Wings. About psychology – not psychological

The ability to imitate is one of those key properties of the primate brain that ultimately gave Homo Sapiens an overwhelming advantage over the rest of the animal kingdom. In order to pass on a new skill genetically, the animal world requires several generations.

The ability to learn through imitation allowed Home Sapiens to pass on significantly more and qualitatively more complex information to the next generation at a rate of one generation, as well as to master a huge number of new skills and behavior patterns throughout their lives.

In the first weeks of life, the baby unconsciously imitates the mother's smile. A smile is not yet colored by emotion, so it looks more like a grimace. It is noticeable that the baby himself does not control the facial muscles; all movements occur against his will. He may even get scared by what is happening to his face.

A few more weeks pass – and now the smile becomes bright, real – during this time the baby – also “closely” – learned from his mother his first emotion – to reciprocately rejoice at the meeting. After a few more weeks, you can march in front of him – and the child will move his arms and legs enthusiastically and very similarly. After a few more months, he, also imitating, will begin to learn speech: – Say: Ma-ma. “A-ah…” the baby will repeat clumsily.

By mastering words, he will simultaneously master the concepts associated with them. Gradually, speech will become more complex – the child will acquire the skill of understanding and working with the meanings of sentences. He will learn not only to repeat, but also to create meaningful phrases and voice his desires and ideas.

This, in turn, means that he masters the most complex process – thinking. And he also masters it “closely” – having in front of him role models – his mother and father.

From personal observations.

Remember, in the famous cartoon, the reaction of the Kid, looking around the space that Carlson had troubled:
– Yes, but what will dad say?
– What about our dad?
– Wow! – The Kid shows a formidable fist.

In another situation, the Kid says:
– Yes, but what will mom say?
– What will she say?
– She will be upset…

The child already has such accurate “virtual images” of his mother and father in his imagination that he is able to make a fairly accurate prediction of their future reactions. I remember well how in childhood we, little viewers watching the cartoon, began to empathize with the Kid – our prognosis was just as disappointing, because each of us also already had fairly accurate parental images in our heads.

From the very first moments of his life – still in the embryonic stage – a person feels his mother as his only external Universe, she is such for him in a literal, physical sense. Having been born, the baby continues to feel her as the only Universe – but not in a physical, but in a figurative sense: she not only continues to feed him, she teaches him emotions, words, thoughts, skills.

Growing up, the baby’s Universe expands – to the size of a house, yard, neighboring streets, city, country.

So communication skills with mother, with parents, becomes experience of interaction with friends, colleagues, with society.

A child joyfully accepted by his mother from birth will perceive all other manifestations of the big world, the Universe will also be joyful, he will be open to communication, such people find the same productive people, the chances of such individuals to achieve successful self-realization and take their rightful place in life are very high.

And, conversely, a childhood “charged” with conflicts will mean the same conflictual interpretation of all manifestations of the outside world, a friendly joke from a colleague will be perceived as an insult, and even the most friendly phrase can become a reason for a serious conflict, probably each of us, unfortunately, has had the experience encounters with such people.

From personal observations. The lack of parental attention received in childhood forces you to look for ways to make up for it throughout your life.

One of my first television projects was about theaters; it was a convenient excuse to visit the backstage of all the theaters in the city in which I then lived, to get to know and communicate with the actors. The discovery that amazed me then was that many of them were mediocre actors who had only mastered the acting technique well. Subconsciously, many of them suspected their inadequacy – but did not admit it to themselves and looked for any reason – even the smallest role! – to be on stage again, at least for a few seconds to be the center of attention – even if only for a few spectators who entered a provincial theater.

If they had been able to understand the origins of this attraction, to understand the parents who were unable to pay attention to them at one time – most likely their work would not have been related to the stage and they could have become excellent specialists in other professions – each of these actors was not mediocre he was a mediocre man only as an actor.

