12 Parental injunctions to Destroy Your Life: Inner Parent

There is no way to overestimate or overstate the importance of parental introjects, parental voices, parental injunctions in your head. If these injections are benign, if these voices encourage you to love yourself, accept yourself, work with yourself, improve, grow, and develop, you're amongst the lucky. But if these voices amount to a harsh inner critic, they're sadistic, the hateful, if these voices are rejecting, humiliating, and shaming you from the inside. If these introjects coalesce in clusters and coalitions of them align, if they form together what is known an internalized bed object and they pull you down and they pull you apart and they destroy you and disintegrate you corroding you internally and then inevitably externally because the body keeps the score. In this case, you are dealing with parental injunctions which could lead to mental illness. And one of the most famous manifestations of such injunctions is narcissistic personality disorder or pathological narcissism more generally. Today I'm going to describe the 12 parental injunctions and what they do to you and how they lead to and yield narcissism in people who otherwise should have grown up happy, should have self-actualized, should have had wonderful relationships, should have experienced love. People who started off as babies and infants and ended up being absences and black holes to a very large extent owing to parental injunctions. My name is Sam, the unstoppable Vaknin, the SUV of personality disorders, and I am also a professor of psychology and the author of malignant self-love, narcissism revisited. Let's delve right in. 12 inner parental injunctions. Parental injunctions to start with are unconscious. These are kind of directives installed in our head in your mind and these directives are motivational and attitudinal. In other words, these voices determine not only your attitude to life in general and to reality and other people and ultimately to yourself, but they also motivate you and demotivate you. These introjs are embedded in your brain in your mind and gradually they seep into the enclosing tissue. They become one with your mind. They become indistinguishable from it. They cannot be extracted and you cannot be extricated. In transactional analysis, these messages known as injunctions can manifest as self-sabotaging adult beliefs dictating a person's unconscious life script. But it would be would be wrong to say that all injunctions remain unconscious. Injunctions do surface in conditions of stress, anxiety, tension, catastrophizing, fear, other emotional emotionally disregulated conditions. In these states and conditions, the injunctions rise to the surface. They make their presence known. They become conscious. They can be verbalized. Luckily for us, cognitive behavior therapy is a method of forcing these injunctions into the surface and then erasing them. And when these injunctions come to the surface, when they become conscious, when you become aware of them, it's easy to tell them apart from your own authentic voice. You see, your authentic voice loves you. Your authentic voice is your guardian angel if you wish. Your authentic voice is there, to protect you, to further your well-being, to cater to your psychological needs, to impose discipline, of course, thus preventing you from suffering the consequences of transgressions and wrong antisocial behavior. Your authentic voice is your only true friend. It never leaves your side. But it can be drowned by other voices by alien foreign introjs and trained into your mind. And one of the biggest categories is the parental injunctions. In the 1970s, Robert and Mary Golding noticed a pattern of 12 typical prohibitions. Parents kept repeating these 12 sentences and these sentences remain embedded and carry over into adulthood. Goldings the Golding wrote in 1979 these prohibitions are given out of the parents own pains, unhappiness, anxiety, disappointment, anger, frustration and secret desires. And I as I have suggested in my work 20 years ago, parents split themselves. They split the child and the child learns to split itself in return. Self-splitting. What the parent does, they split themselves. Then they take the part of themselves which they find unacceptable, which they reject, which they hate and loathe and deride. They take the traits and the behaviors and the thoughts, cognitions and emotions in themselves that they cannot tolerate that they find unbearable and unacceptable and they hand these over to the child. The parent split themselves and cleanse themselves become unadulterated by contaminating the child with a bad rejected part in them in the parent. So I called it projective splitting and I suggested that splitting it's a major mechanism in the emergence of psychopathology in children. And so the Goldings have described actually splitting without using without using the word. And the Goldings called these 12 sentences the the don't injunctions. They said that children who are continuously exposed to these don't injunctions grow into adults and these adults are limited. They're constricted. They experience the the world through a narrow slit, through a tunnel. The don't injunctions are about unbeing, unbecoming, about absenting oneself, about denying oneself, about reversing oneself, and about limiting and minimizing and constricting oneself until one essentially vanishes. These don't injunctions, these inhibitions, prohibitions