Mental Paradoxes

Mental Paradoxes

Mental paradoxes are a psychological phenomenon that occurs when a child tries to get certain needs to be met on a repetitive basis, however the parent or caregiver is unable to give the consistent response that the child is wanting.  This process of “serve and return” exists in all parent child relationships and from the time a baby is born, when they cry, they are wanting a need to be met.  As they become toddlers, all through out the day, they need help to dress themselves, eat, use the bathroom, leave the house for activities and so on.  As the child grows, satisfying the limbic system or the emotional part of the brain is of great importance.

The limbic system is responsible for memories associated with fear, the fight or flight system, and overall, our emotional responses.  The brain develops from the brain stem outwards towards the neocortex, with the final region of brain development in the Frontal Lobe achieving completion by the time a person is 25 years old.  Healthy emotional responses (mid-brain region) which is a learned behaviour, are of great importance during the first 10 years of life.  When a baby is crying, do they get a healthy response, or are they ignored?  When a toddler falls and scrapes their knee, are they helped up and hugged or yelled at and made to feel bad for their mistake?

Gentle parenting has become increasingly popular over the last few decades, which demonstrates opposition to parenting styles that were heavily used in the baby-boomer generation.  The baby-boomers unfortunately were not given a lot of coddling or emotional comfort during their formative years.  Children were hit with objects or spanked quite frequently when punished, not only at home, but also at school.  There was very little education around gentle parenting at that time, and most of the baby-boomer generation grew up with ‘authoritarian parenting’ where they were afraid of their parents and did what they were told, with little explanation.  As the limbic system grows and a child is regularly taught to minimize their emotional response or to not feel anything, this creates a paradox.  Although everyone is innately born with emotional responses, if they are consistently told things like “its not ok to cry, toughen up” etc. these natural responses become muted and the child defaults to “ignore how I feel.”  Although this process on the surface seems to work ok, the subconscious mind operating in the background stores these situations as paradoxical distress.  Over time, the child who was taught to ignore their own emotions also ends up struggling in relationships where they cannot understand the emotional processing of others. Furthermore, it may become difficult for that child to develop a sense of authenticity as they learn to meet the needs of their parents, rather than normal or optimal growth of their true self.  A child’s emotions should always be validated and talked about – never dismissed, or discouraged. This process is entirely reliant on what parenting style the parent chooses.

In extreme cases where the child has a prolonged sense of need for basics such as shelter, food, nourishment, safety, or care during the critical stages of the limbic system formation, paradoxes may also form.  For example, if a child is consistently neglected, they eventually begin to believe they do not need the care anyway.  This of course is not true but during the development of the limbic brain system, we are taught through our parents and environment for how to make sense of the world.  When caregivers are incapable of giving a healthy attachment, this view becomes difficult for the child or adolescent to process and the mental paradoxes form; they simply believe they don’t need anyone else. This is how the brain operates in response to trauma.  As an adult, this person may crave to be alone and continue to see others as capable of hurting them, neglecting them or abandoning them.  Another example of this is often seen when kids go into foster care.  They often do extremely well for a few weeks to a few months, but the memories of early attachment have already been formed in the limbic system.  They continue to assume they will be discarded or abandoned at some point, so they begin to create situations to test this out, or often display patterns of self-sabotage.  Another common situation that occurs is frustration displacement, where the Foster parent receives accusations and actions that were actually intended towards the bio-parent.  This is because the distressing paradox in the subconscious mind has already been formed and healing this takes a lot of work.

Early development of the limbic system is a critical process in the healthy development of emotional regulation.  If the child experienced repetitive trauma, it is best to seek professional help to make sense of these early experiences and patterned ways of seeing the world.  Similar to the phenomenon of mental paradoxes, people often overgeneralize the population at large to what they directly experienced growing up.  If someone is raised by a mother who is an absent, abusive alcoholic, most of the time, that becomes their mental representation of women, even though this represents only +/- 10 % of the population of all women.  In reverse of that, if someone grows up with a very loving and nurturing mother, they too will overestimate the likelihood that all women are nice, kind, giving and so on, in alignment with what their earliest mental representations were.  At any point in time when meeting new people, once aware of this concept, it is extremely important to not carry the baggage of past people, parents, or relationships, into the new situation and give the person a complete blank slate, allowing for them to show who they are over time, without jumping to conclusions or preconceived notions.  Due to the brain being structured for survival, when it comes to childhood trauma, it gets very carried way in processing the world as always dangerous, always harmful, and jumping to negative conclusions that may be grave overestimates.

It is important to seek the help of a Professional who specializes in childhood trauma and unpack some of this information on your journey in life, while trying to create a healthy level of self-esteem and self-actualization.