#81 ·
dustypilot11 said:Don't know about you guys; I didn't deal with any of that trauma. Nobody ever punished me for getting lost, and I wasn't exactly wandering off as a kid. For me, it's just genetic (or so my mom claims). I totally bomb spatial intelligence tests. My other three scores are above average, but that fourth one? Yeah, it sucks. 😁
It's pretty interesting how much weight we give to what our moms think in these discussions. I guess a lot of people "love" their friends or parents by basically just echoing whatever they believe. It creates this weird tension because if you start questioning someone's take on a third party, it might not be the most polite thing to do. You end up seeing those later patterns, like kids growing up singing songs about how they want to be "just like Dad." It’s like this emotional mechanism kicks in and makes decisions for us before our brains even catch up. To actually try and see things differently, you'd first have to admit that your mom—and plenty of others—might actually be wrong. And let's be real, when people aren't right, they don't always love hearing it, and disagreeing often triggers some kind of defensive reaction.
Historically, certain military groups would take boys as young as seven to build their own elite units. Some of the older theories regarding early childhood consciousness suggest a specific way of treating them: just make sure they aren't crying, aren't hungry, and stay still. In some rural areas, infants were swaddled so tightly they could barely move a finger. Now, when you consider the shift from the womb—where everything is warm, there's constant food, the steady rhythm of a heartbeat, familiar voices, and the freedom to move through amniotic fluid—to being suddenly restricted and unable to move, it creates this sense of unease. They're stuck, they're scared, and they haven't even established a baseline for those familiar frequencies or sounds yet... Do you even remember any of that period from when you were an infant or a toddler?
I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, for example. She’s already learned a million things, imitating everything she sees. There are things she’s allowed to do and things that are strictly off-limits—especially trying to run down a steep, slippery hill after she's already slipped once. Since I wouldn't let her, she just flopped onto the ground and threw a massive tantrum, probably because she's used to getting her way most of the time. It's the same with the beach; she wasn't allowed in the water whether it was summer or winter, long before she could even walk, but she wanted to go the second she was mobile because we've made bath time such a big deal at home. During those first few years of life, kids go through way more psycho-mental experiences than they can actually process—which means you can't really know, like most people can't, if you were being punished or how. You just can't be conscious of it. I find it hard to believe that a kid could wander off and somehow escape punishment; I doubt that happens with people who actually raise and watch their children, and honestly, it probably doesn't happen with wolves or lions or any other mammals either.
My takeaway is that because our parents might have had more intense experiences trying to manage kids attempting to wander or explore, they ended up carrying more trauma regarding how they handled infancy. Those traumas then echo through as a sort of emotional imposition on the next generation, which tends to be smaller and raised in environments where they have a bit more freedom to move. That’s why that "intuitive" clash with your earliest authority figure feels so heavy, even if the love for them hasn't faded one bit.
