Some roles difficult childhood can make you pick up as your personality.

A lot of adults are living their lives playing roles they’ve assumed to be their innate design even though that may not be who they are authentically. These adults are mostly victims of childhood neglect or poor emotional nurturing that made them had to fight for themselves to survive the unpleasant situations.

As children, we needed adult guidance in virtually all areas of our lives until the stage when we also become independent enough to take the lead for ourselves. Unfortunately, not every child gets to have this kind of opportunity of being with caregivers who are stable and in tune with their own authentic feelings. As a result, those who don’t have that grace end up learning life alone; the aftermath of this lingering to the phase of adulthood or the rest of their lives, if they do not become intentional about their emotional healing.

The need to be seen, heard and acknowledged as valuable and feeling validated in words and actions towards a child by the caregivers in their lives is so paramount to the general wellbeing of the child that the lack of it can cause great damage that is sometimes too huge to repair easily in the future.

A child’s caregiver(s) could be the parents, teachers, older siblings and relatives or any adults who are in charge of raising that child.

The child learns to trust these people at an early stage, and mostly derive their sense of safety and identity from them. If the child is made to believe that they’re not safe by the way any of these important persons in their lives treats them, then the child might become an adult who lives the rest of his lives in much insecurities afraid that the word isn’t safe for them to be in.

One of our major roles as caregivers to a child is giving them a sense of safety, especially emotionally, by the way we talk to them, listen to them and make them feel validated. Or the child might feel abandoned, unloved and unwanted.

A child can sense being abandoned from the feelings of lack of safety which is communicated in various ways the child is being treated from the moment he broke free from the water of the womb into the family world he now calls home. These feelings of abandonment becomes a hole in the wounded soul of many adults who had dysfunctional relationships with their main custodians.

Unfortunately, it goes on to affect how they see themselves and what roles they take on as their personalities. In order to cope with the difficult situations; being naive, and not knowing how to take care of himself in a world where he’s supposed to be guided, loved and cared for by those before him, the child learns, rather ignorantly, some maladaptive ways to cope just to survive. His experiences from that moment on becomes one of a life tuned into a survival mode of perpetual low vibes and low energies emanating an insecure sense of self. So the child learns to take on roles eventually masquerading as his real self.

Even though these roles are just the manifestations of his childhood’s lack of proper nurturing that are now unconsciously leading him on as who has become identified with.

A caregiver who’s emotionally unavailable to himself or herself cannot be in tune with the emotional state of the child. He might try as he may but ends up frustrated because that part of her is locked up in some emotional wounding—maybe he wasn’t shown any kind either. For these reasons, it becomes difficult to blame our caregivers. Our goal isn’t to blame anyone here. It should be to heal ourselves and help re-parent any parts of us we now feel needs more love and attention we lacked as child. That’s the way of healing.

It takes a lot of conscious efforts for us to provide emotional support to another human being when we lacked same at that age ourselves. Therefore, it will be helpful now that the adult who’s preparing for parenthood finds it necessary to heal, or, at least, become aware of the very important role s/he plays in helping a child regulate his or her emotions by the way they regulate and feel their own authentic emotions. This is what one of the benefits of healing ourselves first before rushing to birth children to continue in the cycles we had.

In the absence of a caregiver’s support of the child’s emotional regulation, the child learns other ways that might be helpful at that time to cope.

These roles go on to affect his sense of identity in adulthood. Some of roles we pick up might manifest as any of these:

?You might have become used to not caring for yourself because your sense of worth is tied to being the one that takes care of everyone but yourself. You become a CARETAKER. A caretaker feels important being the one everyone else rely on. He gets so used to being this role that he often neglects his own needs. As these needs keep stirring at him, he might experience an eventual breakdown from trying to please everyone but himself. This is the child that often were parent to their own parents. They may have never known what it means to be taken care of.

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