are very critical in the development of pathological narcissism as one possible defense against them, but it's not the only one. People pleasing is another, for example. So, what are the 12 injunctions? Number one, don't be don't exist. Believe it or not, many parents broadcast this to their children. Maybe they didn't want the child in the first place. Maybe they feel that the child's needs are too much for them and that the child's existence is honorous and demanding and imposing and constricting in itself. Maybe they subtly communicate to the child this kind of painful message don't exist as we along with the rest of the world don't really need you. You're a burden. You're superfluous. There's nothing you can contribute. You're only consuming resources. And children who grow up with this message continue to perpetuate it. They regard themselves as unlovable, unneeded um kind of surplus. They don't feel that they have the right to exist. On the very contrary, they perceive their own existence as some kind of tax or imposition on on others. They hate themselves and they treat themselves harmfully in a desperate, prolonged, protracted, incremental attempt to essentially kill themselves. The many forms of suicide, the abrupt ones, the abrupt types of suicide are very rare, but there are many ways to kill yourself. I don't know, smoking cigarettes, drinking yourself to abandon, doing drugs, constantly failing in whatever you try to do. All these are forms of self- negation, self annihilation, self- removal from the sin. It's a common injunction. parents who are mentally or physically incapable of coping with children. They are insecure. They are immature. They're otherwise disposed. They are sick. They are under enormous stress or strain from some exter extraneous life events. They are they are under the thumb of a mother-in-law or a father-in-law who is very very harsh. They are you name it. There are numerous reasons why a parent would regard a child as an unwelcome addition to the parents life. An abuse is a symbolic ritualistic way of informing the child of this attitude. When the parent abuses the child as a matter of policy, when abuse is repetitive, structured, ritualized, it is it is signaling. It's a form of signaling. It's like sending a message to the child. I really wish you were not here. I really resent your existence and your intrusion and your invasion of my space, mental and physical. I really, really don't think you have any right to be here. The second injunction is don't be who you are. Parents who haven't become narcissistic parents for example, depressive parents, parents who have failed to become to actualize themselves in life. Parents whose lives are alien to them. They are estrange from themselves. They they maybe they are dissociative. They have constant amnesia, depersonalization, derealization. They don't feel that life is real. Or maybe they are so sorely disappointed and bitter and resentful, covert narcissist for example. So these kind of parents regard the child as a narcissistic continuation of themselves, an extension. They instrumentalize the child. They expect the child to meet or fulfill their their unrealized dreams, to cater to their psychological needs, to participate in their fantasies. They want the child to live the life that they themselves did not have because they could not have. They they put aside the failure and the defeat that their lives their lives have become hoping magically. It's magical thinking hoping that the child will be able to neg to to reverse this to somehow put a stop to it kind of parents. These kind of parents do not want the child children to be themselves but they want their children the child to be someone else a convenient versions version of themselves a successful version of themselves. They don't allow the child to separate. They don't allow the child to be become an individual. They penalize the child every time the child demonstrates agency and independence and personal autonomy. Every time the child makes a decision, every time the child has a new friend, every time the child is successful, ironically, they penalize the child. The child's success is a bitter reminder of their own failure. So they are sending the child a mixed signal. I want you to succeed where I have failed. That's one parental injunction. And the same time the other parental injunction is I don't want you to succeed more than I have because I'm envious of you. This kind of injunction is usually motivated by envy. These parents want you to be more like them than like you. They don't actually allow you to explore who you are. They don't allow you to experiment with your personhood. Something that Ericson called moratorium. They had different expectations of you. Anything including your looks, your appearance, your vocations, your aocations, your personality. Are you sufficiently athletic? Do you have too many friends? Not enough friends. Are you outgoing? Not Not out. They are never satisfied. They're never happy. They're always fearful and they become gradually overprotective. It's a form of control. It's control freakery. They want to control the child as a malleable object. The and the only way for them to realize their dreams and hopes and fantasies. They don't want the child to do what children do. They don't want the child to do anything that the parent would not have done. They they don't allow the child to communicate with peers. For example, don't be who you are is the