In different areas of psychology, there are the terms “father figure” and “mother figure”. These concepts were first introduced by S. Freud, who discovered that one of his clients was arguing not with him, but with his father, having carried out the so-called transfer of his disagreements with his parent to the psychotherapist. Erich Fromm formulates the mother figure as a figure who gives the child the experience of unconditional love, and the father figure as a figure who gives the child the experience of achieving conditional love.

It can be assumed that these are manifestations of those parental images that we discuss in this article, but, as we can see, the phenomenon described in our article describes processes of a different order, although in its manifestations it echoes the phenomena described in the works of the mentioned and other specialists , and, in my opinion, completely explains these manifestations.

Up to a certain age, children subconsciously and consciously imitate their parents: girls, when talking to dolls, will reproduce the words and intonations of their mothers, boys will imitate their fathers in their “boyish” affairs. In everyday life, you can notice that children, without realizing it, copy gait, posture, articulation and, of course, the behavior of their parents. This means that an even more complex process is taking place – the assimilation of the parents’ logic, their thinking and, therefore, to a large extent, their picture of the world. And the main essence of this process is that, obviously, each child in such a subconscious way adopts in a concentrated form the entire life experience of two adults – mother and father. In psychology there is a very precise term – internalization, that is, the adoption of external rules and guidelines as one’s own.

In adolescence, the process of critical reflection on the experience gained begins – a period of extreme behavior begins, rejection of existing rules and norms of behavior. This period, on average, ends by the age of 22-25, after which the birth of one’s own experience occurs as a synthesis of two experiences – received from parents and received independently. After this comes a long period of self-realization, in which one’s own experience is of greatest importance.

From personal observations.

I saw times when people with long hair might not be allowed to go to school, jeans were an object of satire and involvement in the negative part of socialist society, and Komsomol leaders came to the disco and broke reels of recordings of the Beatles and Time Machine over their knees. Nowadays, a hairstyle can be of the most intricate type and color, jeans can easily be combined with a respectable jacket, and such a set can be seen even at a presidential reception, and the works of rock bands are performed by classical music orchestras – in the most conservative music halls.

Thus, new standards of social behavior and culture mastered by young people become the norm, and this happens within one generation. And if there had not been a constant struggle between the old and the new, then humanity would never have emerged from its primitive caves.

I repeat – every child begins his life with subconscious learning through imitation, adopting the social skills and experience accumulated by his parentswhich later, having critically comprehended and enriched with its own, will pass on to its children in the language of subconscious reactions – who will perceive them through imitation and appropriate them as methods of understanding and describing reality.

This is an objective process determined by the structure of our brain and psyche; each of us possesses it. It is the ability to learn through imitation and reproduction of behavior, skills and social interaction observed in other people that has made it possible to transfer a huge amount of useful knowledge from generation to generation, and the ability has the property of unlimited scaling. Relatively speaking, having seen how one monkey hit an opponent with a stick, the whole flock will instantly master this technique, and the flock of rivals too. With the advent of speech, the ability to transmit and assimilate new knowledge provided the species with a non-competitive advantage over the rest of the animal world.

From all this it follows that “virtual images” of parents are an integral part of a person’s inner “I”, his personality, and accompany him – whether he wants it or not – throughout his life. These images influence all decisions made by a person – both in the immediate, current situation, and in future scenarios predicted in the imagination.

Now is the time to take a deeper look at this process. Each of the parents was a child. Learning and adopting life experience from your parents. Each of them was also a child and also went through the entire cycle of learning from their parents, critical thinking, enriching it with their experience and passing on their experience to their children. And so – until, again, the conditional Adam and Eve. Thus, we can say that each child, being at the top of his ancestral pyramid, through his parents’ “virtual images” gains access to a colossal resource – two ancestral experiences of many generations, which are accumulated in each of the parents. It can be assumed with a high degree of certainty that this resource is our intuition or its fundamental basis.

The self develops in a close relationship with the images of the parents.

This means that parents give birth to a child twice – first as a physical body, and then as a person.

