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.They are out of practice at identifying their wants and thenseeing if it s possible to get them met.Even more common are people who do know deep down what theywant and feel, but are so afraid of the repercussions of expressing theirwishes that they ll say:  I don t know or  Anything you want is OK withme or  It doesn t matter, I ll go along with whatever rather than callingattention to themselves by saying  I want or  I feel& And what about now? How good are you first, at identifying yourwants and feelings and second, voicing them in the hopes of gettingthem met or acknowledged?I m only doing this for your own goodEver heard that line? It s a lie.There are many things the adults in our lives did for us that weremost definitely for our own good.Each of you will have your ownmemories of the kind, generous, loyal, playful and nurturing thingsyour parents and other adults did for and with you.However, our experience is that when you are a child, as soon as anadult tells you something is for your own good it s time to be suspi-cious.It usually means that it s for their own good, not yours.It usuallymeans that they are trying to get you to adapt and alter your behaviourin order to make them comfortable, not to improve your social skills.When the adults in your life could no longer cope with your antics,it was usually the time when clichés and heavy-duty commands startedissuing forth.It was their inability to cope which was really the issuerather than your difficult behaviour.We re not saying that you werenecessarily an angel; but it s usually when parents don t know what todo next that children get victimised the worst.60 | The Nice FactorIf this kind of thing happened to you, then what may have beenparticularly confusing for you is that you may have been experiencinglife in all its joyous innocence  and then your parents wrath came likea bolt out of the blue to shatter that innocence and create fear.And when they started in on you, you began to accommodate yourbehaviour in order to make it acceptable to other people.This is whenyou began to develop an extra sense like radar: this is the sense offiguring the right way to behave in order to make everything all right.On a conscious or unconscious level you were on full alert with worriessuch as:  What s going to upset my parents? and  What should I donow? and  What do they expect of me? and  How am I supposed tobehave?If you were very little, then these weren t necessarily thoughts withwords; they were more a feeling, an instinct, that you d better  shape upor you could be  shipped out. Shipped out in this case might mean thewithdrawal of love, affection, approval and acknowledgement  all thereinforcement and reaffirmation that children need in order to feel safeand secure.When you were young you altered your behaviour to fit in with yourparents (and other adults ) needs.Their needs were constantly chang-ing, however, so you had to guess what they were, often unsuccessfully.The ground was unsure and the right to change the rules was in some-one else s control.There might even be new sets of rules every day orevery week which is really perplexing for little children.This could mean life was like treading on eggshells for fear ofwaking sleeping giants, in this case you awakened your parents angeror displeasure.This meant trying to anticipate potential disastersand dangers by cultivating a heightened awareness of the nuances ofatmosphere.It s as though you developed sophisticated internal radar equipmentthat picked up the slightest vibration of impending trouble, and thenyou had to figure out what to do to make sure that trouble didn t erupt.Quite a burden for a young person.You ll have felt responsible forcheering them up when they were down; doing things that would makethem happy; treading cautiously so as to avoid notice if they were on thelookout for someone to vent their frustration on.You Weren t Born Nice | 61Robin: A few years ago I overheard my next-door neigh-bour scream something at his four-year-old son which Ithought summed up the terrible but also ridiculous con-tradiction that children endure at the hands of theirparents.This child had obviously done something thefather didn t approve of and he shouted at full voice,  Actyour age!Well, he was.Four year olds act like four year olds.What the father wasreally saying was,  Act the age I want you to be , which obviously wasn tfour.It is these inconsistencies that are particularly confusing.It s asthough the goal posts were continually being shifted and you had to bealert enough to notice where they had been shifted to.Failure wasinevitable.No young child can be successfully vigilant all the time andyou would have most likely displeased your parents at some point nomatter how much you tried to avoid doing so.But practice makes perfect, and you had a lot of opportunities topractise making yourself into someone you weren t.You tried to figureout what was the best, most approved of way you were supposed tobehave; and, in a sense, you disfigured yourself in order to transformyourself into this other person.In the face of all of this, you miraculously survived.Your genuinespirit of courage and hope and the desire to be free of limiting behav-iour hasn t been completely squeezed out of you.You devised somesimple and some elaborate faculties to cope with the changing rules,shifting goal posts, inconstancies and contradictions you encounteredin your childhood.The way we adaptIn the following section there are descriptions of the most commonways children adapt and alter their natural behaviour in order to win(or not lose) their parents care.There will probably be more than onethat will look familiar to you.They may not be the most helpful behav-iours now, but they helped you get through some rough times.Theywere essential then.62 | The Nice FactorThese ways of adapting are some of the personality traits you mayhave developed as opposed to the ones you were born with.This listincludes both personality types and coping and defence mechanismsthat you may have created in order to survive.We ve separated out someof the specific types of behaviours that nice children adopt and giventhem names.However, we don t believe that any person is just one ofthese types but instead is an amalgam of traits, behaviours, quirks andhabits, shaped by experience to become the self you now know [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]