Einstein used to say “life is like riding a bicycle, if you want to stay balanced you have to move”.
Wise words, but this bicycle must first learn to ride it, every child needs an adult to educate him to do it, he needs to be supported, those wheels that give him safety, and at the same time, to be left free to ride. alone.
Making a Flexible Structure that contains the child's Self is the great job of the adult, which starts from the birth of the child until his / her young adulthood.
At birth, the fragmentation process of the self is physiological and natural, it is part of the experience and evolution that every soul must go through to incarnate and to live life on earth as traveling heroes.
Parents and, especially initially, the mother, must try to contain this small fragmented egg, so as to avoid breaking it, holding it too strong or being afraid of not holding it enough.
In short, how we manage to hold this fragile little egg when it comes into the world is what will determine the reunification of the fragments for a new and very personal form that the child, by expressing himself, will be able to take into his life.
How can we allow ourselves to be guided with simplicity and confidence by our intuition in order to create a flexible containment that keeps fragmentation, but at the same time follows the evolutionary process of the child?
First recognizing in which structure it is inserted our inner child to be able to to separate from it in the moment in which we must open ourselves to education of our children.
As Christina Grof wonderfully explains:
“Some are fortunate enough to be born to loving and well-trained parents, who encourage their children's qualities and nurture their spiritual nature. They respect children and help their personality and creativity emerge. Take the time to guide and comfort them, to teach them to learn from them. And they have the humility to admit their mistakes and learn from them. openly discuss the problems that arise. Therefore the atmosphere in the house is full of love, acceptance, tenderness, flexibility.
People who raise such an environment feel the world is welcoming, resourceful, exciting. They are able to easily connect with beauty and joy. They feel they are blessed to be alive and consider life, even with all its imperfections, worth living as fully as possible.
The days are welcome for them and filled with riches. difficult situations are a challenge, not a problem. The glass is half full and not half empty. These people find their life more easily in the world. Everywhere they feel at home. They are more likely to have self-confidence, to be successful. Thanks to the love they have received, they preserve and cultivate the bond with their Divine origin and, consequently, they have the chance to develop a sense of openness towards themselves and the world "
(C. Gr, Healing from addiction, Red Edizioni, Como p. 43)
Unfortunately, parental containment is not always of this type, very often the parents and adults who are around the child have great difficulty in containing in the right way, and therefore disorders, difficulties in managing emotions, closures, symbiotic relationships and / or dysfunctional family members.
It is clear that the propensity that I call here "containment" is not the only possible cause of disorders in childhood, there may be other and innumerable variables (trauma for example), but, even if there are problems of another nature, a flexible way of evolving fragmentation makes a substantial difference.
The way we adults build the structure around the child's Self is very important, because it determines the personality the child will have as an adult and the type of reaction he will have to the frustrations, problems and obstacles of life.
I have identified three forms of structure that we usually encounter in the growth of children:
1) Rigid structure
It occurs when containment, both initially maternal and then later paternal, are rigid in a significant way.
There is a tendency not to dwell on the needs of the child, on the nature of the child's personality, but a structure based on the rules, expectations and visions of the parents, which must be absolutely respected, arises.
Sometimes what drives this type of structure is theanxiety of not being able to understand what the child really is, a fear of not fulfilling the parental role adequately, of the underlying insecurities and, sometimes, a great interference of relatives and friends who give recipes and advice on what to do and not to do.
The typical example is the sentence "Do not let the child get used to the arms", that is, avoid taking the baby too often in your arms. It is clear that the child has to face frustrations in order to "fragment", but it is also true that picking up the child when we feel he needs it helps him to keep the fragmentation in place without breaking.
To contain in a too rigid and structured way, not allowing flexibility in the way the child is or expresses himself, can determine in him anxious attitudes, unjustified fears, a tendency to evade the rules or follow them slavishly, obsessive thoughts, demotivation or, on the contrary, contempt for authority and arrogance.
We can therefore meet highly functioning children, very adequate in appearance, but who have deep fears, who are very serious, more mature than normal, who have lost the quicksilver of childhood.
Or oppositional children, who theoretically try to rebel against the grip of the rigidity of this structure, capable of attracting the attention of the adult through exaggerated and unsettling behaviors, which have little respect for the role of the adult and for the rules that are given to him.
2) Weak / absent structure
This type of structure occurs when the containment of the fragmentation that the child has to face at birth is not sufficient to give the child a sense of security.
We could talk in part about what Bolwby calls insecure attachment.
The parental figures do not really listen to them, nor do they speak to them. In fact, the attachment relationship between these children and their mothers is mainly constituted by theabsence of true interaction.
In some cases, this condition is due to the fact that the mother figure is absent and disinterested (sometimes due to a psychic or organic illness) and the paternal one is not able to guarantee a meaningfully caring presence; in other cases, however, it is excessively present, to the point of showing itself intrusive and oppressive, and, at the same time, unable to really listen and communicate with the child.
In this sense the child feels floating in the infinite possibilities and visions of life, unable to recognize what is right or good from what is bad for him.
We can expect a adolescent or adult unable to establish deep relationships, to trust others, with tendencies to be shy. We might see a child with concentration or attention disorders, who cannot completely process a stimulus, but who quickly passes from one to the other without carrying out adequate processing of the processes.
A sense of lack of containment it can also bring experiences of depression, profound sense of loneliness, insecurity, inability to stick to the structure offered by the adult, crisis of anger, rebellion.
3) Flexible structure
This is the kind of healthy structure Christina Grof talks about, you have when the parental containment is such that the child can feel that he is expressing his own self within embankments capable of holding him and giving him a direction, leaving him the ease of "moving" freely.
It is a condition in which the parent must develop a very accurate feeling and sense of the child, capable of perceiving his needs and gratifying them, without suffering them.
The vision of all my work as a psychotherapist and the objective of my Course "The Integral Child" want to provide the tools and skills for the realization of a structure of this type.
By favoring the healing process of the inner child of the adult, the parent learns the way of being "in presence", taking the right inner distance from everything that can lead him to lose linear and clean contact with the child, not to be carried away. away from anxieties, insecurities, anger or projections that risk making the child represent a part of our self that is injured and / or that we have not resolved.
So let's work on ourselves, let's look inside with courage to face the monsters that the care of the inner child can bring out from the depths.
We learn to balance on the bicycle and become who we really are, containers full of love, acceptance and beauty.
Dr. Emanuela Fonticoli
Article by Naima Rossi
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