www.self-construct.com

A Self-Guided Tour of Your Upbringing – An Introduction to Section I

What child would not have cause

to weep over its parents?

- Friedrich Nietzsche

In order to describe the probable,

you must have a firm hold on the true.

- Jean-Paul Sartre

Little tykes don’t look around their world and wonder, “Hmmm. Does this look right to you?” They look around their world and think, “Hmmm. So this is life.” This state of affairs serves the general population very well in that naïve children are easy to train. Gullible kids tend toward compliance, and compliant children make “good citizens.” This situation, however, leaves children indescribably vulnerable to the level of mental health in their parental system – indeed vulnerable to the whole adult world into which they were born. To the extent a child’s surrounding adults have themselves been poorly raised and remain unhealed, these adults will pass along misinformation disguised as gospel. These taken-as-truth defaults will start to accumulate inside the belief system of the children, rendering the kids less and less able to determine how the world actually is.

Even more heartbreaking, less-than-healthy adults also pass along errors in how they see their children – these little kids who are unable to defend themselves against misinformation about who they are. At best, their developing sense of self will be truncated by the generic feedback they receive from the outside world. Never nuanced or customized, bland feedback tells children little about who they are specifically. At worst, warped and mangled parental feedback will cause these unfortunate children to think so poorly of themselves that they will likely suffer a lifetime of self-loathing.

A faulty upbringing, as you can see then, drops a child off on a long and cratered road by creating two kinds of potholes in the psyche of the tyke: an incorrect sense of how the world works, and an incorrect sense of who they are as individuals. When these badly served children reach adulthood, their twisted sense of reality sets them up to make errors. A pattern of errors erodes the already-weakened self-esteem of these young adults until they feel forced to conclude that they are simply awful. If you believe this about yourself, as you can imagine, you will be unable to trust your creativity, enthusiasm and sense of adventure – all words that describe resiliency trait number one: an openness to experience.

Past

On top of the misfortune of having your sense of reality distorted, there’s an additional curse that results from a crappy childhood: poorly raised kids end up cut off from their past. Our past is where our uniqueness data reside – the accumulation of tidbits that tells us who we particularly are. What our lives have been like to date contains all the clues about what our gifts and talents are, what brings us joy and how we prefer to interact with our world.

When our past is mysterious to us either because we believe it to be too shameful to remember or because no one bothered to faithfully curate our past experiences in order for us to access them later, we are prevented from going back and recapturing our healthy uniqueness.

If we are left in this terrible state, we can never get past our past.

Uniqueness

Now, the fact that we are each unique is hard enough to face with the most wholesome of upbringings. A mean or sloppy upbringing can make taking that crucial maturational step of getting to know ourselves even more difficult.

It is quite daunting to realize that we can truly follow in nobody’s footsteps, that we have to design our own life for ourselves and we never really know what we’re doing. But uniqueness has an additional and nasty back-truth – we are all, taken in our entirety, completely unique, while at the same time we are all also, when taken in fragments, completely a cliché. No pain or victory or bewilderment or doubt we feel hasn’t been felt before a billion times, in just the same way for just the same reasons. We are unique and we are trite. No wonder it’s so easy for most of us to pay little attention to this existential truth.

Self-construction

What’s to be done?

When you didn’t get the parents you wanted, you must become the parents you need. With respect to recapturing and detoxifying your past, you have to steel your mind to take yourself seriously enough to tackle learning about what has gone on before now for you.

This first section of the website is organized to help you with that task. It will walk you through the steps necessary to break the tether that binds your natural ability to engage in the Past Vector of sound mental health. (To remind you of the Past Vector: it is the ability to digest your past without shame in order to highlight your uniqueness by trusting only your healthy attachments who know you well enough to provide you with trustworthy input.) Section I of the self-construct website explores both the mental health vector that links our past to our sense of uniqueness, and also the effect that the strength of that linkage has on our ability to be resilient.

Section I starts with a self-guided tour of your upbringing with sturdy guardrails set in place to protect you from misinterpreting the data you find.

The first article – It’s Not Your Fault. Really. No, Seriously. – is an expanded version of what is described above. It is designed to help you understand as completely as possible that you are not responsible for the mistakes that the adults in your childhood world made. I cannot stress enough that this first article needs to be read as often as it takes for you to say to yourself "Of course it's not my fault." when you finish reading it.

The second article – Shame: The Monster Under the Bed – is probably the single-most important article on the website for it was created to help you start the essential process of eliminating shame within yourself. It is my professional opinion that very little healing can occur if the toxicity of shame remains present within an individual. Shame simply must be eliminated and replaced with well-considered and effectively practiced guilt.

The third article – Pricked: The Sleeping Beauty Effect of a Poor Childhood – provides an additional guardrail. It describes how the unexamined desires and the unresolved issues of the parents set the tone for your specific birth curse. A common example would be when one or both parents are raised in an unrelentingly strict household and then either recreate that gruesome environment by always leading with harshness or swing too far in the other direction by leaning precariously toward permissiveness. Rather than figuring out why their childhood was lamentable or understanding how to remediate it, they merely parent from some instinctual and reactionary place.

There are three articles in the second half of Section I that should help you make peace with your past.

The first one – A Good Childhood: How It’s Supposed to Go – will provide you with a checklist of sorts to start the process of recognizing what you were entitled to growing up.

The second article – Self-Parenting: It’s All in the Attitude – gives you a template for creating the internal parental unit that you need to correct any damage done to the Past Vector within you.

And the final article in this first section of the website – How To Talk To Yourself: Healthy Internal Discussions – will help you replace harsh or weak parental voices inside you with a healthier, kinder and more potent style of self-talk.

People who take themselves seriously can effectively digest their past which frees up the data describing how truly special they are. All the articles in this portion of self-construct will help you study what has happened to you to date and start the resiliency recovery process. When you have finished I hope you will find the following to be true: you have an earned authority on yourself which allows you to appreciate your uniqueness by facing your past and absorbing it without shame.

Being out of touch with your past is like living in a large and cleverly designed house but occupying only a couple of the rooms. When you can fully access your past, your life will naturally expand – opening all the doors and filling all the rooms with an animated and passionate version of who you want to be today. I guarantee that there are many, many wonderful little truths about you that have been hidden in your past. Once you reacquaint yourself with these truths, with who you were meant to be, you will also reconnect with your specific flavor of curiosity. And that natural curiosity, once recovered, will allow you to make those course corrections needed to steer your life back toward the probable that Sartre believed followed a firm hold on the true. What is probable for those with curiosity is the discovery of their unique route to their life-affirming mastery.