It's never too late for happy childhood,” says the famous American journalist Regina Brett, “but a second childhood depends only on ourselves. And these are not empty words. Some people had difficult childhoods. Others have difficult episodes in their lives. How to deal with these bad memories? Reboot with happiness...
Inside us live the people we were in every year of our lives. A three-year-old toddler who was bitten by a dog. A six-year-old girl whose mother lost her at the mall. A ten-year-old child who was tickled until he peed. Thirteen-year-old shy, pimply, quiet girl. A sixteen-year-old girl who was not invited to the school prom, and so on. We hide in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and awakens one of these guys.
One day I went and bought myself some booties. At my moms there were eleven children. We don't have a single children's book left. Mom didn’t save anything from our childhood, because all things were passed on to the next child or were already second-hand.
The photo album is filled with pictures of the first four children. These pictures were taken by professionals and the little ones on the cards were smiling in perfect soft light. I was born fifth. There are simply no photos of me as a baby. Or maybe there is. Random pictures: a child in a playpen, in a crib, in a stroller. Perhaps it’s me. Or Mary? Or Tom? Now you can't tell the difference. I always felt sad that my mother did not keep any mementos of the unique and special baby named Regina. This is probably why I carefully keep all my daughter’s things.
But one day I decided that I would stop feeling sorry for myself. It's time to create your own memorabilia. I bought a pair of white silk booties with mother-of-pearl buttons. These were my elegant shoes; I always dreamed that my mother would buy and keep these for me. I even picked out an adorable rattle and claimed it was mine.
This may seem like a stupid or strange thing to do, but it helped close the wound a little and build up some scar tissue where the wound kept opening up, where I kept falling through.
My parents gave me the best childhood they could. Better than both of them combined. Now I'm an adult and they can't make my childhood any better. It's up to me.
I can look back and find the joy that was in my childhood. I can look at my life and the joy that is in it. I can look to the future and create the joy that may be in it. It's up to me.
- Go to a toy store and spend money there for pure pleasure.
- Go to your nearest planetarium and make a wish on a falling star.
- Make a volcano using baking soda and vinegar.
- Eat a popsicle, cone or briquette for breakfast.
- Make yourself a complex sandwich with cookies, soufflé and chocolate cooked over a fire.
- Eat dessert first.
- Use your fingers to paint an old sheet.
- Watch cartoons in your pajamas.
- Make yourself some cinnamon toast for breakfast.
- Play ping pong.
- Pick a bouquet of dandelions.
- Read funny parts from the book loudly and role-playing.
- Read under the sheet with a flashlight.
- Go to the pet store and cuddle the kittens.
- Go to the children's literature section of a bookstore.
- Play on the swing.
- Run through a cornfield.
- Play invisible all day.
- Play without keeping score.
- Go on a scavenger hunt and collect all the items on the list.
- Buy a pack of wax crayons and don’t share them with anyone.
- Do somersaults in front of the house.
- Play war with cut grass.
- Walk in the rain without an umbrella.
- Ride a bike through puddles.
- Play board games.
- Go look for birds' nests.
- Read "Winnie the Pooh".
- Play badminton in the yard.
- Shake up a cocktail of ice cream, syrup and soda.
- Have a winter picnic on the floor.
- Prepare a chic dessert with banana, ice cream, syrup, nuts, whipped cream and cherries.
- Watch "Mary Poppins".
- Pretend to work.
- Do nothing all day.
- Watch the clouds, ants, squirrels and leaves.
- Create a crazy hairstyle with wet, shampoo-covered hair.
- Learn a nursery rhyme by heart.
- Bake the soufflé in the oven.
- Play ball.
- Play numbers on cars.
- Build a fort out of tables and sheets.
- Color the skin between your toes.
- Make necklaces from shells or chestnuts.
- Fill glasses with water and play some tune by tapping them.
- Go to the fire station to look at the cars.
- Pitch your tent in your yard, porch, or living room.
- Draw with crayons on the asphalt.
- Throw "pancakes" along the river, look for all sorts of bugs under stones, wade across the stream.
