Your childhood not only has a connection, it actually dictates who you are and where you are heading, because your personality and feelings of self are shaped by your experiences from the time you are born to this moment. However, as you get older, and become more mature, you learn the skills of changing your life and living the way you want to, thus gradually diminishing the effect of your childhood.
At the beginning, in your very early years, the way you are treated by your parents is paramount and actually affects how you see the world to a remarkable degree. Many parents do not realise that their children are learning not just what they are told by them, but how they are told and whether that information is given in a positive, optimistic or a negative, pessimistic way. For example, a mother who is always anxious, fretful and insecure in herself, is likely to have equally anxious, insecure and fretful children, because that is all they have to guide, copy and reassure them. They come to see that way of responding as 'normal' and applying to everyone else too.
Their parents, especially the mother who spends the most interactive time with them, will be unwittingly moulding them into little copies of her emotional self without often realising it. That is why, whether we like to acknowledge or not, how our children act later in adulthood has been largely formed by what we did as parents. Often when children rebel it is because there is a mismatch of expectations which the child is trying to derogate or ignore in preference for his/her own.
Later on, the teen years tend to be the worst as you are in transition from child to woman/man and have to learn to make your own decisions, while still being guided by your parents. That is why many teens find it difficult to cope because they are emotionally conflicted and biologically uncertain, often expected to act like an adult when they are still a child emotionally, or to be a child when they are advancing rapidly to adulthood at a more intelligent rate.
From your information, you are not really depressed, but you are missing physical love, appreciation and value. As you say, you don't get hugs or feel affection for your parents. You are probably too detached in your emotions to feel good about you. Yet we all need to belong, to feel wanted and valued in our life. You are mainly feeling the effects of that absence, hence why you are in your present anxious state. Yes, your childhood treatment has obviously affected how you are acting now but, as you mature and gain more experience, you will begin to find ways to override that early influence in order to feel much better about you and what you wish to be. Your rate of progress in being whom you wish to be will depend largely on whether you regard your childhood influence as temporary and subject to your gradual empowerment, or permanent and simply blamed on your parents.
©Elaine Sihera (Ms CYPRAH) 2011
Emotional Health and People Management Consultant
"Respect and love begin with the self. If we have none, how can we give away any?"
