It is a fundamental stage for self-development. The baby begins to realize that the mother is a separate entity from him. He starts to explore the environment with eye contact, touch, gestures. The one-year-old child’s transition from horizontal to vertical movement and starting to walk are studies of separation from the mother.
In the first sixth month, the child moves his head away from the mother and begins to experiment with separation from the mother’s body. At the age of one, these decomposition studies take place on foot. So what does this mean in your mother’s eyes?
When the child starts to move away slowly, it actually feels like one of the soldiers of the castle is being left out of the administration of the mother’s heart. Because the child is gradually trying to become an individual with dissociation exercises at that time.
There are 2 types of mothers at this point. Our first mother experiences a sense of loss when the child begins to separate from himself and starts with that feeling of panic and anxiety. When the child sees the anxiety, he realizes that he has already crossed the border. Oh, something happens to you — she turns into the arms of her mother in the mode of fear.
The second type of mother gives the message that “I am here, don’t be afraid,” she approaches from a place that encourages and supports the child so that you can go further.
While the first mother is at a point approaching from a place that prevents individuation, the second mother is at a place that supports individualization.
The child who receives support from the mother here goes on a healthy path and has a normal identity. In the first structure, the mother was worried about the decomposition of the child and showed her fear about something happening to him. He prevented the child from becoming individualized and made him freeze.
In this case, if the child ignores what the mother has done, the mother cuts off her interest and love for the child by punishing him. And no child can live without maternal love and attention.
This conditional love pattern of loving the mother allows the child to return to his slope. As the child starts to return to the point that the mother wants, the mother’s face laughs and rewards him.
Actually, the message she gives is that if you walk away from me, I won’t love you, and I’ll cut off all my resources, I’ll leave you. I mean, I don’t love you for who you are, I love you when you follow what I say.
Here, the child, in itself, thinks I have no value. In order to be valuable, I must act in accordance with my mother’s expectations.
The feeling of love and worthiness is my most basic need. When I couldn’t meet this need, a person experiences feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, nothingness, and absence.
If he has not been able to individualize, this child will try to please his teacher in the future, he will always try to please his parents — that is, he will always spend his life pleasing others.
“I have existed myself far from individuality here, and I have received your admiration,” and he feeds himself with it.
In other words, if we behave in a way that mom likes, mom loves us, and then we live life in a way that someone else likes.
When the child acts autonomously on his own, he realizes that he is not loved from infancy. He realizes that he is loved by treating others in the usual way and acting appropriately, and then he stops being himself.
The false self is formed. The inflated self that does what you expect.
This is an artificial showcase — actually, it’s not real, but a person lives knowing it from the inside out. In the future, he begins to realize that the fear of death, panic attacks, and feelings of emptiness, absence, and nothingness that he cannot admit to anyone in the depths of panic disorders are a psychological problem.
He is on a quest from the inside out. Until today, his quest has always been raised with an incredible ambition to please others and to go after them. The life he has come to until that age consists of conditional love.
He has acquired a quality for himself in order to receive the admiration of others. Like a lawyer, like a teacher, like a doctor, like an athlete, etc.
In other words, he has never been able to express the things that his own self wants. What we need to ask here is: What have you done for yourself?
In fact, there are not many answers that he can give even to this question.
The conditional love given on the basis of childhood always makes him alive with the belief: If I don’t do something, it pushed me to the consciousness of not being loved, seen, and valued.
We need to fulfill the task of motherhood a little more like an accompanist in a child’s adventure.
Because those feelings that we mirrored to him in infancy come out as completely different gaps in his later years.
Individuals who grow up with conditional love develop anxious or avoidant attachment styles in later life.
They may be an individual who is looking for too much approval in relationships or is running away from intimacy.
They exhibit an attitude of extreme unconditionality, shy of setting limits, in order to exhibit the opposite condition in their own parenting.
Therefore, as parents, we can accompany our children on their journey and raise trauma-free individuals in their future age, rather than showing love and attention by setting conditions and unhealthy boundaries.