message. And usually gradually this leads the child to become more and more isolated, more and more quiet, more and more skits, less and less gregarious and social. uh afraid of risks, uh always wary of failure, performative, performanceoriented and the child gradually becomes parentified. He begins to cater to the parents needs instead of the other way. The child begins to develop a belief that the only way to discover who the who they are. These kind of children develop a belief that the only way to discover who they are is by gratifying the parent. The only way to secure love, attention, care, compassion is by gratifying the parent. The only way to self-actualize is by gratifying the parent. The only way to experience life and to become in any way, shape or form is by gratifying the parent. The only way to gratify the parent is to suspend one's own existence or even eliminate it altogether and become that figment in the parents mind, that internal object that the parent has always dreamed of. The third injunction is do not be a child. Parents send this message when they want their children to grow up fast or when they are terrified of emotions because children are highly emotive and a bit disregulated and a bit narcissistic. And there are some parents who regard this as very threatening. They don't know how to they don't know how to do emotions. They don't know how to cope with emotions. And they want the child to skip childhood and become an instant adult. It reminds me that in the novels of Dickens, children are called little men. And of course, Louisa May Alcott had written the book Little Women. So they want the child to be a little men or a little woman, not a child. As children make demands, especially emotional demands that many many parents don't know what to do with, can't cope with, are not trained, qualified or educated to deal with. And this injunction is directed especially according to studies at the firstborn child which is immediately adulified and is expected to assume chores and roles around the house especially when they are additional siblings later on. Young parents, insecure parents, narcissistic parents, depressive parents, poor parents who are coping with the exigencies of poverty, parents who have experienced a chronic disease or an accident. All these kind of parents who are constantly under stress, strain, anxiety, these kind of parents are likely to use this injunction. Don't be a child. grow up and be of help to me. They expect the children to parent them, relying on the children to comfort them, to give them advice and to fulfill functions that in any normal household are reserved to the parent exclusively. And the child is crumbling under this burden, too much responsibility. Child begins to catastrophize. There's a terror ambient terror of what would happen if I fail what would be the impact on my parents on me on our family and the child begins to assume the role of savior rescuer protector which is usually a lifelong thing there is the message is this is your responsibility and you are prohibited from fooling around or acting silly or being too emotional or allowing yourself a moment of dysregulation and and crying or you this is all forbidden. Growing up is accompanied by this injunction. Children, as children, these people try not to be too noisy, not to be too messy, not to be too emotional, not to be too too obstruive, not to be too ostentatious, not to be too something. as children later on when they grow up. This need to not be a child, to not cater to your childlike aspects, to not deal with your inner child, to never ever display any behavior, make any choice, reach any decision, interact with in any way that would betray the fact that there is a part of you that is still growing up, that is still maturing or immature. Like all of us, these people find it difficult to enjoy a good time or to go on adventures or to try something new or to be happy because they've grown up. They're adults. They don't really believe they're adults. They associate adult with adulthood with childhood. They also have increased feelings of guilt for not meeting some kind of standard or some kind of bar or some kind of expectation. Constantly try to please people. The next injunction is intimately connected to this one. The fourth injunction is do not grow up. So where there's a group of parents that tell you don't be a child, grow up already, there's another group of parents and their injunction is diametric diametrically opposed. It's don't ever grow up. Don't ever become an adult. Don't ever separate from me. Don't ever abandon me. It's emotional blackmail. The message is directed usually to the youngest child in the family or the child that serves as the only link keeping the parents together as a couple or the child whose departure would create an empty nest. When the child is grown that these kind of parents know that they will just walk away and there's will be nothing nothing left of the relationship. So they're terri terrified. These parents are in a state of terror. Every day that passes, every tick of the clock drives the child further away from them. And their entire identity, the reset, the reason to exist, all of it depends on the child. The child's presence, child's interactions, child's responses and reactions. They determine the internal dynamic processes, psychonamics of the parents. And such parents would communicate to the child, don't go out there, don't venture away because the world is