I believe it's important we explore our thoughts, feelings and experiences, pertaining to parental influences and culture. In many respects, it's how we learn to do things better and how we come to make positive changes in our life.
Consciously, we may not always equate how influential our parents or family are until we’re older or we have our own children, by which time the dye has been cast. It’s important to look at our relationships, knowing that traits we bring into our relationships are carried from childhood, based around cultures and made up of expectations about the world and how we must come to act.
How we act and react in our close relationships is largely a result of how we experience life in our family relationships. When it comes to committed relationships, there are without a doubt, clashes that we bring to the relationship, from our respective families.
As we begin to live our lives, it’s important we’re aware of family expectations, based around those early cultures. It’s vital we continue to work to change old expectations, so that new expectations can be formed. We come to learn through early experiences that culture and background traits take on inflexible characteristics, through which we often have very little choice.
During our lifetime, we will come to test and re-test programmed learning from our parents and will opt to either copy them, or change. Some of us of course will do neither and will continue to replicate our parents’ culture and personalities. Others will do the opposite, consciously making themselves aware of any new changes, they feel they should make.
It is only when our experiences force us to recognise other possibilities through new experiences that we begin to see and change any conditioned behaviour.
I tried so very hard to be different from my parents and ended up being just like them and so much worse! It pains me to think about it, since things could have turned out so differently if only I had accepted that I needed help.
In the world I grew up in, talking about my problems was like one of the 7 Deadly Sins. Even now it's a struggle at times to even begin to open up. I feel that old sense of dread that comes from breaking the code.
My parents weren't very good influences and we didn't really have a culture to guide us since we weren't exactly involved in the community.
I just find it to be so very exhausting as of late to be working on the myriad of issues that I have to deal with. No one ever really showed us how to live our lives, so we all made mistakes that have haunted us our whole lives.
Although I don't plan on giving up the fight, I can understand why there are some who choose to when they just can't do it anymore. I'm not sure of what exactly it is that I'm supposed to do now, so maybe it's time to focus on that issue.
People seem to think that it's just so easy to, 'get over it' when I would love to see them try!
Thanks Randy. Yes, that generation didn't seem to 'get it' when it came to parenting and although culture played a big part for many children, the parenting side in terms of emotions, just didn't exist.
I understand when you say, 'why there are some who choose to give up the fight.' It's so tiring having to keep up with all the baggage we have to deal with.
In my own case I believe being able to rationale my thoughts from an early age saved me. I unconsciously believed the time would come, where things would right themselves and I continued to unconsciously believe it. Inwardly I was quietly confident.
But you're right Randy, no one just 'gets over it.' We have to work at getting over it. I believe you can.