What conclusions and hypotheses can we draw from this?

1. images of parents are integral parts of the child’s personality, his own “I” and remain so throughout his life; 2. images of parents, being part of the personality of an adult, are perceived by his child as the total experience of the parent and are inseparably included in the image of the parent created in his mind; 3. the image of the parent contains the total ancestral experience of the entire family of the parent; 4. the child’s internal conflict, caused by psychological trauma from the parent, partially or completely isolates the child’s own “I” from the birth experience of this parent – by rejecting the “bad” part of the parent, the child’s inner “I” will reject part of the parent’s image, and therefore part experience of parental image; 5. after working through psychological trauma, the person’s inner “I” restores access to the parent’s birth experience.

As an additional consequence, we need to understand one more important circumstance.

Modern psychological counseling practice tends to focus on the relationship between the client and his parents, rarely going beyond this triangle. The phenomenon of the ancestral resource described in the article explains the need to cover relationships to as great a depth as possible – to the level of grandfathers, great-grandfathers and beyond.

When investigating a conflict at the client-parent level, the client faces the need to transform his childhood grievances into a relationship based on love, overcoming internal resistance – because childhood grievances, as a rule, arise as a child’s interpretation of adult manifestations into aggression against him. In this process, the client – an adult who has already grown from a traumatized child – still faces the need to enter into a relationship – even if it is work in the imagination – with a “bad mom” and a “bad dad”, positioning his “I” as “good”, but the victim. It is difficult for a person to part with a grudge – after all, this was his own way of self-love, saving himself from a traumatic situation. Often such a step requires admitting one’s own mistake, wrongness, this complicates the situation and if a person does not find the strength in himself, then so be it. leaves the situation unresolved.

In the case of covering relationships to the level of grandfathers and great-grandfathers, it is possible to explain the motives of the client’s parents through their childhood – by finding in it the prerequisites that formed the behavior of the parents, which traumatized the client’s childhood.

The child “receives” parents already in a “ready” form – mature adults. He has no experience of life at this age, and often understanding of parents occurs only after reaching the age of the parents, with obtaining comparable life experience. Let's say, it is difficult for a 20-year-old young man to explain the motives of his parents, who were 30-40 years old at the time of his birth. But if you “guide” him through the childhood period of his parents, i.e., through the age, the experience of which he himself has not forgotten, you can get a deep understanding and sincere empathy for the collisions that occurred in the childhood of his parents and formed traumatic patterns for him behavior.

This technique evokes the client’s sympathy for his parents, helps to understand their motives and see in their actions not aggression, but a consequence of their difficult childhood. The effect is enhanced if the client’s knowledge of distant ancestors allows him to repeat the technique of “living childhood” in relation to grandfathers and great-grandfathers. The technique is especially effective if the realities of the childhood of ancestors are correlated with historical conflicts – wars, repressions, dispossession, etc.

With this approach, the client’s internal resistance decreases, overcoming internal conflict with parents and establishing relationships is much easier. The client’s inner “I” gains harmonious acceptance of parental images, cleared of grievances and conflicts, the personality becomes whole, self-esteem returns to the level of self-sufficiency – this is always reflected in relationships in the family, in personal life and in professional activities in the most positive way, the perception of the world becomes positive .

From personal observations.

Very often, the root of some of the parents’ reactions (touchiness, rationalization, inability to handle money) can be found in the childhood of their ancestors who survived political repression and dispossession. People who have experienced severe injustice, deprivation of property and subsequent exile experience a similar set of dramatic feelings, withdraw into themselves, become immersed in fear and suspicion. It is obvious that children raised in such an atmosphere will inevitably receive similar childhood traumas, which will be copied by their children. This understanding debunks many established and popular mystical and esoteric positions, such as “unfavorable karma”, “ancestral curse”, “evil eye”, etc. Understanding the origins of the key – first – trauma often helps to find the shortest path to solving the client's problems.

