Childhood: The Psychological Basis of the Comfort Zone

No, this is not going to be one of those chapters in which our parents are blamed for everything we are and are not. As Russell Bishop pointed out, "I don't know any parents who look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say, 'How can we screw this kid up?'"

Our parents (or whoever raised us) loved us — in the most fundamental sense of that term. Maybe they didn't hug us all we wanted, but they fed us, clothed us and physically nurtured us such that we are at least alive today.

The major reasons parents don't raise their children free from trauma are:

1. Parents don't know any better. Children learn by example as much as anything else. If parents knew how to live their own lives better, they would — and that learning would be passed onto the child.

2. Children require different rules than adults. Children are not as capable as adults. The less capable we are, the more rules we need.

3. Parents have other things to do besides raising children. Making a living, keeping house, maintaining the relationship with their spouse, dealing with their parents, etc. Life can be overwhelming even without children.

4. Who on earth knows what a child needs when? Some complain their parents ruined them by not enough attention — they needed more loving; others claim their parents gave too much attention — they needed more freedom. Many complain about both. To give us precisely what we wanted, precisely when we wanted it, our parents would have had to be psychic — which some children would have considered painfully intrusive.

Given this preamble, let's look at childhood — the place where we learned to use the elements of the comfort zone to limit ourselves.

Fear . Children don't know the difference between playing in the street and playing on a playground, between drinking poison and drinking milk, between petting the nice neighbor's cat and petting the nasty neighbor's pit bull. In order to let us out of their sight, parents must teach us not to do things that might cause us physical harm. Their tool is fear.

In turning children loose on the world (and vice-versa), the basic message from parents is, "Don't do anything I haven't personally shown you how to do." In other words, "Don't do anything new." While most of the "new" a child could do is perfectly safe, a small percentage of it is deadly, and that small percentage is what the parents want to protect the child from.

Guilt . Naturally, children ignore the cautionary statements of parents — they do what they want to do when they want to do it. Curiosity is more important than rules. So, the parents "lay down the law." (Actually, the law already has been laid down; now they're laying down the punishment.)

Punishment can include yelling (the perceived removal of love), deprivation (of freedom, food, toys, etc.), or physical pain. From a parent's point of view, this may not be much, but from a child's point of view, this can be devastating.

To children, parents are (A) real big (imagine someone thirty feet tall, weighing a thousand pounds); (B) the source of love, caring comfort, dry diapers, etc.; and (C) the ones who protect them from all those other thirty-foot, thousand-pound monsters. In addition to all that, parents control the food.

Little wonder, then, that when parents exact punishment — even though they're doing it for "our own good"— the child reacts strongly. Sometimes it hates the parents, and sometimes it hates itself for doing whatever it did to provoke the parent's wrath. When the latter happens, it's called guilt.

Hence, we learn to use fear as a reason not to do anything new, and if we do it anyway, to feel guilty afterwards.

Unworthiness is programmed in at the same time. If the child plays for two hours within its parent's comfort zone (toys in the living room, for example), all is well. There is little interaction with the parents; they're reading or watching TV or whatever parents do when their children are being "good." When the child goes beyond its parent's comfort zone and starts playing with, say, a can of shoe polish, the interaction with the parents becomes suddenly intensified — and almost entirely negative. Bad, wrong, nasty, naughty, no good.

What does the child remember from an evening at home with "the folks"? The hours of harmonious play, worthy of a Rockwell painting? Or the moments of intense, negative interaction? The intensity, probably. After enough memories of a negative kind, it's little wonder that a child builds an image of itself as being bad, wrong, nasty, naughty and no good. Sometimes lack of self esteem is rooted in this type of ambivalent behavior by parents.

Hurt feelings . From a very early age, we are taught that what happens outside us should affect what happens inside us. Someone jangles keys, and that's supposed to make us fascinated. Someone makes faces and silly noises, and that's supposed to make us happy. Someone gives us a Teddy bear, and that's supposed to make us feel loved. Eventually, our inner good feelings are linked to external distractions. When the distractions are not there, we feel deserted, alone, unloved.

We also learn by watching. Father arrives late, mother's feelings are hurt. Mother doesn't cook father's favorite food, father's feelings are hurt. And so on. Mother's choice in food has some direct connection to father's emotional condition. Must be the way it should be.

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