We are sometimes surprised at the type of relationship that is established between one of the parents and a child who does not a priori present any particular characteristics, but these parents were children, had brothers and sisters, and the relationships between them were not always idyllic.
It is commonplace to cite the jealousy of a child, unique until then, towards a cute baby who arouses the joy and admiration of adults.but for a long time parents have worked to defuse this resentment well before the arrival of the troublemaker. The child, now promoted to the rank of eldest, has understood that his image would suffer seriously if he allowed a glimpse of some of the feelings, which he knows are reprehensible, which invade him. He doesn’t want to give the image of a selfish, mean and heartless child, so he puts on a good face and represses his painful anger.
The situation gets even worse when this younger child becomes a beautiful child adorned with all the qualities, the resentment, always carefully repressed, of the eldest becomes a cruel torment which does not leave him in peace. Naturally, there are several cases of situations likely to arouse jealousy which seems very legitimate in the eyes of the person who considers himself frustrated by a particularly malicious and bitter fate against him: he is less handsome, less brilliant, less charming, it is never him that we look at, strangers to the family hardly speak to him, whatever his place in the siblings.
This anger, accumulated for so long, finally finds an outlet when, having become an adult, this child wronged by a perverse destiny finds in his own children the image of his brothers and sisters who had eclipsed him, but, this time, the power belongs to him, his anger, which remained hidden, can finally be expressed. A mother who spent her childhood and especially her adolescence in the shadow of a dazzling sister, will see in her pretty little daughter the image of this much jealous sister: she will let nothing pass, she will accumulate criticism, she will indulge in a few rare lip service compliments and always in front of witnesses. This pretty little girl is the reincarnation of the beauty that had eclipsed her, so her mother’s torment will never end.
The pretty little girl feels her mother’s discomfort, she does not understand it and feels incapable of soothing her, moreover she suffers too much to try to resolve this latent aggressiveness which prevents her from being herself and from flourishing: she accepts her mother as she is, but her heart sinks when she sees her cuddling her brother and indulging her every whim. Sometimes, her sisters are not better off, they too receive merciless criticism that they no longer even try to justify, except by the difficult character of their mother, but it would never occur to them, in their childish brain, that a mother could be so deeply jealous of her children.
Moreover, this mother, who is also attentive to the well-being of her children, would protest vigorously if it were suggested that she could also feel some jealousy towards her daughters, or just one. Various scenarios are possible, leading to reactions that are often subdued, more rarely openly critical: it also happens that a mother whose childhood was tormented, identifies with the daughter who occupies her rank among her siblings, she can then pamper the eldest and protect her excessively, because she still retains the bitter memory of all the forced renunciations that she had to accept under the imbecile pretext that she was the oldest, and therefore the most reasonable. This moralizing speech was given to him at an age that the cadets were already well past.
Where is the coherence that she was told about when she tried to rebel? Now, as an adult and master of her life, she could reestablish a much more satisfactory order and it is the cadets who pay the price. It even happens that uncles and aunts settle their accounts through nephews: they favor, with a surprising lack of fairness, the one who occupies their place among the siblings.
It is an invisible film which passes from generation to generation with sociological modifications: an only child cannot be the bearer of all the configurations, but it can still represent the ancient torment of its mother by its physical appearance, its character and, sometimes, by the love felt for it by the one who had been, in its childhood and despite itself, the cause of so much suffering and frustration: a maternal aunt, especially if she has no children, can find the child in a nephew or niece that she was and that she will then understand better than her own mother. In this tangle of repressed, sometimes intense feelings, the child who is at the end of the line receives all these old echoes, blurred by the experiences of all the protagonists, he feels lost, surrounded by faults which make his journey uncertain, without acquiring the slightest hint of mastery of a complex network of feelings never directly evoked.
No one will formulate the real story: it is the inner child, bruised, still suffering, who continues to dictate harmful behavior without thinking of the injuries it causes, the story is perpetuated, it is no longer exactly the same configuration nor, above all, the same protagonists, the roles have been modified, but the intense impression of painful frustration persists and can finally be expressed in the face of a defenseless being over whom we have all power. There will, of course, be justifications and protests, but the imprint is too deep to extricate itself and this mother who can finally take revenge sees no reason to look within herself for the reasons for this so repressed anger.
Everything then depends on the inner strength of the child, incapable of understanding the reasons for this permanent anger, he can draw from himself and from the kind people around him the capacity to build himself, despite everything, without expecting recognition for his efforts, his qualities, his successes, but his desire to live, to move forward, to make his dreams come true, he relegates as far away as possible the bitterness and the feeling of abandonment experienced for a long time, he does not want letting himself be hampered by stories that do not concern him, but, sometimes, he needs to be helped in this fight, especially to better understand all the elements that contributed to placing him in this discomfort. Intellectual gift constitutes an effective weapon for charting one’s path, despite everything.
It goes without saying that some fathers have also experienced repressed suffering and injustices which have left deep traces for which their children pay the price. It will still remain a mark of the almost instinctive love of parents for their child, it allowed him to find the necessary strength and not to become discouraged too quickly in the face of the vagaries of existence. Above all, he learned that it is better to rely on yourself to chart your path.
ADVICE : those around them can sometimes be vigilant and try to put the failing parent on the path that will allow them to understand themselves, this presupposes a questioning of the entire family structure that we must have the courage and the strength to undertake. The essential thing is that the child victim of this past has the right reading grid to free himself from all the false interpretations which have weighed on his development.