dangerous and hostile. It's better to stay at home. It's better to cocoon yourself here. It's better to hunker under the bed or the blanket. It's we are here to protect you. We are your only defense. It's where the firewall that separates you from the monsters out there. It's like, you know, in the ancient maps, they would would they when they didn't know um the geographical contours of a country or a continent, they would put here be monsters. This is the message of these parents. These parents are overprotective, but not in the classical sense. They're not protecting the child from any real danger. They're not phobic. They're overprotective as a control technique, as a way to manage the child, to constrain the child, to limit the child, to not allow the child to explore, develop, experiment, and ultimately separate from them and become an individual. These parents might are immature. They fail to grow up and so they feel threatened by a grown up and they don't want to have a grown up in the household because they themselves are infantile their children and they wish to stay young by identifying with the child. They themselves do never wish to grow up. It's a Peter Pan kind of collective Peter Pan syndrome or household Peter Pan syndrome. And so these kind of parents enable and encourage and teach childish behavior, dependent immature acts. They try to delay the child's departure even to school. The consequences of imposing this injunction on the child are severe difficulties. is when the child grows up physically at least chronologically the child is unable to become independent unable to develop personal autonomy and agency it the severe difficulties to adjust to the world as an adult is a long always every change requires long periods of adjustment and the need to figure it all out constant rumination and immersion in some kind of puzzle jigsaw puzzle never ending eternal The next injunction is don't make it. Don't make it means don't be a success. The injunction is clearly intended to prevent the child from succeeding, from accomplishing anything, from achieving anything. Achieving success becomes dangerous. In such a family, you are punished when you're successful because the parents are envious of you or because they regard success as empowering and endowing you with the ability to walk away. They have abandonment, anxiety or separation, insecurity, and so you're punished. And the it's absolutely dangerous in such a family to be successful because the the parents can't cope can't deal with the consequences of of your success as a child and so they resort to all kinds of self-destructive patterns of behavior. Uh and so these kind of individuals when they grow up they become self-defeating as they perceive failure and defeat as safe. The secure base has to do with failing not with succeeding. Achieving success if someone has been punished for it or has not been able to deal with with its consequences is perceived as menacing. threatening parents who are envious of the child's success would undermine and sabotage the child in a varieties variety of ways. They would passively and stealthily and periciously and insidiously behind the scene make it impossible for the child to succeed. They would manipulate and in re-engineer the environment to make it very difficult to for example concentrate on something or they would isolate the child from figures other people who might spur the child to succeed. So a teacher a teacher who believes in the child and wants to help the child to make a success of himself would be cut off. appears. Similarly, a kid may be provided with unreasonable expectations or standards and then the child is set up for failure. When you're expected to meet standards that are superhuman or inhuman, you're bound to fail. It's a way to prevent chances of success. And this kind of person becomes a perfectionist and goes through life constantly trying to attain perfection because nothing less than perfection is acceptable. Anything less perfection is a failure. However, perfectionism is safe. The individual knows that perfection is unattainable. So there's no risk of success. Perfectionism is a firewall against success. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough. This injunction causes a dread of achievement and a lack of self-confidence in adulthood. Someone, these kind of children when they grow up, they believe that they're worthy only of failure and that there's no point in having, for example, ambition or life plans, long-term goals. It's all a waste of time. A derivative of this injunction is injunction number six. Don't do anything. Just don't do anything. Don't run. Don't climb high. Don't get dirty. Don't walk. Don't think. Don't read. Don't argue. Don't talk back. Don't express emotions. Don't don't don't. These messages um are kind of placeholders. The parents who deliver them tend to do everything in place of the child. they they induce passivity in the child. They want the child to become a passive receptacle of parental decisions, choices, behaviors and so the parent is acting in lie of the child instead of the child. And in this way the child becomes an extension of the parent. The the the parent may be worried about the children's child's safety. They may be overprotective. There's no telling why they're doing this. It's as if they're trying to reduce the child into an ancient Egyptian mommy. As if there's safety in paralysis. The injunction comes from a parent who may be jealous of