3.1 Childhood

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The most impressionable time in our lives is in childhood. This is the time when we are learning everything about the world and ourselves. If we experience anything during that time that may suggest we’re inadequate, it will leave a huge imprint on the brain that will last the rest of our lives – or until we address it.

There are 6 principles which can cause a child to form a sense of inadequacy.

1. All Children Are Born Totally Helpless. #

When we are brought into this world, we cannot take care of ourselves. We are helpless. We depend on our parents to fulfil our needs. Particularly, children need the four “S”s – to be safe, seen, soothed and secure.

• Safe – Parents must avoid actions and responses that frighten or hurt children.

• Seen – they must be seen for who they are, not just visually, but emotionally and personally. They must be mirrored, given attention when they cry, and empathised with.

• Soothed – they must be helped to deal with difficult emotions or situations.

• Secure – they must feel protected, stable, and be secure in themselves.

Of course these are not all our needs, only a few which play a large role in who we grow up to be.

The point is that we are 100% dependant on our parents to fulfil our needs.

2. A child’s greatest fear is abandonment. #

Because children are dependant on their parents, if their parents leave them, they will die. Children are born totally helpless, so abandonment will lead to death. There is nothing worse – and so it is their greatest fear. If they can’t get their needs met, they will not survive. A child’s greatest fear is abandonment.

3. All children can and will have numerous abandonment experiences. #

They will have times where their needs are not met. They will have times when their needs are not met quickly enough, or fairly. This is known as ‘abandonment’ even though it’s a very overdramatic term for what it is – not getting your needs met in a timely, judicious manner.

Abandonment experiences might include any of the following experiences:

• He is hungry and no one feeds him – not getting his need for food.

• He cries and no one holds him – not getting his need to be soothed.

• He is lonely and no one pays attention to him – not getting his need for attention, or to be seen.

• A parent puts unrealistic expectations on him – parents commonly push their children to achieve, mostly so those parents can feel good about themselves.

• A parent uses him to gratify his or her own needs – for respect, attention, validation, etc.

• A parent hits him – one of the most common and worst of all, it threatens their need for safety.

• A parent leaves him and doesn’t come back in a timely manner – literal abandonment. Divorces cause this.

Because every child is born into an imperfect world and into an imperfect family, every child has abandonment experiences of one form of another. All children can and will have abandonment experiences.

4. All Children are ego-centered. #

They have not developed the ability to realise that their parents are separate people with their own thoughts, feelings, and lives. They can only think of themselves. The other people around them don’t seem like people, almost robot-like because children can’t understand that other people are separate people. Children believe they are the center of the universe – they haven’t developed the ability to think otherwise.

Because of this, they also believe that everything that happens to them is because of them. They can’t understand that if their parents are busy, they might not get much attention. They cannot comprehend that other people have their own worries, emotions, and issues, instead they think that everything that happens to them is somehow because of them.

John Bradshaw, in his book ‘Homecoming: Reclaiming And Championing Your Inner Child’, writes: “Children are absolutizers. This quality of a child’s thinking is manifested by an “all or nothing” polarity. If you don’t love me, you hate me. There is no in between. If my father abandons me, all men will abandon me. Children are nonlogical. This is manifested in what has been described as “emotional reasoning.” I feel a certain way, therefore it must be this way. If I feel guilty, I must be a rotten person. Children need healthy modelling in order to learn to separate thought from emotion-to think about feelings and to feel about thinking. Children think egocentrically, which is manifested in their personalizing everything. If Dad has no time for me, it must mean that I’m not okay, that something is wrong with me. Children interpret most abuse in this way” (abuse is interpreted as being their fault).

5. This means that when a child has an abandonment experience, they believe they are the cause. #

They believe it’s because of them that they’re not getting their needs met. If they didn’t get fed, they believe that they need to do something differently next time. If they didn’t get attention, they believe that they can change the way they act to get attention next time.