In conclusion, I would like to move away from dry logic and move on to a more lively language of metaphors.

Every time we find ourselves in a situation of choice – in a momentary situation or planning long-term scenarios, especially with a large “novelty coefficient”, a coefficient of unknown – we inevitably turn not only to our knowledge, but also to intuition. If our assumption is that the ancestral experience, concentrated in the parental experience, is the basis of our intuition, then it is obvious that the “right to vote” is involved in the choice of the option – “to go left or right”, who to be with, and, finally, who to be. and parental images – “inner mom” and “inner dad”. One of the ancestors was in a similar situation and, since the family continued to exist, chose the right decision. And ancestral memory can respond to the current situation and suggest a choice. In the case of unresolved childhood grievances and internal conflicts, parental images are fragmented – “mom is good”, “mom is bad”, “dad is good”, “dad is bad”. Thus, in situations of choice, the inner “I” has a relationship not with two agreed upon images that suggest the right decision, but with several, with some of which the “I” is in antagonism, and each of which suggests its own version of the development of events. Therefore, the possibility of an erroneous choice is extremely high, and the individual tends to evaluate himself too critically; low self-esteem causes vulnerability to the opinions of others. Often such a person chooses a decision not in favor of his own interests, but in order to “look decent” in the eyes of society or a specific person, whose opinion dominates his own opinion.

Internal conflicts, isolating the “I” from the generic resource, leave a person alone with his problems; in his feelings he is alone against the Universe. We are social creatures, even for a very strong personality, loneliness is a severe test, full of internal struggle; the contradictions of the inner world become projections onto the outer world, a person rushes about without a goal, causing wounds to himself and those around him.

The cumulative birth experience, concentrated in the image of parents, is a powerful force. Well-established relationships with parents, freed from childhood traumas and grievances, help their child—often an adult—to realize their “I” more fully. And in situations of choice, when the conscious “I” is faced with a choice, the “inner father” “says”:
– I know you can do it!
And the “inner mother” supports:
– I believe that you can handle it!

And together they say:
– If you make a mistake, we will accept you as you are.

In such unity with the internal images of parents, self-esteem can be neither underestimated nor overestimated, the inner “I” is fully aware and accepts both its strengths and weaknesses.

This means that the personality of such a person is invulnerable, both from external opinions and manipulations, and from internal torment and contradictions.

Such a person lives in harmony with the outside world, with the Universe, he is not alone, he is accepted by the “pack” of his kind, he clearly sees his place and his purpose.

From personal observations.

After writing most of this article, I was lucky to be present at my eldest daughter’s 16th birthday! – my close friends. There are four children in a friendly family, they are surrounded by the care and great love of their parents and respond to them with the same sincerity. At the time of the feast, the toast was given to my mother, she made a big speech full of kind words, which she ended with the phrase:

– We put a lot of work into raising you, we have always loved you and love you. You are starting to have a difficult time searching and there will definitely be mistakes. Always remember – we will accept you and love you, no matter what happens to you, you can always count on our support and understanding. And we believe that you will find yourself and become a worthy person.

Just imagine what wings of strength – and responsibility – a young girl grows from such words. PS Enough time has passed since this article was written, and now the girl has a completely successful business and an active life.

The two accepted parental experiences are those powerful wings that uncontrollably carry the personality – through self-realization, through understanding the meaning of one’s life – to the goal, to the main meanings of Existence.

Conclusion

The role of the brain's imitative capacity in the evolutionary leap and leadership of our species may be much broader and deeper than learning and empathy. It was the ability to imitate that developed in primates that led to the adoption of parental experience – both in terms of skills and in terms of social interactions – which made it possible, in a relatively short time, to transmit from adult to child, from adult to adult, from generation to generation a huge number of logical, speech and other behavioral skills. constructions, made it possible to complicate the inner “I” of the individual and the reality perceived by him. And awareness in the above context of the role of this ability in the general functioning of the brain helps to better understand some of the psychological processes of a person’s personality.

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