Recently during one of my classes with children, at the end a student came up to me and hugged me. There was a lot of joy and love in her eyes and smile. Such manifestations of children’s love for me pleasantly surprise me. And the first thought in my head is that I didn’t do anything special for this. What did I do to deserve her love? And it even becomes somehow uncomfortable at such moments, somehow unusual. As children, we were raised so that we were all good. A good girl. Good boy. There's a twist to this. The fact is that parents often want too much from their children, for them to be good, comfortable. “I want my daughter to listen to me all the time, not be angry, not offended, not to be selfish.” “I want my son to be real a man, such a gentleman, was strong, kind, could always defend himself and others.”If children do not meet these requirements, many parents, who are not yet quite adults inside, begin to “slide” into a childish position, taking offense at their children for their feelings. Parents punish their children with silence, leave home, promise to send them to an orphanage if the child does not stop arguing, and engage in physical violence. And these punishments are not about the fact that this is necessary, but about the fact that often parents cannot stand it, they do not know how to contain strong feelings of children. In the short term, parents get the desired result - the child is scared that you will abandon him, and begins to obey you. If parents engage in such punishments constantly, then the child is reinforced with the fact that in order to be LOVED, you need to: - deny your desires - you can’t just love me like that, you have to prove something - always listen to everyone, don’t have your own opinion, because then they scold me - if someone is silent or offended, it means I’m bad and they don’t like me And all this is carried with us like baggage , into our lives. We choose partners where we need to earn love. This is how we end up in dependent relationships. We try a lot to please all the people, but this won’t make them love us any more. It seems to us that while we remain such good girls and boys, everyone will pat us on the head and say that they love us... We don’t We believe that love does not need to be earned. It either exists or it doesn’t. I have sympathy, love, and warm feelings for many people. And if you ask me - why do you love? I don’t know what to say. And the person didn’t do anything special for this. If only you were yourself) But you also need to be able to be yourself, when this belief “you have to earn love” is spinning in your head, it’s incredibly difficult! The most surprising thing is that you start pretending less and pretending to be a good person, just as you start doing more in life feel love) Your psychologist Svetlana BerezyukSign up for a consultation Viber / Whatsapp / tel. +79200027306