Model of Child Emotional Development
CAARP-ALIAS: A Model of Development of Self Worth
Isabella McKenzie Parker © 2013
Note: This version is the original model from which the 'Secrets' version of Self Esteem Parenting and the Five-Part Model was extracted/adapted for parents and other general readers. The first part of this original version provides more psychological explanation and rationales of developing the model. The second part (CAARP-ALIAS: Parenting Behaviour) is virtually the same as Part 1 to Part 5.
Self Worth, the Common Denominator
Regardless of what problem has led a client to seek therapy, my observation is that there is a common denominator. Often, as clients tell about their childhood, their reports indicate that they did not feel valued by one or both parents (ie felt unloved, alone, not important, lacked approval, not felt accepted for who they were, not receive acknowledgement for efforts and achievements, feel not good enough in spite of efforts, repeatedly let down with broken promises, treated to abuse /violence, not protected from abuse/violence, trust violated).
Sometimes clients will state they have low self esteem or lack self confidence in some area of their lives, or ‘do not feel good’ about themselves. There may have been acceptance or tolerance of life circumstances or treatment by others which implies they place a low value on themselves. This is generally combined with a lack of sense of empowerment to change distressing or unsatisfactory circumstances in their life. There appeared to be a link between not feeling valued by parents and not feeling good about the self.
Links between parenting and psychopathology
Parental Bonding Instrument
Needs unmet or violated during childhood may pose some degree of risk for depression during the lifetime. This link between childhood and depression has been formalised in the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), a research questionnaire designed to assess quality of parenting received (Parker, Tupling and Brown, 1979). In depression studies, adult participants are required to answer questions on how caring, protective or controlling their parents were, based on recollections and perceptions of their parents.
Attachment-Based Family Therapy (ABFT)
ABFT is a family therapy that focuses on negative attitudes towards their parents and adolescent behaviour, when treating depressed and suicidal adolescents (Diarmond, Reis, Diarmond, Siqueland and Isaacs, 2002). This therapeutic approach is based on evidence that parental rejection, criticism, control and lack of warmth result in children having low self worth, self-critical tendencies, depressogenic attributions and poor problem-solving skills - all risk factors for depression. Longitudinal studies have found that such negative parental experiences and behaviour predict increased risk of depressive symptoms and the onset of major depression from two to twenty years later.
This link between childhood and experiencing some degree of ‘not feeling good about self’ is not necessarily about having a horrible emotionally deprived or violent and abusive childhood. Mostly, it is about having an ‘ordinary’, ‘average’, ‘normal’ childhood with parents who cared about their kids and ‘did the best they knew how’. But, they really didn’t know how and besides, “Babies don’t come with a manual”.
This has led me to conclude that (in addition to survival) the most significant outcome that everyone acquires from their childhood is their sense of self worth. Children need to feel valued by their parents. This validation is adopted and internalised as their own sense of self worth and has long term implications for emotional and mental wellbeing. If a particular adaptive behaviour or attribute is perceived by the child to be the source of parental validation, the child will identify with this behaviour or attribute. It will be adopted as their identity or role, as their source of validation (by self and the expected source of validation from others) throughout life. As an adult, this adopted role may continue to be a source of validation and bring satisfaction and enjoyment, thus reaffirming their sense of self worth. Alternatively, it may fail to elicit validation and instead be dysfunctional or even maladaptive.
I would say that the most important fundamental human need is validation – we need to feel valued for who we are and for what we do – by those who are significant to us - starting with our parents. (Check out the 'Validation Hypothesis').
So what do I mean by this ‘Self Worth’?
My definition: Self Worth is a measure of what we subconsciously believe we deserve in life. Having a strong or healthy sense of Self Worth means recognition that you have needs and acknowledgement that you are worthy of these needs being met (eg, acknowledging that you are lovable and worthy of being loved - including, being loved by yourself). Having a healthy sense of Self Worth also means having the ability to ensure these needs are met, being able to be assertive when
required in achieving needs - in a calm, confident, polite manner, without being selfish, without use of aggression or manipulation or having a sense of entitlement and without interfering with, overriding or ignoring the competing needs of others.
