I met a guy years ago, when I was just a baby-woman of 23. He was a successful entrepreneur who was really into psychology. I’d wanted to pick his brains about business (I knew very little about psychology at the time, especially my own), yet he kept asking very probing questions about my life experience. I couldn’t fathom why. In the grand scheme of things, my life had been very uneventful. Yet his gaze was unyielding, his interest relentless. I soon found myself talking to him in a way I would never normally allow myself. My stalwart defences apparently took a lunch break.
He wanted to know how my mum and dad met. He wanted the full story - who they were as people, how they got together, what kind of world I was born into, what kind of relationship I was born into. I had to confess that although I knew the trajectory, I had never given it much thought. It pre-dated personal memory and their story pre-dated me, so it wasn’t really any of my business!
My interrogator disagreed. “It’s pivotal information for you! It’s what initially shapes your entire psychology”.
My parents met at work. My dad ran a factory where my mum became employed and in my dad’s words, “she was and still is the love of [his] life”. It certainly wasn’t straightforward. They were both in unhappy marriages at the time. They both had children. They had both previously settled for marriage as an inevitable older life-stage (my mum aged 19, my dad 23 …it was a different time) before realising they were miserably mismatched with their partners.
They met each other and fell in love. I was the product of an affair that eventually blew up both their worlds, and my announcement in their lives was unexpected and inconvenient to say the least. A trigger had been pulled and I was the bullet that could not be retracted.
My father was soon to divorce, which involved a messy fight for custody of a young daughter he was eventually forced to leave behind, for which he never forgave himself. Despite being dedicated to his new life, he found it impossible to love another little girl out of unconscious loyalty to the daughter he left behind.
Meanwhile, my mother was desperate to make good of this complicated situation to prove that it was all worth it, so for her I needed to be perfect. I needed to be a good thing in their lives. A shining beacon of hope and joy. No hassle, no tears, no aggro.
These were my first impressions of the world and my place in it. I was an unwelcome problem and thus developed the mindset that would pervade throughout my life - that I needed to prove my worth. I committed an emotional lifetime to trying to get my father to acknowledge me, and live up to the standards set by my mother (who I, in turn, saw as perfect). I tried to walk the tightrope of perfection but my little feet frequently misstepped. I fell hard and often. I’d put myself on a torturous hamster-wheel of perceived failure and rejection, which became internalised as self-hatred.
To have some random bloke point this out to me was bizarre and confronting. However, his line of questioning cracked a nut of information that would become pivotal in the piecing together of my psychology.
That man went on to become a mentor to me for years, and I now realise what he’d seen at the time. I’d wanted to understand business but he knew that first I needed to understand myself.
We are beautifully complex individuals, but we are also a product of two other beautifully complex individuals. So of course our parents’ story is relevant to how we move through the world. Not just how they got together but their backstories before that, and their parents’ backstories before that.
As babies we are starving and screaming for information, gobbling up every piece of code we can find in the communication of our surroundings. We will read energy before we learn to read words - how wanted we are, how safe we are, how allowed it is to make mistakes, whether we are a joy, a nuisance, a burden, or without relevance at all. Our clever little minds will then calibrate our perception and behaviours according to that code.
We might be aware of something major that shaped us in early life, but we often overlook the more subtle messages that shaped our view of self. An important part of developing our mindset is understanding the original coding it’s working from.
So, what does your origin story tell you about the character journey you embarked upon? What code were you given to work with, and what scripts might need updating for the future of your story?
The Truth is in the Breakdown
The atmosphere (energy/tension) of the environment we are born into has a direct impact on our developing mind, behaviours and sense of Self.
We often don’t consider the nuances and emotions of our parents at the time of our conception. What pressures did they have and how did this affect them? How hopeful or anxious were they about the future? Did they feel excited or trapped? Prepared or under-resourced? What core scripts did they themselves have that might have impacted their mindset as a parent and spouse?
How do you think you initially interpreted your earliest environment as a way to make sense of the world?
It can be powerful in our understanding of Self to map out the details of our origin and pre-origin story. ..And to get the important answers, we need to be asking the important questions.
What’s Your Story?
Map out what you know of the conditions in which you came into the world.
What do you perceive were the emotions of the people involved at each stage? Be as detailed as you can.
What unconscious messages or core scripts might you have received from this time?
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