Telling our children about what we know and knowing how to say what we do not know or cannot know is the best way to protect them from unwanted excitement from previous generations.
Most of the secrets depend on an unsurpassed trauma. A personal trauma; A social trauma such as grief, harassment, rape or miscarriage; such as natural disaster, terrorist attack or war, migration.
If we compare our spiritual system to our digestive tube, the swallowed foods are broken down for digestion and these parts are used as basic materials for new syntheses. Likewise, in order to digest our world experiences, we do not reduce them to parts and associate these old experiences with our new ones. Because some situations occur due to unusual events. Spiritual digestion will not be easy either. When it happens to us, it is necessary to give a spiritual response. This is called symbolizing capacity in psychoanalysis. Sometimes symbolizing; It becomes difficult to put the experienced events into words and designs. The organism falls into a falsity. Spiritual meaning cannot be found. His current strategy seems to be to sweep the difficulties under the carpet.
The best way to hide this difficult situation will be solutions that are quick and feel good at the moment, such as a built-in wardrobe or a chest. Putting aside whatever is disapproved seems to be a solution to the distress. When a natural disaster, war scenes, rapes are a world experience that cannot be symbolized with words, it will be symbolized with images, attitudes and gestures. A mother smilingly looking at her baby suddenly stops laughing, and a father holding his child affectionately while watching TV suddenly becomes stiff. Do you think these are causeless? There must be a specific reason for such sudden changes in attitude, facial expressions, behavior and tone of voice.
While mysterious events are "ineffable" for those who experienced them, the same events become "unnameable" for the second generation. For the 3rd generation, it becomes "unthinkable". Even the existence of the secret cannot be known. The 3rd generation feels this situation as a child and as an adult with sensations, behaviors and images that seem "strange" to them, and cannot explain these with their own spiritual life or family history.
It will seriously affect the learning process, and psychotic attitudes, serious intellectual disabilities, or various forms of addiction or criminality may be seen in subsequent generations. It may even interfere with its reproductive function. Thus, it appears that some lineages may disappear without cause.
IS THIS A FATE?
This situation is not a fate. If a traumatized parent can talk about the existence of this secret when they are with their children and invite them to think that this is a situation that only concerns them, the risk of the above situations and diseases will undoubtedly be reduced.
An adolescent came to psychotherapy because of his barefoot phobia. He was incredibly afraid of seeing and thinking about bare feet. According to the parent interview, the grandfather who lived in the same house hanged himself when he was 6 years old. This incident was hidden from the little girl, but the child felt the emotional burden that surrounded the family. He tried to suppress these intense emotions by connecting them to the snippets of the words he heard. Among the words he heard, he connected the letters of the word "hanged" to the word "barefoot", which he knew well, since this word was not in his vocabulary yet. This little girl grew up focusing all her anxiety on bare feet. What would these secrets be if they were not solved in therapy? How would a mother with barefoot phobia take care of her baby's feet and wash them? How do you think she would teach him to walk? Such a baby could even show body image disturbances or gait defects.
The distress caused by a generation's secret, when it involves unspoken behavior, can affect even a very young baby with unhealthy care provided to him.
WHAT REACTIONS DOES A CHILD SHOW WHEN HE FACES A FAMILY SECRET?
When a child encounters some symptoms in his parents, he will question their origin. Like an explorer in unknown lands, she progresses through trial and error and tries to understand what cannot be prevented. Thus, the child can gravitate towards 4 possible psychological attitudes.
First of all, this group sees itself as responsible for the suffering that overwhelms its parents. This is often more true in young children. child In the first years of his life, he actually seems to volunteer to be the center of the concerns of the adults surrounding him. The problem is that the child who feels guilty about his parents' suffering cannot appease it. And he continues this cycle with the delusion that he can relieve the pain of others by soothing them. These people often marry partners who blame them.
Children who are kept in the unknown of what is hidden from them think the worst. And this, as a “worst” outcome, has more devastating consequences for them than the disclosure of the secret. They convince themselves that they are guilty of a terrible and shameful event that their parents hid from them. These children are not consumed by guilt like the other group, but by the loss of trust in their parents. And in this case, they also lose trust in adults, such as teachers and educators, to whom their parents delegate some of their authority.