Self Worth (or lack of) has a significant impact across all areas of life. It determines expectations we have of what we subconsciously believe we deserve: what we will get out of life (the best available or the ‘short end of the stick’); how we will be treated by others (with respect or disrespect, used, abused); whether we will have the confidence to be assertive (non-aggressively, non-selfishly) in ensuring our own needs are met and speak up in seeking justice and a fair go (for self and
others); seek to improve our situation in life or always settling for second best (in jobs and relationships) in the subconscious belief that we don’t deserve anything better and should be grateful that we have anything at all. A person with low sense of Self Worth has poorly defined personal boundaries and may live a life of compromise – compromising their needs, compromising their self respect, allowing transgression of their personal boundaries, never ‘speaking up’ so as not to be disliked. A strong healthy sense of Self Worth developed in childhood means a greater chance of long term mental and emotional wellbeing. Conversely, poor Self Worth as a child means less chance of achieving long term mental and
emotional wellbeing - regardless of successful achievements.
A person with low Self Worth may constantly engage in ‘self-less’ behaviour. Most people will engage in self-less behaviour at times, but a person with a strong or healthy sense of Self Worth will do so without compromising or having to
always sacrifice their own needs. However, totally ‘selfless’ people lack a sense of self, lack an awareness of their own needs or if they do, lack acknowledgment that they are worthy of these needs being met. Individuals who are habitually self-less and
‘love’ (ie, need) to be of service to others are this way because they have learnt as children that their needs are regarded as unimportant, less important than the needs of others. Subconsciously, they believe they are worthless and undeserving and their only source of validation is in serving others. ‘Selfless’ people are both valued and exploited for their selflessness. What the ‘selfless’ person does not realise is that other people treat us the way we treat ourselves. If we ignore our own needs as unimportant, others will ignore them as unimportant, too. (The exception is a saint who has made a conscious decision to live a life of service to God and helping others). People with low self worth are likely to be vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation, due to their need for approval and their inability to say ‘no’ out of fear of being disliked.
Individuals with low self worth are likely to remain in unfulfilling jobs in the belief that they do not deserve anything better and/or believe they lack the ability to improve their position. They are more likely to settle for second best in
relationships that may be dysfunctional or unhappy, putting up with disrespect and even violence, in the subconscious belief they do not deserve anything better and should be grateful that anyone would want them at all. In relationships, the person with low self worth is too much – too insecure, too needy, too caring, too giving, too eager to please, too acquiescent, too grateful, too tolerant, too forgiving. An example that is easy to recognise is Jennifer Aniston’s character in the movie, “The Break Up”. Other examples are women who repeatedly forgive partners or husbands for emotional abuse, violence or betrayal and humiliation of repeated infidelities or desperately cling to a man wanting to leave the relationship.
Women with poor self worth may be more vulnerable to getting into relationships with married men. Since they lack respect for themselves, they are also likely to lack respect for the man’s marriage or his wife and obviously, the man lacks respect for both of the women. Often, these women’s low self worth is due to not feeling valued by their fathers who were ‘emotionally unavailable’ to them (or even absent from their lives). Hence, they continue this expectation pattern of being attracted to men who do not value them and are unavailable.
Lack of a healthy sense of self Worth may be compensated for by:
* Covering up or masking
* Adopting a persona of confidence.
* ‘Out there’ attention-seeking behaviour
Lack of healthy Self Worth may be disguised or overcompensated for and mistaken as a high sense of Self Worth by:
* Loud, boorish, rude, outspoken and insensitive, or a bully, aggressively achieving personal needs without concern
for the impact on others. In terms of adaptive behaviour, it is like a mouse wearing a lion mask and adopting the role
of a dominant lion. Other individuals with low self worth do not see the mouse behind the mask so mistakenly misinterpret
the boorish individual to be a ‘strong personality’ or a ‘big personality’ and they may feel intimidated. Those with a healthier
sense of self worth can see through the facade.
