Name: 當你有一個糟糕的童年時，就會受到責備。 (Criticism when you've had a bad childhood)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:33:16.000Z
Duration: 5 min 57 s
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Criticism is never easy. To learn that others
judge us to be foolish, perverse, ugly or

轉承詞

unpleasant is one of the most challenging
aspects of any life. However, the impact of

程度副詞

criticism is hugely variable – and depends
ultimately on a rather unexpected detail:

what sort of childhood we have had. The clue
to whether criticism will be experienced as

merely unpleasant or wholly catastrophic lies
in what happened to us many decades ago in

the hands of our earliest caregivers. What
is meant by a 'bad childhood' is here

a matter, rather simply, of love. An infant
arrives in the world with a very limited capacity

to endure their own being. It is the tolerance,
enthusiasm and forgiveness of another person

that gradually acclimatises us to existence.
Our caregivers' characteristic way of looking

at us becomes the way we consider ourselves.
It is by being loved by another that we acquire

the art of looking sympathetically on our
cracked and troublesome beings. It is simply

not in our remit to believe in ourselves on
our own. We are utterly reliant on an inner

sense of having been valued inordinately by
another person at the start as a protection

against the subsequent neglect of the world.
We don't need to be loved by many, one will

do, and twelve years might be enough, sixteen
ideally, but without it the eternal admiration

of millions won't ever be able to convince
us of our goodness. And with such a love,

the scorn of millions won't ever need to
be fatal. Bad childhoods have an unfortunate

tendency to drive us to seek out situations
in which there is a theoretical possibility

of receiving outsized approval – which also
means, along the way, a high risk of encountering

outsized disapproval. The emotionally deprived
return, almost manically to the question,

never really settled of: 'Do I deserve to
exist?' And this is why they typically put

unusual effort into attempts to be famous
and visibly successful. But of course the

world at large will never give the emotionally
nervous the unqualified confirmation they

seek; there will always be dissenters and
critics, people too bashed about by their

own past to be able to be kind to others,
and it is to these voices that those with

bad childhoods will be attuned, however enthusiastic
the crowd might be. We can observe, along

the way, that the chief marker of being a
good parent is that one's child simply has

zero interest in being liked by large numbers
of strangers. We do not all hear the same

thing when we are criticised. Some of us,
the lucky ones, hear just the surface message

from the here and now: that our work fell
short of expectations, that we must try harder

with our assignments, that our book, film
or song wasn't excellent. This can be bearable.

But the more wounded among us hear far more.
Criticism takes them straight back to the

primordial injury. An attack now becomes entwined
with the attacks of the past and grows enormous

and unmanageable in its intensity. The boss
or unfriendly colleague becomes the parent

who let us down. Everything is pulled into
question. Not only was the work subpar, we

are a wretch, an undeserved being, a piece
of excrement, the worst person in the world,

for that is how it felt, back then, in the
fragile, defenceless infant mind. Knowing

more about our tricky childhoods provides
us with a vital line of defence against the

effects of criticism. It means that we can
be on our guard, when we are attacked, against

raising the stakes unnecessarily. We can learn
to separate out the verdict of today from

the emotional verdict we are carrying around
with us and always seeking to confirm with

the use of current events. We can learn that,
however sad the attacks we are facing, they

are as nothing next to the real tragedy and
the effective cause of our sadness: that things

went wrong back then. And so we can direct
our attention to where it really belongs;

away from today's critics and towards the
unconvinced parent of yesteryear. We can forgive

ourselves for being, in this area, through
no fault of our own, fatefully sensitive – and,

in essence, mentally unwell. We cannot stop
the attacks of the world, but we can – through

an exploration of our histories – change
what they mean to us. We can also, importantly,

get a second chance: we can go back and correct
the original verdict of the world. We can

take measures to expose ourselves to the gaze
of friends or, more ideally, of a talented

therapist who can hold up a more benign mirror
and teach us a lesson that should have been

gifted us from the start; that like every
human, whatever our flaws, we deserve to be here.

At The School of Life we believe that confidence is a skill we can learn.

Our confidence prompt cards are designed to help us master this mysterious art.  Click now to learn more.