- In the summer, run in the spray of the sprinkler on the lawns; in the winter, build snowmen.
- Have a pillow fight.
- Go to a homeless animal shelter and walk the dog.
- Follow the chain of animal tracks, wherever they lead.
- Organize a fashion show by trying on all your clothes.
- Catch fireflies.
- Visit the monkeys at the zoo.
- Walk around the house and look in the mirror, holding it so that it appears as if you are walking on the ceiling.
- Fly a kite.
- Take ten quarters and try everything slot machines in the supermarket.
- Jump on the bed until you get tired and fall asleep.
What to do is up to you.
It's never too late for a happy childhood - so arrange it for yourself. This childhood depends on you.
Discussion
And definitely with a fire
went to set up a tent in the living room
Comment on the article "Day of Happiness: 60 tips for adults on how to remember childhood"
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So I write more and more about cats. And all because it’s a joy to tinker with them. Just no negative points. But it doesn’t work that way with children. It's not that children aren't fun. The very fact that they exist is a great happiness. But everything else... The worst thing is school. I am a normal mother and I want my children to have a good education. But I just can’t understand why I should take such an active part in the process of gnawing the granite of science? A special nightmare from the beginning...
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We remembered our childhood :). - gatherings. Child from 7 to 10. The site runs thematic conferences, blogs, ratings of kindergartens and schools are maintained, articles are published daily and competitions are held.
Although I can’t say that I was unhappy in childhood - no, I remember it as the most boring stage of my life. Starting from the age of 16, I liked my life much more; sometimes I feel nostalgic for the period of 16-20 years, yes!
I remember my childhood. None of the relatives went to the matinees, however, there was no time. But as soon as I saw my own grandmother, who was walking past the garden fence to the store (the garden was in the yard), that was it.
How will he remember his childhood? Or is a vibrant social life with noisy holidays that we, the family, don’t really like? I was very happy as a child and remember him with great warmth.
we remember our childhood. Toys and games. Child from 1 to 3. Raising a child from one to three years: hardening and development, nutrition and illness, daily routine and development of household skills.
I remember with horror 7 years in music school (from >. From 6 to 14 years old, my childhood was KILLED by music school. Having received a certificate, I locked the piano and threw the key out the window.
I had a good childhood, I remember my parents with warmth, there were also very happy times, but there are so many painful memories: you are ashamed to remember something, you regret something very much.
I remember my childhood... So close and far away... I remember with pain the loss of my notebook with addresses. I especially cried then because of the lost address of a girl from Moscow, half a year older than me.
Let's remember our childhood! Girls, don’t take it as unceremonious, but I remembered how once someone here was discussing the name for a company, and I decided to stick my head in with my request. It’s just that no one can come in during the day during a teenage meeting, but it’s always busy here.
Our childhood. Looking at the children from the neighboring yard, you understand that this is the most carefree time in every person’s life. However, memories of our childhood or birth are not available to us. What is this mystery connected with? Why shouldn't we remember ourselves in our childhood years? What is hidden behind this gap in our memory? And then at some point a thought suddenly flashed, why don't we remember ourselves from birth, forces us to delve into the mysteries of the unknown.
Why don't we remember our birth
It would seem like this important point, like birth, should have been imprinted on our brains forever. But no, some bright events from past life sometimes they pop up in the subconscious, and most importantly, they are forever erased from memory. It is not surprising that the best minds in psychology, physiology and the religious sphere are trying to understand such an interesting fact.
Erasing memory from a mystical point of view
Researchers studying the unknown mystical side of the existence of our universe and the Higher Mind give their answers to the questions of why areas of human memory erase the ability to reproduce the birth process.
The main emphasis is on the Soul. It contains information about:
- lived periods of life,
- emotional experiences,
- achievements and failures.
Why don't we remember how we were born?
WITH physical point It is not possible for a person to understand the soul and decipher the facts stored in it.
It is assumed that this substance visits the formed embryo on the tenth day of its existence. But she does not settle there forever, but leaves him for a while, only to return a month and a half before the birth.