* Sense of entitlement which may reflect:
(i) a false, exaggerated sense of self worth (ie, narcissistic) that is due to a parent having fed the individual’s ego with
inappropriate and excessive praise during childhood or
(ii) an adult feels they deserve everything now as compensation for missing out as a child.
Summarising characteristics of Self Worth:
Strong, healthy sense of Self Worth:
* Acknowledging worthy of having needs met
* Able to meet needs without making a 'big deal' out of it
* Assertive in meeting needs, non-aggressively
* Do not buy into belief that aggression = strength
* Considerate of needs of others
* Comfortable putting needs of others first
Poor or low Self Worth:
* Living a life of compromise, settling for second best
* Putting own needs last all or most of the time
* Needs approval, may be a 'people pleaser', unable to say 'no'
* Fear of upsetting others and being disliked
Compensating for low Self Worth:
* Covering up, mask with persona of confidence
* May strive for career success
* Seeks self-improvement, read self-help books
* May self-medicate with drugs/alcohol, reliant on alcohol
Over-compensating for low Self Worth , disguised - may be mistaken for high Self Worth:
* 'Out there' attention seeking behaviour, loud, boorish
* Ensuring their needs are met, aggressively, selfishly
* Ignoring, overriding or violating needs of others
* May have a sense of entitlement due to
- being spoilt by parents, given inappropriate praise (narcissistic personality)
- making up for deprivations as a child.
Beliefs about self worth are self-fulfilling because subconsciously we are attracted to people and situations (or subconsciously create them) where we will be treated as we subconsciously expect. Hence, behaviour based on negative beliefs or schemas about Self Worth can be self sabotaging, self defeating or self destructive.
Low Self Esteem is regarded as a risk factor for depression. However, this link is unlikely to be a direct one but is indirect. A person with low Self Worth is perhaps more likely to be in circumstances that become a depressogenic
‘trap’. This means that the life situation deteriorates to the extent that the individual feels trapped, powerless to improve the situation or extricate themself and hopeless in that they can’t see their life ever changing for the better. This may be due to lack of self empowerment to take control and change the circumstances. It may be due to fear of upsetting significant others whose approval we ‘need’ and in whom we rely on for our emotional security.
Measures of Self Value:
Self Worth and Self Esteem are terms of Self Value that tend to be used interchangeably, but are
they actually the same? I believe that although Self Worth and Self Esteem are both a reflection of Self Value, they are from different perspectives and differ in their origins and temporal emergence.
Self Worth is a subconscious belief, a received value from parents, an internalised perception of value held by parents. This value is stable across time unless there is therapeutic intervention or ‘life changing’ life events.
Self Esteem can be regarded as a conscious, self-constructed value that is more akin to the self image presented
to the world. This may be constructed from self-assessment of what the individual values about him/herself: character; personality; body image, physical beauty, fitness; skills, performance and achievement; popularity, acknowledgment; self-improvement efforts. Self Esteem can be boosted by positive experiences or consciously working on the specific areas of
interest. Conversely, Self Esteem can take a beating from negative life experiences.
It is probable that Self Esteem overlays Self Worth, so that if a healthy sense of Self Worth provides a strong foundation, Self Esteem with also be strong and healthy. Conversely, if the foundation is poor Self Worth, then Self Esteem may serve to mask or compensate, but may be fragile and crumble when confronted with negative experiences that challenge what they value about themself. If people are asked about their Self Worth or Self Esteem, they are likely to refer to the more
socially desirable self-constructed version of Self Value.
Summary: Self Worth can be defined as a measure of what an individual subconsciously believes they deserve in life. Self Worth represents internalization of the perceived value placed on children by the parents and has a lifelong impact on mental and emotional wellbeing. Self Worth is the foundation for Self Esteem. Low Self Worth can increase risk of non-endogenous depression.
