When Discipline Leads to Shame

As children, nobody within our community or family informs us about how important our experiences play in shaping the rest of our lives. As a child, I would often go about my day following my own needs and wants for the time being. My visible needs were simple and straightforward, focusing on what games to play, yearning for my favourite meals, and spending time with friends. But training to become a counsellor and participating in the counselling for children module changed my perception of my childhood.

The childhood experience is more than just a moment of nostalgia; it is the crucial point where we define the way we value and approach our emotions.

As part of this reflection statement, I will be exploring a moment of my childhood that defined my approach to experiencing and managing sadness. I will then examine the implications of this experience in both my adulthood and upcoming career in counselling, using frameworks such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Gestalt Therapy to support my point of view.

A Presenting Issue of Crying and Discipline

Throughout my childhood, I was always a sensitive child who frequently cried. From the age of seven, my parents showed their dislike towards me crying, which prompted them to ignore me altogether when I was experiencing and expressing feelings of sadness.

Crying was a presenting problem that persisted throughout most of my childhood. As I look back, crying was a way for me to express various emotions and needs. Primarily, it was a way for me to express my sadness. It might have also been a way for me to express my longing for attention and safety from my parents. But both my parents didn't subscribe to the same perception. More importantly, my mum made it clear to me that crying was wrong and something that she did not like.

This led to critical memories which in turn shaped my sense of shame towards expressing sadness. As I continued to grow older, my crying was still frequent, and this was something that my mum didn't support. She perceived my crying as child-like, suggesting that I was regressing and not maturing as I was growing older. Because of this, my mum would enforce punishment and ignore me completely whenever I could cry. She would also ask my father to do the same, to ensure there wasn't any mixed messaging and enforce clear subsystem boundaries between parent and child.

Starting the Road to Emotional Shame

It's important to recognise and contextualise the behaviours that my parents took when managing my presenting issues with crying. Based on their actions, there is enough evidence to infer that my parents didn't fully understand the implications of their parenting towards my emotional and mental well-being. If we examine their approach from a biopsychosocial perspective, my parents were recipients of a rampant cultural stigma towards mental health, and managing mental wellbeing was practically non-existent when it came to their decision making as parents (Engel & George, 1980). Their conservative and conflict-avoidant social environment played a role in establishing their response to my presenting problems.

Due to the way my parents responded to my episodes of crying, I shaped a belief system that fostered an immense sense of shame towards feeling sadness. I believed that it was wrong to feel sad and to express it in front of other people. Belief systems are an integral part of how I respond to events and actions and is a fundamental aspect of understanding their thinking process (Kendall, 2011). It is the root cause of both my behaviour as well as my perception. And because these thoughts started forming since my early years of childhood, it evolved into a powerful belief system that impacted every aspect of my life routine as an adult. For example, crying became a behaviour that I continued to hide, making sure that no one within my personal or professional network would see me express myself in that state. Subconsciously, this leads to me purposely isolating and devaluing my feelings of sadness, as I would continue to make sure that no one would see me looking upset.

This aspect of my childhood also affected my inability to express emotions immediately and effectively. Congruence of emotion is key to maintaining a positive and healthy mental wellbeing, which involves being able to express your emotion in the present moment fully (Jacobs & Yontef, 1989). My childhood incidents of being ignored shaped my understanding that I needed to keep my feelings to myself, and that sadness isn't a feeling I should acknowledge and express to the world. This value and perception continued in adulthood, which meant that I would burden myself with unresolved feelings of anger and sadness that I didn't correctly navigate. By being incongruent with my emotions, I was putting too much pressure on myself and impairing my ability to be emotionally healthy and positive.

Coming to Terms with a
Maladaptive Belief

While I managed to grow out of my presenting issue with frequent crying, it took a long time for me to come to terms and overcome the negative belief system that I continued to subscribe to for so many years. There were several tools and resources which helped me, which include improving my self-esteem, seeking professional counselling support, and understanding my parent’s context.

Even though I continued to feel ashamed about expressing sadness, I was able to improve my self-esteem through my continued pursuit of creative and performing arts. Participating in art subjects as well as performing dance performance helped improve my self-esteem and is shown to build a resource of confidence across children and adolescence in development (Wright, 1994). This growth then leads to my improved confidence in challenging my belief system and at least being able to express sadness in front of close friends and partners.

Seeking professional counselling support was also a vital resource, as I was able to put myself into an environment where I could freely explore and deconstruct my negative belief systems with a fellow professional. By seeing a skilled counsellor, I was allowing myself to review my perceptions and recognise alternative beliefs that I could subscribe to instead. And finally, understanding my parent's context helped acknowledge the limitations that my parents had. The exploration started through my current counselling training, primarily as I studied the family therapy module and looked at the various ways family dynamics, culture, and rituals shape and transmit to other family members. I don't feel that I've entirely overturned the incident and its impact on my wellbeing. However, with my growing autonomy and support network, I can recognise and challenge my inherent belief systems more effectively.

Impacting my Approach to
Counselling Children

I do believe that my personal incident and its subsequent implications to my behaviour and wellbeing will greatly help my approach to counselling children. This is because it helps reaffirm the importance of acknowledging and recognising children as they express their emotions, and it will give me the tools and resources to inform this as part of my therapy when empathising with children clients, and working with their respective family members.

As an adult and a fellow counsellor in training, I now recognise that childhood experiences matter because of the future value it brings into their adult stages of life. It becomes more apparent that what individuals experience as children shapes the perceptions and values of how they respond to the world as adults (Henderson & Thompson, 2016). Childhood experiences foster belief systems, reinforced by role modelling behaviour that children are absorbing subconsciously. Having these insights will ensure that my approach to children counselling will be both systemic and client-focused. I want to make sure that not only will my children clients have a safe environment for them to explore and express their emotions, but also that they're supported by parents who are more self-aware on the impact their behaviours and rituals are having for their child's development and growth.

It is indeed true that childhood experiences will continue to define the way we value and approach our emotions. My personal experience alone helps recount how simple moments ignorance catered for discipline can reinforce itself to grow into a belief system that impairs productivity, social interaction, and self-esteem in the future. Because of this, we all have a collective responsibility to foster a positive and healthy environment for children to express themselves in their most genuine and authentic form. 

References

George, E., & Engel, L. (1980). The clinical application of the biopsychosocial model. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(5), 535-544.

Henderson, D. A., & Thompson, C. L. (2016). Counselling children. Cengage Learning.

Kendall, P. C. (Ed.). (2011). Child and adolescent therapy: Cognitive-behavioral procedures. Guilford Press.

Wright, C. H. (1994). The value of performing arts education in our schools. NASSP Bulletin, 78(561), 39-42.

Yontef, G., & Jacobs, L. (1989). Gestalt therapy. Current psychotherapies, 4.