the child's abilities. Again, envy enters the scene. And disabling the child, render rendering the child disabled is a way of avoiding success. And of course the extreme form of this is mchousen by proxy and and mchousen. These are mental health disorders where the parent actually renders the child sick in order to obtain attention especially from medical stuff. But not only parents who give such an injunction usually are themselves afraid of the vastness and richness of life of the endless number of opportunities and potentials. They resent the fact that the child seems to be taking advantage of talents, capacities, opportunities, other people, the environment, circumstances. The child is coping, the child is succeeding, the child is making it while the parent is terrified to even try. And so they feel threatened. They don't want the child to be more successful than they are because it's a mirror. A mirror which reflects back at them their inadequacy and incompetence. But the child absorbs this message. Don't don't do it. Don't make it. Don't succeed. Don't go further. Don't explore. Don't discover. Don't experiment. Don't be adventurous. Don't try. This message is absorbed. The child learns to obey it. Self-sabotage, selfdeeat, self-destructiveness in myriad ways, most of which are unconscious. These kind of children may start all kinds of projects or schemes but never finish them. They may undermine their own performance by behaving in ways which are self- negating or self-sabotaging. They struggle to make decisions. They gradually develop paranoid ideiation and victimhood stance and their efforts are always self-inhibited. They are their own worst enemy and adversary and competitor. One of the worst injunctions in my view is injunction number seven. Do not feel them. In some families, the expression of emotions is upsetting, is embarrassing. The parents become angry. Emotions threaten the equilibrium and homeostasis of such families. The precarious balance that keeps the family together. Unspoken things that should never be aired, dirty laundry. These are known as pseudo mutual and pseudo hostile families. and I have a video dedicated to them. In these families, feelings or the expression of feelings is taboo. You're not allowed to talk about your feelings. You're not allowed to show feelings even your body language. Feelings are threats. And so when the child inevitably ends up expressing some kind of feeling at some point the parents become furious or they deny the feeling or they mock the child or they criticize the child. They shut the child out of the child's own emotions. They try to distract the child somehow. They are terrified. Feelings threaten them. They might say things like boys don't cry or nice girls don't get angry or some other nonsense like this counterfactual nonsense of course in such families um there is a displacement of feelings substitution of feelings feelings are reframed sublimated redesigned dressed up camouflaged some feelings are legitimate and allowed and they stand in for illegitimate taboo feelings. It is a process of substitution. So when a when for example the child is ashamed or feels humiliated or is afraid or maybe just sad about something that is not legitimate but the child is allowed to become angry and aggressive or vice versa. So the parents similarly constantly transmute and transsubstantiate real emotions into substitutes substitute as fake emotions. These kind of parents are monovalent. They have like one emotion. They are mono emotional. They have one emotion and uh this emotion is overemphasized ubiquitous and you know and so it could be anger and usually anger conceals depression or sadness. When a child grows up with this injunction they struggle to understand and express how they feel. They they feel something but they can't label it. They can't manage it. They definitely can't control it. They can't express it. they can verbalize it. This leads actually to dysregulation. They may these people may seem none and but actually it's an expression of panic or fear. They're afraid to express themselves in a relationship because they're afraid to catch flack to be criticized or derided or or humiliated somehow. Feelings are associated with pain. Feelings are associated with loss. Feelings are associated with mockery. Feelings are associated with negative effects. No feelings, no no bad outcomes. No feelings, everyone is happy. Everyone is safe. And the twin the twin sibling of this injunction is number eight. Do not think or do not overthink. When a child starts to question everything, usually around the ages of one, one and a half to three, the terrible twos, especially child starts to question everything. Keep asking hundreds of questions a day can drive you insane. Toddlers and some parents become annoyed. They begin to misinterpret the child's behavior as aggression or passive aggression. They resent a child. They discourage a child from further exploration. And they cast the child's curiosity as some kind of defect, some kind of deficiency. Parents don't like it. These kind of parents don't like it when a child has a different opinion to theirs or when the child sees an anger which they didn't think of or when the child's c curiosity leads the child to learn something the parent is ignorant of. They can't tolerate this. They get easily irritated when presented with uncomfortable questions or when they asked to explain things because it exposes their own limitations, their own