CAARP-ALIAS: Model of Development of Self Worth:
For the development of a healthy sense of Self Worth, what children need is to feel valued by their parents. The parental
role it to treat their children (from early infancy) in ways that result in their children feeling valued by them. Ironically, the onus for being valued by parents is on the child. Information from clients and information obtained in hypnosis from their child ego states suggest that in addition to the need for ATTACHMENT, there are four other supplementary components to this need to feel valued. The model being developed around Self Worth appears to link into ATTACHMENT which I regard as also being a developmental context for the other four components of Self Worth identified. Hence, I have adopted the aspect of ATTACHMENT that I regard as being relevant to Self Worth and it has been incorporated into the model as the first component. In this proposed model, each component consists of two complementary parts: (i) the feeling the child needs to
experience and (ii) the parenting behaviour that elicits the feeling in the child.
Bowlby’s ATTACHMENT refers to the interactive/whole relationship between mother and infant, but for consistency, I have separated this into attachment as what the child needs to feel, and connection to describe the type of parenting behaviour required for the child to experience feeling attached. To avoid confusion, any further references to attachment will be distinguished by: Bowlby’s ATTACHMENT (ie, upper case) as representing the developmental context that is the mother-infant relationship, while for the first component of the Self Worth model, ‘attachment’ (ie, lower case) representing the feeling the child needs to experience in order to feel valued.
Model design:
CAARP-ALIAS is a psychodynamic model of ‘bottom-up’ construction. It is not ‘theory-driven’ or based on ideology (‘top-down’), with data sought to fit a pre-designed model and support a theory. The model has been extracted as providing the best fit for the available clinical data and the theory has been developed to explain that fit. Although not yet tested for ‘internal validity’, it does have real world ‘external validity’.
Retrospectively, the model can be seen to link with ‘attachment’ as an aspect of Bowlby’s ‘internal working model’ in the subconscious mind. Self Worth qualifies for inclusion, since it can be seen to underpin the role of ‘confidence’ in believing care will always be available when needed.
There are five components to the child’s need to feel valued: five feelings by the child - Attached, Loved, Important, Approval (Accepted and Acknowledged) and Safe; and five corresponding classes of relevant parenting behaviour - Connection, Affection, Attention, Recognition and Protection that elicit the child’s feelings. While I regard these five components as being independent of each other, the feelings are all linked by a common outcome (sense of value) and functionally, the parenting behaviours are all interconnected. ATTACHMENT is innate; love exists within the context of ATTACHMENT, we accept those we love for who they are, acknowledge their efforts and their successes with support and praise, regard them as important to us and want to keep them safe.
Here proposed is a model of child emotional developmental needs and parenting behaviour based on the five
identified components of value that explains the development of the child’s sense of Self Worth. I have arbitrarily named this model CAARP-ALIAS, joint acronyms of parenting behavior (CAARP) and feelings (ALIAS) the child needs to experience. This
model, which I regard as a component of Bowlby’s ‘inner working model’ could also be subtitled: Essential Principles of Parenting.
Example of steps to a child feeling loved in response to parenting behavior:
A mother gives hugs and cuddles to her infant daughter, accompanied by smiles and statements of affection such as,
“Mummy loves her beautiful little bunniekins”. From Mum’s words, the infant is able to interpret Mum’s ‘affectionate’ behaviour to mean that ‘Mum loves me’ and also enables the infant to label the inner experience as ‘feeling loved’. The implication is that Mum regards the child as ‘worthy of love’. The child then internalises this as ‘I am worthy of love’.
Key steps: (i) parent behaviour, (ii) feelings elicited in the child by that behaviour, (iii) implication of parent behaviour as perceived by the child (ie, the subliminal message).
The hypothesised sequence of steps from parenting behaviour to internalized value:
(i) Parent engages in appropriate ‘parenting behaviour’ which
(ii) elicits a positive feeling in the child,
(iii) who interprets this feeling and the parenting behaviour to mean that the parent has positive feelings/intentions
towards the child (ie, the child attributes this perceived meaning to the behaviour),
(iv) the implication being that the parent must regard the child as worthy of the parenting behaviour and thus value
the child (ie, subliminal message which is implicit in the parenting behaviour) and
(v) the child’s feeling activates the process of internalisation of this value the parent is perceived to put on the child, as the child’s own sense of self worth.