Scientific background
But we do not have the opportunity to remember a very important moment in our lives. This happens due to the fact that the soul does not want to “share” with the body the information that it itself possesses. A bundle of energy protects our brain from unnecessary data. Most likely, the process of creating a human embryo is too mysterious to be solved. The external universe uses the body only as an external shell, while the soul is immortal.
Man is born in pain
Why do we not remember how we were born into this world? Accurate evidence of this phenomenon has not been obtained. There are only assumptions that the extreme stress experienced at birth is to blame. A child from the warm mother’s womb climbs out through the birth canal into a world unknown to him. In the process, he experiences pain due to the changing structure of his body parts.
The growth of the human body is directly related to the formation of memory. An adult remembers the most outstanding moments in his life and places them in the “storage” compartment of his brain.
For children, everything happens a little differently.
- Positive and negative moments and events are deposited in the “subcortex” of their consciousness, but at the same time they destroy the memories existing there.
- A child's brain is not yet developed enough to store large amounts of information.
- That is why we do not remember ourselves from birth and do not store childhood memories.
What do we remember from childhood
Children's memory develops from 6 months to 1.5 years. But even then it is divided into long-term and short-term. The child recognizes the people around him, can switch to this or that object, and knows how to navigate the apartment.
Another scientific assumption about why we have completely forgotten the process of appearing in this world is associated with ignorance of words.
The baby does not speak, cannot compare current events and facts, or correctly describe what he saw. Infantile amnesia is the name given to the absence of childhood memories by psychologists.
Scientists express their guesses about this problem. They believe that children choose short-term memory as a niche for storing important experienced events. And this has nothing to do with a lack of ability to create memories. Any person not only cannot tell how his birth took place, but the passage of time makes him forget other important bright moments of his life in a certain period.
There are two main scientific theories that try to understand this difficult issue.
| Name | Description |
| Freud's theory | The world famous Freud, who promoted important changes in the fields of medicine and psychology, had his own views on the lack of childhood memories.
In other words, the girl in early age She is strongly attached to her father and has jealous feelings for her mother, perhaps even hating her.
But this theory was not widely used. It remained exclusively one person's position regarding the lack of memories of an early period of life. |
| Hark Hawn theory | What the scientist proved: why we don’t remember childhood
This doctor believed that the child did not feel like a separate person. He does not know how to separate the knowledge gained as a result of his own life experience and the emotions and feelings that other people experience. For the baby everything is the same. Therefore, memory does not preserve the moment of birth and childhood. How do children know how to distinguish between mom and dad if they have not yet learned to speak and remember? Semantic memory helps them with this. The child easily navigates the rooms and shows who is dad and who is mom without getting confused. It is long-term memory that stores important information, so necessary in order to survive in this world. “Storage” will tell you the room where he is fed, bathed, dressed, the place where the treat is hidden, and so on. So why don’t we remember ourselves from birth:
|
Why do some people remember themselves as children?
At what age do we begin to remember events that happen to us? Among your acquaintances, most likely, there are people who claim that they remember their infant years. If you are one of them, then stop deceiving yourself. And do not believe others who prove that this is so.
The brain erases events from childhood
An adult can remember moments that happened to him after five years, but not earlier.
What scientists have proven:
- Infantile amnesia completely erases the first years of life from memories.
- New brain cells, as they form, destroy all early memorable events.
- This action in science is called neurogenesis. It is constant at any age, but in infancy it is especially violent.
- Existing “cells” storing certain information are overwritten by new neurons.
- As a result, new events completely erase the old ones.
Amazing Facts of Human Consciousness
Our memory is diverse and has not yet been fully studied. Many scientists have tried to get to the bottom of the truth and determine how to influence it, forcing us to create the “storage chambers” we need. But even the rapid development of information progress does not make it possible to make such a castling.
