A second grader runs home. He has great news. Today we wrote an independent paper and he got a bad grade. And he's not the only one! But, at the last lesson, the teacher allowed me to work on my mistakes. The second grader did everything wonderfully and as a result, a pot-bellied round A was included in the magazine. I really want to share this with my mom! You definitely want to share the incredible elation with your loved one. “Mom, today we wrote an independent essay,” the child blurts out, out of breath, standing in the hallway. - And you know what? - What? - They gave me a bad grade. But then I corrected it to an A! - the child chatters joyfully. Silent scene. The mother's face changes. Every muscle of her tenses, her eyes become scary - scary and she begins to scream at the child in her heart. The fact that he corrected the grade does not bother her. She heard only one thing - “two”! He has no right to get bad marks. However, like threes... However, like fours! There is only one rating - it's five! And she didn’t care about his pathetic attempts to justify himself by some kind of grade correction. He is already to blame for the fact that he dared to bring the situation to the point where it had to be corrected. The child is crying. Not so much from resentment as from fear. There is such a striking difference between my mother’s expected reaction and what he received in reality. The mother is not embarrassed by the fact that her child’s friend is standing right here in the hallway and sees how she behaves and how she humiliates her. The child is crying. He can't stop. He's in pain. He feels this pain with his skin. Mother, of course, will not apologize. She did everything right! I know hundreds of similar stories. The age of the characters changes, the topic changes, the reaction to which the child’s expectations are shattered. The only constant is the discrepancy between what follows from the logic of what is happening, from the logic of the child, if you like, and what the mother demonstrates. There are many reasons for such mother’s behavior. This includes the fatigue that has been accumulating all week, certain expectations placed on the child, one’s own fears and even mental illness. But when children encounter this, of course, it doesn’t occur to them that they have nothing to do with it. That the mother reacted to something of her own, internal, and the child’s behavior or situation was just a trigger. The child ascribes responsibility to himself for the state or reaction that the mother demonstrated. He decides that he did something terrible and therefore... That he caused his mother such exorbitant pain that she practically collapsed and destroyed him... That somehow he decided to manifest himself in the wrong way or at the wrong time and many, many other things that would justify the mother and convince the child that he is a monster. The mother must be justified! This is the key to a child’s survival in the family. After all, the thought that something is very wrong with the mother can destroy the child’s world! While the mother is justified, the child’s world exists, it is drowning in unpredictability and even quite ordinary and harmless manifestations of the child are interpreted incorrectly and receive an incorrect reaction to them. But the world still exists. Moreover, the child even creates the illusion that it is he who controls this world. After all, his mother’s behavior is tied to his behavior. This gives rise to many other consequences, but as long as there is peace, you can somehow survive in it. Children who grew up with such mothers have in their psychological arsenal: Unstable self-esteem, with a tendency to underestimate it. Incredible sensitivity to the mood of people around them. Mechanism introjection, when opinions and judgments on the part of another person are accepted without any criticism. But, as a rule, this does not apply to a positive assessment. The projection mechanism, when a person does not dare to clarify what is behind this or that facial expression, behavior or words of another person, but reads these signals, interprets them in a certain way and begins to build communication with this person, based on your own assumptions. By interacting with their fears and anxieties, rather than with a real person, the projector suffers greatly. Insufficient.