ignorance, their own incapacity. And these parents undermine confidence in the child. The children are born with a confidence. They are grandio to a point between the ages of two and three. They're grandios. They believe children believe that they have the ability to handle problems by injecting themselves into reality. Child's interaction with reality is very grandiose. These kind of parents suppress the grandiosity. They undermine the child's confidence. They inject themselves between the child and the problem. They appoint themselves as the only arbiter, the only one able to provide an answer or a solution. They force upon the child mediation with reality instead of mediated reality instead of disintermediated reality. They become intermediaries. The child begins to develop a perception of reality and begins to gauge and evaluate reality only through the interface of the parents. And this leads of course to impaired reality testing. The child grows up dealing with any difficulty in the most simplistic and non-creative ways. The child expects the parent to stand in for them, including the internal parent. Alternatively, these kind of children grow up and they become highly conservative, incapable of innovation or thinking outside the box, accepting of traditional ways of thinking. They can't develop any type of free thinking or coping strategies or critical thinking. Number nine, don't belong. The parents of of some parents prevent the child from any contact or interaction with friends or peers. They don't allow the child to be accepted and to belong. They don't allow the child to be inducted into an inroup. Now belonging to a group especially in early adolescence is a critical dimension critical element in developing a core personality. It's very important when the child is denied this opportunity. This friction with peers, a friction which can at times be painful, can involve hurt and loss admittedly, but it's the only way to grow. When the child is denied this, the child remains stagnant, what used to be called arrested development. This kind of family maybe is very secretive, very paranoid, justly or unjustly. They don't don't want outsiders. They reject all types of outsiders, not only peers. They don't want teachers to visit. They don't want peers to visit. They want don't want even other family members to visit. They isolate themselves. They hunker down. It's a fortress. It's a siege mentality. And this within this siege mentality. Anything visiting, anyone visiting, anyone communicating from the extra familial world is a potential enemy, a threat. Such parents pass on this kind of paranoid ideation to the child. They judge the child's friends or any group to which a child is attached. Role models, teachers, grandfather, grandmother, parents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, colleagues, you name it. this constant court, the con constant court session that this there's a court that is constantly in session and within this court there is a trial going on and everyone is on trial. Every outsider is on trial and so this creates a perception of ingroup and outgroup. The ingroup is exclusionary. The ingroup is safe. The in group is cohesive and is bound by fear and catastrophizing whereas the outrow group is always potentially very dangerous and hostile. These parents usually these family units households are very itinerant desolatory. They move around a lot and so the child cannot settle down, cannot settle down, cannot belong, cannot develop attachment to a place or to some permanent group of people and this kind of family cuts the ch child's connections because they unconsciously want the child to belong only to the family. A message conveyed by the parents is if you are not with us, you're against us. When children in such family grow into adulthood, they become suspicious. They about other people. They become paranoid. They they develop conspiracy theories. They don't fit in. They lack an understanding that there are many different people with many different values and personalities. They don't do diversity and variety very well. Number 10 is don't be too close. way and that is when the child attempts to have intimacy with the parent, confide in the parent, hug hug the parent, talk to the parent, seek advice from the parent, love the parent visibly and ostentatiously. In all these situations, the parents would reject the child and they reject the child because these kind of parents are uneasy with intimacy. They don't do intimacy. They don't they don't understand intimacy. They perceive intimacy as some kind of intrusion or invasion or imposition or burden and they send this injunction to the child. Don't get too close to me. Stay away. This is my boundary. Never ever cross it. My physical boundary, my emotional boundary, my co cognitive boundary. Never ever cross it. They place these parents place no value or little value on closeness on affection on bonding on attachment and they themselves demonstrate this to the child. They are they are distant they're absent in each other's I mean the parents absent and distant in each other's lives. They don't show any displays of affection. They never hug. They never kiss. They never laugh together. They're highly functional and operational. They're called, they're calculated. The children interpret the cold demeanor of the parental couple as physical and emotional detachment, aloofness, an indication of the desire to be apart and separate. It's as if the