However, some points have already been proven and may surprise you. Check out some of them.
| Fact | Description |
| Memory works even if one part of the brain hemisphere is damaged |
|
| Complete amnesia almost never happens. | In reality, complete memory loss is practically non-existent. You often watch movies where the hero hits his head, causing the previous events to completely evaporate. In reality, it is almost impossible that during the first trauma everything is forgotten, and after the second one everything is restored.
|
| The onset of brain activity in an infant begins in the embryonic state. | Three months after the egg is fertilized, the baby begins to place certain events in the cells of its storage. |
| A person can remember a lot of information |
It's just that you can't get the necessary facts out of your storage, the volume of which is unlimited. |
| It has been proven how many words can the human brain remember? | This figure is 100,000. There are so many words, but why don’t we remember ourselves from birth, it’s still interesting to know about this. |
| False memory exists | If unpleasant events happen to us that traumatize our psyche, consciousness can turn off the memory of such moments, recreating, exaggerating or distorting them. |
| Works while sleeping short term memory | That is why dreams mainly convey recent life facts that happen to us, which we do not remember in the morning. |
| TV kills your ability to remember |
|
| Brain growth occurs before age twenty-five |
|
| Always needed new and unique experiences | Memory loves nothingness
Have you ever wondered why time flies so quickly? Why are the same impressions and emotions subsequently devoid of novelty? Remember your first meeting with your loved one. The appearance of the first child. Your vacation you've been waiting for all year.
But when it repeats, it no longer seems so joyful, but fleeting. After you have just tripled back to work after studying, you look forward to your first vacation, spend it usefully and slowly. The third and the rest are already flying by in an instant. The same applies to your relationship with a loved one. At first you count the seconds until your next meeting; they seem like an eternity to you. But, after the years you have lived together, before you know it, you are already celebrating your thirtieth anniversary.
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What can you remember from childhood?
What are your most vivid childhood memories? The child's brain is designed in such a way that it is not susceptible to sound associations. Most often, he is able to remember events he saw or those that the children tried by touch.
The fear and pain experienced in infancy are forced out of the “storage chambers” and are replaced by positive and good impressions. But some people are able to remember only negative moments from life, and they completely erase happy and joyful moments from their memory.
Why do our hands remember more than our brains?
A person is able to reproduce bodily sensations in more detail than conscious ones. An experiment with ten-year-old children proved this fact. They were shown photos of their friends from nursery group. Consciousness did not recognize what they saw, only the galvanic skin reaction revealed that the children still remembered their grown-up comrades. This can be determined by the electrical resistance experienced by the skin. It changes when excited.
Why does memory remember experiences?
Emotional memories become scarred by our most negative experiences. Thus, consciousness warns us for the future.
But sometimes the psyche simply does not have the ability to cope with the mental trauma suffered.
- Horrible moments simply do not want to fit into a puzzle, but are presented in our imagination in the form of scattered fragments.
- Such a sad experience is stored in the implicit memory in torn pieces. Small detail- a sound, a look, a word, the date of an event - can resurrect the past that we are trying to erase from the depths of our brain.
- To prevent obsessive terrible facts from being resurrected, each victim uses the principle of so-called dissociation.
- Experiences after trauma are fragmented into separate, incoherent fragments. Then they are not so associated with real life nightmares.
If you were offended:
Are there really options for answering the question of why we don’t remember ourselves from birth? Maybe this information can still be pulled out from the depths of our capacious storage?
When certain problems arise, we most often turn to psychologists. To help cope with its solution, specialists in some cases resort to hypnosis sessions.
It is often believed that all our painful real experiences come from deep childhood.
During a moment of trance, the patient can list all his hidden memories without even knowing it.
Sometimes, individual non-susceptibility to hypnosis does not allow one to immerse oneself in early periods life path.
Some people, on a subconscious level, put up a blank wall and protect their emotional experiences from others. And this method has not received scientific confirmation. Therefore, if some people tell you that they perfectly remember the moment of their birth, do not take this information seriously. Most often these are simple inventions or a clever professional advertising trick.
Why do we remember moments that happen to us after we reach 5 years of age?
Can you answer:
- What do you remember from your childhood?
- What were your first impressions after visiting the nursery group?
