Psychologist Lada Lapina - about the power of likes and why it is important to be able to appropriate your merits and achievements.
Try the experiment. Post the most effective selfie on your social media page. Or write there that you won a cool international competition. Made? Now try not to check how people react to your messages. Pretend you don't care. How long can you take?
Probably not for long. For we absolutely do not give a damn how they react to us. Receiving marks "like" - "likes" - we are filled with joy and happiness, the energy splashes over the edge. If there are few or no likes at all, anxious thoughts come that something is wrong with us. This can give rise to shame, fear, and other unpleasant experiences. And only after making sure that we are still likable to other people, we are able to return to a good mood.
Mental wellness doesn't necessarily come from social media likes alone. This can be the approval of the bosses, the admiration of girlfriends, or the husband's avaricious tears.
But it will definitely be some kind of external source. Praised - I'm good, not praised - probably not. External approval and praise are always needed when there is a lack of understanding and experience of their value from the inside.
In fact, the less self-worth, the greater the dependence on the opinions of others. The bad news is that it is impossible to feed from the outside. No matter how much we are praised, liked and admired, self-esteem cannot be raised by this if there is no skill to appropriate one's merits and achievements. You can only become dependent on the fickle reactions of other people. Today they were in a good mood and appreciated, but tomorrow the mood has soured, and they will sneeze at us.
And we build our self-esteem building on their opinion. Therefore, today we climbed to its very roof, and tomorrow we flew down rapidly. Getting back your mental health will take you trying again and again to earn praise. Do your best job, write a funny post, or learn how to take mind-blowing selfies.
The good news here is that changing this alignment and gaining greater resilience is difficult, but real. But more on that later. To understand what needs to be changed and how, it would be good to figure out where it came from and what exactly the problem is.
And the problem is that the current generation 25-45 years old are the children of the first post-war generations. People who grew up in the conditions of collectivization, repression and survived the meat grinder of the war, could provide their children only at the very least well-fed and shoddy life. There was no question of any attitude towards the child as a separate person with his own desires and feelings. Moreover, the state, in principle, did not support attention to individuality; on the contrary, a person was only a functional part of a large system, and the less he stood out, the better.
Therefore, our parents were constantly, in fact, in circumstances of psychological violence. They shouldn't have been crying, upset, angry, or angry. They had no right to doubt and error. Having the strongest, like any child's, need for approval of their own existence, as a result, they abandoned their individuality and bore unbearable responsibility for the emotional state of their parents, and no one convinced them of this.
When day after day the child's feelings are declared forbidden and his desires insignificant, when he is regularly manipulated, when he is not forgiven for mistakes and blamed for his own misfortunes, the little man has no way to understand that he is good and valuable in himself. His main experiences are shame and guilt, he poorly understands his true motives and absolutely cannot stand the expression of feelings and needs that are taboo for him by other people.
The result of this sad tale of family and government pressure was non-adult adults. Non-adults - because they have not learned to take full responsibility for their lives, understand their needs, be able to support themselves and regulate the emotional sphere. And so these underage adults - former disliked children - had their own children. Those who are now 25, 30 and 40.
Could such parents have taught their offspring to recognize and present feelings, thereby recognizing the child's right to be himself? Risk of opening up to the world in your uniqueness? Knowledge of strengths? Experiencing yourself meaningful and valuable outside of "good behavior"? Of course not, like their ancestors. The endlessly sad chain of generations in the history of the country in the twentieth century, a century of violence and suffering, has only led to the fact that the vast majority of Russians have chronic self-doubt.
Maybe that's why they have the idea that children can be over-praised and they will turn into people with an unreasonably grandiose idea of "themselves loved", and this is bad. Yes, like excessive criticism, praise inappropriate to the situation is an unviable extreme. However, a good opinion of oneself, even in the absence of obvious advantages, is a much healthier situation than depreciation with a large number of them.
The best thing a parent can do is to provide his child with a safe self-presentation, which will both give confidence that he is good, and he will not need to seek endless confirmation of his worth.
What does it mean to ensure safety? It means helping the child understand their states, intentions, strengths and weaknesses without evaluation. It means being able to handle childish tantrums, bad moods, aggression and anger without judgment. All this is real, of course, only if the child's parent knows how to do it in relation to himself.
And here it is worth discovering the "secret" of how you can change the state of affairs with low self-worth and evaluative dependence. Unfortunately, this cannot be done by an effort of will and even by reading motivating books. More real - in a warm relationship, but this is a heavy, not always bearable, and too obligatory burden for a partner. You can learn everything that an adult should have taught a child, but could not, in the safe conditions of personal or group psychotherapy. It can help you free yourself from obsessive guilt and shame, learn to appropriate your accomplishments, and generally treat yourself better.
When we know how to appreciate and praise ourselves, it is much easier for us to do this in relation to others (as well as to build a distance with the wrong people) - then the circle of contacts changes qualitatively and even personal effectiveness increases. But this is not the most important thing. Even if no one appreciates us and puts a lot of likes, this will not become the basis for a tragedy. The need for recognition, which is natural for a person as a social being, will not dominate, and the response of the world will determine our attitude towards ourselves.
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