"You established your philosophy of life in childhood."
"Owing to the powerful influence of our abundant habit history, much of the time
we adults are still making major life decisions through the eyes of the child we
used to be."
"All of the negative psychic effects that make up a traumatic experience are caused
by distorted and inaccurate meanings that got stuck in the mind."
Meanings and Habits: How the
World Makes
Sense
As we grow and develop we have a universal need to make sense of what happens to
us, so that we can give ourselves an explanation that fits with our total experience
of life. It all has to add up and make sense to us at the end of the day. We need
to believe that we comprehend how and why things happen to us. We're uncomfortable
if things don't make sense to us. It's part of Internal Security. How can we take
care of ourselves if we can't detect the patterns in the way things work well enough
to predict probable outcomes of our behavior choices?
We build up the meanings in our adult world on the foundation of our meaning-making
in childhood. It may surprise you to learn that you established your philosophy
of life in childhood, but you did. Everyone has a philosophy of life.
Owing to the powerful influence of our abundant habit history, much of the time
we adults are still making major life decisions through the eyes of the child we
used to be. To one degree or another we're all subject to this phenomenon. I've
worked with more than one person who found and married a life partner (or two),
had and parented children, got and lost jobs, and established their adult relationships
entirely based on the value system, emotional maturity level and life philosophy
of a twelve-year-old, entirely by force of habit.
As adults we have conventions and concepts that give us the feeling that our world
generally makes sense to us and that it is manageable. During childhood, while the
foundations of our habits are being laid down, we understand far less about our
world than we will later in life. In childhood life frequently catches us by surprise
and often it is overwhelming. Children are frequently left to their own devices
to come up with explanations for things. How we make sense of our childhood world
can be wildly inaccurate, and, worse, we might never get the chance to correct our
misperceptions and faulty conclusions. People don't always realize how confused
children are, and many of the explanations adults give children only add to the
confusion because adults have forgotten what it's like to be and think like a naïve
child. Many children end up blaming themselves for having been sexually or physically
abused and neglected, for their parents' and other people's feelings and behavior,
for a divorce, a drug problem or a temper and for many other things that were far
beyond their control.
Distorted and mistaken meanings that get stuck on events can be the glue in the
plywood of bad habits that lasts a lifetime. All of the negative psychic effects
that make up a traumatic experience are caused by distorted and inaccurate meanings
that got stuck in the mind. This is also true of trauma that occurs in adulthood.
 | THINK RESPONSIBLY! |
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