having its effect. On the wrinkled surface of our brain our life is recorded in its entirety!
Unconscious hearing is a phenomenon that you’ve almost certainly experienced. You’ve been at a party or a meeting, listening to someone near you. The room is buzzing with people talking and perhaps music, too. Suddenly, from a conversation clear across the room, you hear someone say your name, or the name of a friend, or something that concerns you. ‘Aaargh!’ you think, ‘what are they saying about me?’
How does this happen? We have discovered from research that there are two parts to your hearing: firstly, what your ears actually pick up; and secondly, what you pay conscious attention to.
Although you are unaware of it, your brilliant hearing system is filtering every conversation within range in the room and, if a key word or phrase occurs, the switchboard department in your brain ‘puts it through’ to conscious attention. You certainly couldn’t listen to all that was being said at one time but, nonetheless, a primitive filter is scanning it for important messages. We know this from many experiments and also from the fact that under hypnosis people can recall things that they didn’t consciously notice at the time!
The following situation has been reported in many parts of the world.
Late one night a petrol tanker runs out of control, careers down-hill and smashes through the front wall of a house. When rescuers enter the house they are amazed to find a young mother sleeping heavily, undisturbed by the crash. As they stand there, not knowing what to do, a baby begins to cry in the back room. The mother instantly awakes. ‘Wha…what’s going on?’
The