These children lose confidence in their own abilities when they encounter parents who ignore the existence of the secret and tell them that the situation is not as they see, hear or intuit. And this may lead to various educational problems. Later, they may become adults who inherit authority from their parents and obey because they think they are always right, so much so that they act like slaves. One consequence of family secrets is thus over-adaptation.
After all, children who grow up in a secretive family become adults who create new secrets themselves when their turn comes. Since they cannot suppress the secrets of which they are victims, they try to create other secrets that they can control.
In order to avoid these reactions, parents should share painful problems with their children, not to “explain everything” but to convince them that if they are suffering, it is not their fault. They should talk. Also, by talking about their problems early, parents gradually get used to the words with which to address that issue, and when the child is old enough to understand everything, the words come easily to their lips.
TO CHILDREN HOW SHOULD THE SECRETS OF THE FAMILY BE TALKED ABOUT?
When parents decide to tell their children about a secret that has been carefully guarded for years, of course it is not about "telling everything".
It is important for parents who will talk about a painful secret with their children to first insist that they are not responsible for it. And of course, for this reason, the reality that has been hidden from him until now should be presented to him not as a "secret", but as a fact that is difficult to talk about but that his parents are ready to give him the information he wants. It is not necessary to give the adult the information he has mastered at once, it is only necessary to explain to him that he has the freedom to question and understand.
Let's give an example; How should a woman who was sexually abused by her father at an early age explain this to her child?
“When your grandfather and I were always together, you may have noticed that there is a difficult situation between your grandfather and me. You have noticed that sometimes we look at each other in a hostile way and there is often tension between the two of us. What you see is not a dream, it is reality. You can be sure of your feelings. But know that this situation is not about you. You have nothing to do with this situation. This is about problems that we, your grandfather and I, went through a long time ago. And since the situation happened long before you were born, it has nothing to do with you.”
Thus, the child finally receives confirmation that the problems he feels and cannot understand between his mother and grandfather are not a figment of his imagination. This gives him proof that he should not give up on his feelings and that his intuition is strong. Although this explanation will be sufficient for a while, questions will then arise about what kind of "problem" there is. The explanation here will be to follow the path the child knows.
“At school they explained to you that your body belongs to you and adults have no right to touch you if you don't like it. But when I was young, they didn't explain all this to us. So it was really hard for us to understand what was happening to us and to protect ourselves. The child will think about this answer for a while before asking new questions to obtain new information. But there is no difference between his mother and his grandfather. He will continue to ask what happened. Here, the child should first be asked what he wants to learn. Did you keep thinking about these things after we talked? What did you think, what did you dream? If the child says that he dreamed of his grandfather caressing his mother when he was little, the mother may confirm this, but no more. If the child asks what kind of caresses his grandfather makes, he should again ask what the child is thinking and designing. He must approve whatever he designs. In such a situation, the child's confidence in both himself and his parents is strengthened. On the other hand, after everything the parents say, they say, "This experience with your grandfather is about me, it's just between your grandfather and me." You have nothing to do with this incident. Separating himself from the child by saying "You are someone else, I am someone else" will prevent the child from becoming someone who absorbs his mother's pain and needs to defend his mother.
But it is quite obvious that in order to adopt such an attitude, a parent must first do intense work on himself. He must get used to the terrible event he has experienced and also learn to find words to talk about it easily.
WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WHEN IT FEELING THE VICTIM OF A SECRET?
We need to question our memory to find memories that do not seem to be hiding something from us. Although this effort does not reveal a secret, it at least informs us about the distortions in our personality that occur under the influence of the secret. This realization is fundamental. Because it will prevent us from harming our children later with our own troubles.
From this point of view, it should always be known that in families where there is a painful secret from the previous generation, children find the solution by silencing all their questions because they are afraid of awakening their parents' pain. On the contrary, in families where parents reveal their personal pain by telling their children that they are not responsible for this, children feel freer to ask questions that come to their minds.
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