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I often get asked this question: ” What role do parents or family continue to play in who you are as an adult person?
Susan Bodnar, PhD is a practicing clinical psychologist. She also teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Teachers College/Columbia University and The Stephen Mitchell Relational Center. Also, she works as an assistant editor of "Psychoanalytic Dialogues," and serves on the editorial board of "Contemporary Psychoanalysis." Having studied anthropology at Wesleyan University, she received her PhD from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in medical psychology at Roosevelt Hospital, and psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute.
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Ordinary Earth ™
November 17, 2009 at 7:26 pm |
Almost everything you experience as a child influences you. For a long period in your life parents have the greatest influence because they are the people most involved with you. Children make everything they experience a part of themselves and that type of internalization inspires development. Keep in mind that other things – friends, school, cultural events and even geography, not to mention biological proclivities like temperament – also influence you. The people who have raised you have also been influenced by a similar array of events and area as much a composite of biological, familial, cultural and georgraphic events as are you. And political events aren’t insignificant in the formation of consciousness.
And keep in mind that the same array of influences have also impacted everyone else you know. It is important, therefore, not to look critically upon another person. Rather, the goal is to wonder what made him or her become the person they are, and then, how has the totality of that person’s identity affected you?