Most often, people cannot give at least any answer to these questions. But, nevertheless, there are still at least seven explanations for this phenomenon.
| Cause | Description |
| Unripe brain | The roots of this hypothesis have come to us a long time ago.
But at present, many scientists argue with this statement.
|
| Missing vocabulary | Due to the fact that until the age of three, a child knows a minimum number of words, he is not able to clearly describe the events and moments surrounding him.
For example, a girl remembered the smell of her grandmother’s pies in the village where she spent up to a year. |
| Muscular form |
You saw that they constantly copy the movements of adults, gradually bringing their actions to automatism. But psychologists argue with this statement.
|
| Lack of sense of time | To put together a picture from flickering details from childhood, you need to understand in what specific period the corresponding event occurred. But the child cannot do this yet. |
| Memory with holes |
|
| No desire to remember | An interesting position is taken by pessimists who argue why we don’t remember ourselves from birth. It turns out that unconscious fears are to blame for this:
Everyone is trying to force their helpless state out of uncomfortable memories. And, when we are able to serve ourselves independently, from that moment we begin to “record” all the information we receive and reproduce it, if necessary. |
| A very important period of life | The brain is like a computer
Think about how a computer works. If we make changes to system programs at our own discretion, this may lead to a failure of the entire system as a whole.
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Do we remember or not?
It cannot be assumed that all of the above hypotheses are one hundred percent correct. Since the moment of memorization is a very serious and not fully studied process, it is hard to believe that it is influenced by only one of the listed facts. Of course, it’s curious that we keep a lot of different things, but we don’t imagine our birth. This is the greatest mystery that humanity cannot solve. And, most likely, the question of why we don’t remember ourselves from birth will worry great minds for decades to come.
Your comments are very interesting - do you remember yourself as a child?
Question for a psychologist:
Hello! I am 19 years old, I am not married, I have no children. I was raised by my mother and grandmother, my father already had another family, in which he stayed, and came to me 2-3 times a year.
At the age of 5-10 (I don’t remember exactly how long) my mother asked if I remembered anything about one incident when I was 2-3 years old. I said no. The following happened: when my uncle came to us, and my mother and grandmother were distracted, he locked himself in the kitchen with me and did not let them in, although they were screaming and breaking, he simply held the door with his hand (no, there was no violence, EXACTLY! , because before going to school I had to be checked by a gynecologist), my mother said that I didn’t cry, but laughed, and then he opened the door and that’s it; Mom asked him about what he was doing and why he closed, but he didn’t answer anything, and I don’t remember anything.
This has been bothering me for more than one year; at school and college I didn’t ask psychologists about it, because I didn’t feel comfortable and they discussed all the problems of the students with their class teachers, and they are already with their parents. I was afraid that they would misunderstand me, and I never asked my mother and grandmother about this again, and even less so my uncle. I am writing to you because this is, after all, anonymous. I can’t remember, although I remember some moments of this age very vividly, maybe there is some kind of technique or something like that. Please tell me.
Psychologist Alexander Evgenievich Zhuravlev answers the question.
Hello, Veronica!
There are different techniques for “evoking deep memories”: hypnosis, meditation, “spontaneous writing”, shallow sleep, associative techniques, etc.
In principle, all these techniques are in one way or another connected with psycho-emotional relaxation and the subsequent “work” of the consciousness and subconscious.
Scheme of one of the most simple ways the memories are very simple:
1. Relax (take a comfortable position, relax your muscles, regulate your breathing, clear your head of thoughts and tasks, focusing yourself on, for example, the movements of a pendulum, a candle flame, certain sound signals). How exactly to do this is described in 1,000,000 sources and is available on the Internet. Moreover, everyone has their own methods of relaxation. Some people need a pendulum, others don't. Some people respond faster to meditative mantric music, and others to visual images (candle, transparent crystal, ball, etc.)
Here you need to look for yourself and know yourself, or contact a specialist hypnologist.
So... You relax. Now...