other parent is intolerable. some kind of punishment, an annoyance to be tolerated somehow. A parent of this kind is unwilling and unable to create an emotional bond with a child. And the parent is unwilling because they are unable. We usually do things we're good at. These parents don't do bonding, don't do attachment. They usually have insecure attachment style, maybe dismissive, maybe avoidant. So to avoid the rejection, the rejection is anguish. Rejection is agony. When you're very young as a child, rejection is very threatening. So to avoid the rejection, the the child stays away. Child isolate themselves. They embed themselves in some paracourse or fantasy. They find an imaginary or create an imaginary friend. they they drown in books or they they kind of become a world unto their own. It's as if they exclude the world. The grown child resolves to never ever get close to others and they live a solitary life with solitary vocations and so on. Injunction number 11 is do not be important. In families that organize themselves around the needs of some other p person within the family, your needs as a child are secondary. They're not only secondary. They are impolite. They are selfish. They're entitled. You should never have needs. Maybe there's someone in the family who is ill. Maybe there's an emotionally dependent child or a child with special challenges. Maybe there's an aged adult in the family. Someone in the family sucks like a black hole sucks all the attention. Someone in the family determines the agenda. Someone in the family is the only one who is allowed to express emotions and receive them. Everyone around revolves. It's like again like the sun and all the members of the family revolve around this individual. And any expression of a need or a wish or a dream or a hope or a fantasy or a fear or an emotion any such expression is a waste of scarce resources which should be exclusively invested in that individual. The child is useful because the child can service that family member. The child is useful only in this sense. If the child deviates from this assigned role, the child is obstructive and destructive to the family unit and its functioning. The child's the child's needs, legitimate needs are stifled. The child's voice is silenced. The child's importance importance is diminished in comparison to the needs of this central member. The child should not exist. When a child grows, they feel unseen, unimportant. They have a tendency to neglect themselves. They find it difficult to connect with body and mind. They don't trust themselves and their needs. They don't accept themselves. Their goals are either unclear or revolve around some other person. They learn to redirect their being at someone else. They learn to render themselves an extension of someone else. They learn what we call external regulation. And finally, the final injunction is don't be well, don't be sane. Believe it or not, there are some parents who pay attention to the children. Only when they are sick, only when there's an emergency, only when they are in danger. When the child is healthy, happy golucky, not in danger, uh perfectly sane and balanced, the child becomes invisible. The parents do not give such a child any of their resources. Not time, not attention, not love, not care, not compassion, nothing, not empathy. Is impossible to obtain affection from such parents or care when you're healthy, when you're stable. So children when in these kind of families with these kind of parents the child who wants to be loved and all children want to be loved they get sick very frequently or put themselves in unsafe and dangerous situations. They're trying to attract attention this way. They become troublemakers. When such a child grows up, they believe that the only way to get love and attention is to suffer, to put oneself at risk, to somehow be mentally ill or physically uh sick. Insanity becomes a currency. Look how psychologically damaged and broken I am. Pay attention to me. Love me. Whenever they want to develop relationships, they destabilize their own lives. to render the potential partner a caretaker. As children, we are exposed to numerous injunctions, hundreds, thousands. And these injunctions stay with us for life and they limit us in many ways. And it helps to understand which is which. to make a list of these injunction to isolate the beneficial, benevolent, benign ones, to isolate, to find out your authentic voice and definitely definitely recognize the 12 injunctions in one's unconscious. These injunctions not only influence behavior and limit freedom of choice, but these injunctions shape your life. If you identify them, you can separate yourself from them. You can silence them. You can erase them. There are techniques to do that. And they're highly efficacious. I urge you to do this. You will find a life that is less restraining and more fulfilling. And so if you discover patterns, repetition compulsions, discover patterns in your life of self-destruction and self-defeat, self-sabotage, unhappiness, recurrent unhappiness, inability to progress or to succeed by your own by your own standards and definitions, any of the things I've mentioned, seek help. We can reprogram you. I mean, clinicians can reprogram you. And they've been doing it successfully for decades now. No, no. And it's usually these are swift procedures. They don't take they take a few months and you emerge as a new person. No need to deny yourself at least this minimal service.