Unaware parents dictate to their children the role they must fulfill in order to be valued.
In our families, we receive the emotional road map that we take with us for the journey that is our life. It includes our self-image, our expectations of how people will treat us in intimate relationships, and our definition of love. It becomes an unaware part of us—like the air we breathe.
Parenting is the hardest job there is, and no parent will do it perfectly. Because all parents bring their own unresolved issues to the task, all parents will miss meeting some fundamental need, leaving a painful imprint on their child’s psyche. This is why it is essential to a child’s healthy development that parents are willing to bring awareness to their parenting style and consider how their behavior is impacting their child.
Children need their parents to provide an accurate mirror of who they are. Children look to their parents to help them know what is valuable and lovable about them and how they fit in to their family. Children need caregivers who, in a warm, tender, respectful, and emotionally available way, help them to make sense of their world and to believe in their own goodness.
When a child’s feelings are not validated and their emotional needs are not met, they come to believe, deep inside, that they are unworthy of love and connection. Because it is far too threatening to see their caregivers as lacking, children unconsciously interpret their painful situations to mean their mistreatment is occurring because they don’t matter and are inherently unlovable. Without appropriate nurturing, children feel shame. Dysfunctional family systems encourage this tragic delusion to remain unquestioned into adulthood.
Rather than making space for their children to be who they are, unaware parents dictate to their children the role they must fulfill in order to be valued. A child may sense, “my role in the family is being smart or accomplished, or caretaking others, or being the peacemaker, the entertainer, the entitled one, the scapegoat, the butt of family jokes, the rebel, or the one who complies with others’ demands.” A child may feel an unspoken pressure from the family to remain in such a role. All too often, the family dynamic becomes one that overtly or covertly controls and undermines its members rather than supporting them to be who they truly are. This is the family trance. Living in the trance, we accept our family’s dynamic as “normal,” and we learn to treat ourselves the way our family members treated us, as we buy into our culture’s myth that families are where you are always loved appropriately.