Conversely, if the parenting behaviour fails to elicit positive feelings in the child (or elicits negative feelings), then the child is not going to feel valued by the parents. Instead, the child will believe that they are regarded by the parent as ‘not worthy’ of their efforts and will internalise this belief as ‘I am unworthy’, ie, ‘low Self Worth’.
I am repeating an important, fundamental point here: The ultimate feeling for children is the subconscious feeling of being valued by their parents. Hypothetically, parent behaviour (ie, what parents say and do or don’t say and don’t do) elicits a feeling in the child and communicates two sets of information which the child receives via ‘perceptual antennae’. One can be regarded as a low frequency message in the interpretation explicit in parenting behaviour, the perceived meaning attributed by the child (eg, a hug from Mum means “Mum loves me”). The other can be regarded as a higher frequency message on how the child subconsciously feels valued by the parent, received in the subliminal message which is implicit in the parenting behavior (eg, “Mum loves me because she regards me as worthy of love”). This perceived value or worthiness is what is internalised as the child’s subconscious belief in it’s own sense of Self Worth.
However, words can often be empty if other behaviour does not back them up. Saying “I love you” every day has a hollow sound if the actual parenting of a young child is ‘outsourced’, parents are not involved in the child’s life and do not attend functions in which the child is a participant, pay them off by spending money on expensive gifts in lieu of spending time with them, break promises, fail to acknowledge achievements and effort or they are highly critical, neglectful or abusive to
the child.
Hence, more important and of greater significance than the explicit message in what parents say and do or
don’t say and don’t do, is the subliminal message – the hidden or implicit meaning in their behaviour. This is the implication that the child is valued by the parents as worthy of the commitment they have made to love, nurture, guide and protect their child. This subconscious sense of being regarded by our parents as worthy of the commitment they have made to us and worthy of the effort this involves, is our true sense of how they value us. This subconscious feeling of being valued can be regarded as the ‘prime feeling’. Explicit behaviour by parents may elicit ALIAS feelings but does not produces the feeling of being valued and worthy of parental commitment to provide care. This is the role of the implicit or hidden meaning in their behaviour. It is this 'prime feeling’ of feeling valued (or not) that we internalise as our own sense of Self Worth.
The following tables summarise the sequence of steps for each CAARP-ALIAS component. Table 1 shows the sequence for needs being met, Table 2 for needs unmet and Table 3, for needs violated.
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Table 1. CAARP-ALIAS Model of Child Emotional Needs and Parenting Behaviour in Development of Self Worth.
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I II III IV V
Parenting Behaviour Child Feeling Perceived meaning Subliminal message Internalised self Worth
of PB implicit in PB as subconscious Belief
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1. Connection Attached P desires attachment Worthy of I am worthy of security/
to me attachment attachment
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2. Affection Loved P loves me Worthy of love I am worthy of love
I am lovable
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3. Attention Important I am important to P Worthy of attention I am worthy of attention
My needs are important
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4. Recognition Approved P accepts me and Worthy of I am worthy just as I am
- Accepted acknowledges my recognition I am worthy for what I do
- Acknowledged achievements/efforts
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5. Protection Safe P wants me to be safe Worthy of I am worthy of protection
protection I deserve to be safe
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P = Parent; PB = Parenting Behaviour.
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Table 2. CAARP-ALIAS Model of Child Emotional Needs: Summary of Child Needs not being met because Parental Behaviour is INADEQUATE in some way (or completely LACKING).
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Parenting Behaviour Child Feeling Perceived meaning Subliminal message Internalised Self Worth
Lacking of PB implicit in PB as subconscious Belief
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1. Connection: Insecurity/ P does not desire UN-worthy of I am UN-worthy of security
Detached anxiety attachment to me security
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2. Affection: UN-loved P does not love me UN-worthy of love I am UN-worthy of love
Unaffectionate I am UN-lovable
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3. Attention: UN-important I am not important to P UN-worthy of I am UN-important
Uninvolved attention My needs are not important
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4. Recognition: Lack approval P not accept me and UN-worthy of I am not worthwhile
Ignore not acknowledge my acceptance/ I am not good enough
achievements/efforts acknowledgment
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5. Protection: UN-safe P not care if I am safe UN-worthy of I am UN-worthy of
Lack of protection protection protection
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Table 3. CAARP-ALIAS Model of Child Emotional Needs: Summary of Child Needs not met because the Parental Behaviour VIOLATES the child's needs.