6. This creates a sense that they are not good enough, and need to change to be good enough. #

When they believe that they are the cause, they believe that they are not good enough to get their needs met. They form a perception of inadequacy – and because this occurs during the most vulnerable time of life, when they are learning the way the world works and who they are, this becomes a very deep-rooted perception.

They will do everything to avoid the same experience happening again, because their greatest fear is abandonment. So children will develop coping mechanisms to try to prevent those experiences from happening again, and to try to hide their perceived “badness” from themselves and others.

Children find a multitude of creative ways to try to accomplish these three goals. Since their knowledge, intelligence, and experience are limited, these coping mechanisms often don’t work, and sometimes don’t even make sense. For example, someone who is feeling lonely may misbehave in a way that is sure to attract attention in a negative way. Even though it doesn’t make sense for a child to do something that invites painful or negative attention, at least they’re getting some attention.

Then, they might be punished for their misbehaviour, even though they were only trying to meet their needs, and perhaps this punishment threatens their other needs – going hungry (threatening their need for food), getting locked in their room (threatening a whole load of social needs), or being spanked (threatening safety as a child). To us adults, these things don’t seem that bad – it’s really just a small punishment. But we’re independent and can take care of ourselves. Children can’t. They’re helpless, dependant, and very scared of abandonment.

This is why a subconscious sense of inadequacy is actually very common. It’s not just people with this fetish who have this, it’s a significant percentage of the population. I would go as far as to say 90% of people have this to a small degree, because no-one’s childhood is perfect. It’s only when this is repeated, over many childhood experiences, and combined with other factors that it becomes the cuckold fetish. Of course, it’s important to note that other fetishes eroticize inadequacy too, from different angles.

Ultimately, cuckolding pushes on that painful emotional hotpoint of abandonment. It recreates those abandonment experiences by being literally abandoned by your partner, turning that sense of inadequacy into sexual pleasure as a way to be protected from that pain. John Bradshaw calls this the “original pain”. The cuckold fetish is just a way to push on that button of unresolved emotions in a subconscious attempt to resolve them.

So when their needs are not met, they believe they are bad and they need to change to be good. But on a more literal level, this happens again and again through childhood when we are taught by our parents how to behave.

From the moment we are born, we are handed rules, demands, expectations, about how to behave, how to act, how we should be. We’re given very clear distinctions about what is bad, and what is good. For example, if you cry in a public place or too loudly, you are bad. You are told to stop crying.

We are repeatedly told what we need to do to be good, and we are repeatedly reminded when we do things that are bad.

• You need to eat your vegetables to be good.

• You need to not be too loud or else you’ll be bad.

• You need to work harder to be good.

• You need to stop bothering your parents or you’re bad.

• You need to stay out of the way to be good.

All of this communicates that we are not good enough just as we are.

In my family, I was taught that to be “good”, you had to be quiet, you had to do what you were told, you had to never be a problem or ask anything of someone else. So I grew up as a quiet child that was kind of a pushover, and I grew up thinking that I never had to ask anything of anyone, that my needs were not important.

This is just my example, yours might be different. The point is that we grew up thinking that we had to change something to be good, that we weren’t good enough just as we are, we are fundamentally inadequate.

I’m not spending too long on family dynamics – which is a massive area of psychology – because it can get VERY boring and it doesn’t give you much to take action on. It’s only good for understanding that this toxic shame is nothing to do with you or who you are, it’s a result of external circumstances. If you want to learn more about that I recommend reading ‘Homecoming’ by John Bradshaw. But it’s worth mentioning, albeit briefly, that your parents have a big role in this subconscious inadequacy. If one or both of them were critical/neglectful/smothering/needy/distant/overbearing/unstable/dependant/narcissistic, or pretty much anything, that’s going to cause toxic shame.

Source #

Author(s) || Connor McGonigal

Website || howtostopbeingacuckold.com

Article || 3.1 Childhood

Date || Between January 27th and November 14th, 2018

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contributors: ["Connor McGonigal"]

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