Revelations from The School of Life

Selection from The School of Life

What happens to a child who is not loved properly? The answer one might expect is that they start to hate the person who doesn’t give them the love they need.

Lots of people do hate their parents, do not forgive them. That is a double-tragedy.

Far from it. The reality is that the child becomes filled with shame. What is shame? A sense that one is profoundly unworthy, dirty, soiled, sinful, ugly, embarrassing – and also, in danger; a fit subject of attack and ridicule by strangers. The child is unable to redirect the blame outward: it does not ask: ‘What is wrong with my parents for not loving me adequately?’ It simply wonders in a forlorn way: ‘What have I done wrong in order to have ended up on the receiving end of my parent’s disapproval?’

This is a profound revelation, if there ever was one! Yes, children do not turn around and start blaming their parents for being terrible parents. They will instinctively, automatically start blaming themselves. It's really striking.

A primitive fear of abandonment kicks in. The child prefers to attack itself for being bad than to confront a yet more awful possibility: that it is entirely dependent for its well-being on inadequate and unkind parental figures.

This shock occured to me when I was a child. It's tough to write about, but I can share generally that I understand the sentiment.

The child searches assiduously for explanations for the lack of love it has to endure – and comes to all the wrong answers. It might conclude: ‘I have not been impressive enough.’ And therefore it may undertake enormous efforts to prove to itself and harsh outsiders that it does – nevertheless – deserve to exist. At school, it might try seven times as hard as any other child to show that it is clever and ‘good’. Later on, the shamed child might turn into the over-achieving adult who works relentlessly for money and status in order to escape appalling feelings of being invisible.

As a rule, children blame themselves for not being good children. In their minds, there is no way that "mom and dad are wrong." That is too painful, too traumatic for children, since they are so dependent on them in the first plcae.

This conflict describes what I went through when I was younger. The trauma was considerable, and quite painful. I tried my best to be a "good boy," and I hoped that that would be enough. Of course, in the real world, being a "good boy" is really not all that good in the first place. There are so many bad people doing bad things, and you have to stand against this evil in every way possible. Being "nice" never works, and we have had decades of nice around the world allow utmost evil to take precedence.

Or else, the child may go down an anti-social route and graffiti the nearby underpass, as a desperate way of giving outward form to a feeling of badness it is tortured by inside.

I did not go into this route. I did not rebel against society in such a bold fashion, that's for sure. Sometimes, I think it might have been better for me if I had rebelled more against bad teachers in high school. Some of other kids did that, AND that got better grades than I did and went to better (?) colleges than I, too.

At the very least, they were having more fun, because they were not living under law.

There is so sadly no way out from the burden of shame available either by trying to be extremely good – or extremely bad. The only solution is to work against the grain of forgetting in order to perceive, for the first time, an awful possibility that one could never perceive as a child: that one has done nothing wrong at all, that wrong was done to one.

This revelation was not at all painful for me when I realized that I have a Loving Heavenly Father who is watching out for me all the time. When I realized that I was cared for all the time, no matter what; when I learned to rightly divide the word of Truth and receive the grace of God in greater measure, it was easier for me to stand away from past experiences and look at them objectively.

And I could see, at last, that it was my parents who were wrong.

I can forgive them all their failures, and I can confront the fact that for all their holy talk and nice-nice going to church once a week, and then going to men's prayer groups or men's breakfasts on Saturdays, my dad did not know the Gospel, and my mother was in bondage to a cult.

I am so glad that I am free of their lies, and I will never have to live in bondage to them again. Thank you, Jesus!