2. Visualize those memories that remain. Imagine a white screen and somehow “overlay” at least one “picture” from that episode on it. No matter what! This could be a fragment of that kitchen, a door, a figure, clothes, a face, etc. We must try to keep the focus on this picture as much as possible, try to complement this picture with details and additional strokes and colors. You are, as it were, “on the other side” of the camera. You are the operator. The focus is not on what you are doing inside the picture, but on the details of the picture itself! With the details will come sensations, even images that were present then! Gradually the entire screen will fill up. Moreover, not a two-dimensional, but a voluminous, deep plot!
But this is all done only after achieving relaxation!
The main thing is to take your time and just be an “operator”. There is no task to see something specific. The task is to see and “complete” the picture with as many details as possible.
And now - the main thing!
Veronica! How much do you really need it?
It seems to me that if everything is fine with you now, then there is no point in remembering some difficult to explain episodes from childhood!
It is interesting to figure out what is still hiding behind the “screen” of your concern, if you are sure that there was no violence.
You are now a fully grown person living in the information space of the 21st century! You understand perfectly well what generally happens in life and that, probably, God saved you (as well as your relative) from something possibly irreparable.
It’s hard to imagine what you (then just a baby) went through! It's GONE! It has passed, but if there is anxiety, something neurotic remains.
Do I need to go back there to cope with this neurosis?
You know, I'm not sure!
I have my own opinion about what “unfinished actions” and “unfinished dramas” are. Some things need to be played out and completed, but some things are better left in the depths of the subconscious.
After all, you don’t have obsessive fears, some disturbing dreams, or recurring panic attacks? There is what you called the word “anxiety”.
The frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex, responsible for memory, mature by the age of two: from this age we can remember everything that happened to us. Why doesn't this happen?
Why do we rarely remember our earlier childhood? Photo: Lori.ru.
At the same time, in childhood we form relationships with our parents. Relationships with them will then determine our ability to create contact with other people. Connection with the most significant images in life is a certain matrix of our perception of the world and others.
And if we don’t remember a lot of things about our childhood, this is often evidence that an obliging memory has erased some of the difficult memories.
This is illustrated by this dream:
“I recently ordered a dream that would clarify what happened in my childhood that still affects my life. And I had a dream where the main characters were souls. I can’t say what they look like, but they feel like souls. I'm flying next to an older soul. Very dear to me. She is God to me. I trust her endlessly. And suddenly physically in a dream, as if in reality, I begin to feel suffocation in my throat. That is, she is choking me. And he laughs. There's nothing I can do. All I have is helplessness, amazement, weakness and a feeling of being pathetic and insignificant. And the most vivid feeling is wild fear. Then I almost woke up and, half asleep or in reality, continued the dream by the fact that I came to life - either they didn’t strangle me, or this soul suddenly needed me at the last moment. I continued to fly next to her after a while because I didn't remember anything. She didn't remember being strangled. All that was left was an incomprehensible feeling of one’s own uselessness, inferiority, and helplessness. Another intuitive distrust of others. I began to fly a little further from this soul, but with the same love.”
The dream indicates that there is some kind of absolute, authoritative soul next to our dreamer. And this soul, instead of love and support, turns into a threat to life for the dreamer. Such dreams are often dreamed by those who were raised and punished physically. The child is trapped. The normal behavior in the event of a beating would be to run away or fight back. But since the offender is an adult whom he loves and needs, the child must consider possible punishment. He turns into anxious, suspicious, suspicious, distrustful.
Although many parents raise their children with the help of spanking and hitting, no one attaches importance to this. In fact, this is one of the most common and fatal parenting mistakes. Thus, they instill in the child the idea that his body is not valuable, that it can be destroyed and invaded according to his mood. Growing up, such children do not know how to defend themselves in front of others, especially in front of authorities.
Apparently, our dreamer’s dream in an intensified form reflects what she probably experienced in relationships with her beloved authorities - a threat that she remembered more unconsciously than consciously.
And only through sleep does she have the opportunity to come into contact with the distance and fear that is always present in relationships.
Maria Dyachkova, psychologist, family therapist and training presenter personal growth Training center Marika Khazina