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Parenting Child Feeling Perceived meaning Subliminal message Internalised Self Worth as
Violating Behaviour of PB implicit in PB subconscious Belief + Anger
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1. Connection: Insecurity/ P not desire UN-worthy of I am UN-worthy of security
Abandonment anxiety/fear attachment to me attachment
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2. Affection: Un-loved/ P does not love me UN-worthy of love I am UN-worthy of love
Emotional abuse betrayed I am UN-deserving of love
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3. Attention: UN-important/ I am UN-important to P UN-worthy of I am UN-important
Break promises let down attention My needs are unimportant
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4. Recognition: Dis-approval/ P reject me and UN-worthy of I am not worthwhile
Rejection/ridicule demeaned my achievements acceptance/ I am not good enough
acknowledgement I am useless/worthless
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5. Protection: UN-safe/ P not want me UN-worthy of I don't deserve to be safe
Abuse/violence betrayed to be safe protection I deserve to be treated
badly
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Significance of Feelings:
Feelings + Perception >>> Meaning >>> Subconscious Belief
In the example of a mother engaging in affectionate behaviour with her infant daughter, it is the child’s experience of warm fuzzy inner feelings that is significant and essential to ‘feeling loved’ and feeling valued.
In the absence of this affectionate behaviour from the mother, there will be an absence of positive feeling in the infant. Initially, the infant is likely to experience an inner emptiness rather than actually ‘feeling unloved’. It is probable then, that as the infant develops an awareness of its environment, it observes affectionate behaviour by others and the positive
response from the recipient of this affectionate behaviour. The child is then able to develop an awareness of the meaning of affectionate behaviour and an awareness of the lack of affection shown by its own parents. The child is able to label the inner
experience of emptiness as ‘feeling unloved’ and interpret the parents’ lack of affection to mean they do not love the child and believe the child to be unworthy of love.
It is the feeling that is crucial since it could be regarded as serving multiple roles: (i) a ‘qualitative indicator’, providing ‘meaning’ in interpreting parent behavior which is the basis of ‘perception’, (ii) a ‘quantitative measure’ of perceived value (or lack of) the parent places on the child and (iii) also activates the cognitive processing of internalization of perceived parent value as self worth.
Parenting behaviour must also be consistent. If there is inconsistency between action and words, the child may be more likely to believe the message in the more negative of the two as representing the parent’s true value of the child. Likewise, there needs to be consistency between the behaviour of both parents since if one gives praise and the other gives criticism only, the child may regard the criticism as a more accurate reflection of their worth and dismiss the praise. One parent cannot compensate for shortcomings of the other – if Mum is affectionate but Dad is emotionally unavailable, feeling loved by Mum
is not going to make up for not feeling loved by Dad. If a parent sends ‘mixed messages’ by constantly telling the child “I love you”, (high value) but also constantly breaks promises (low value) or sometimes calls the child an ‘idiot’ (low value), then the negative messages contradict the positive one, and may render the words of affection meaningless. If the contradictory (negative) behaviour is abusive, then the child may interpret this as an expression of parental love, thereby growing up with a distorted idea of what constitutes ‘normal’ expressions of love.
Child's subjective experience vs parent's thoughts and feelings:
A child’s feelings of being loved, and the subsequent perception of value and worthiness to be loved has nothing to do with how a parent actually feels. The child’s feelings are based purely on their ‘subjective experience’ of what the parents say and do, or fail to say and do. Children are not mind readers, so judge a parent’s feelings and attitudes by their words, actions
and facial expressions or absence of validating words and action.
Perception - the Subjective Experience:
Feelings + Perception >>> Meaning >>> Subconscious Belief
The perceptual system in the brain plays a role in making sense of the world around us. Observations and experiences are categorised by key features and stored in the databank in our subconscious mind so that future observations and experiences can be identified by checking for a match. These key features may be descriptive physical characteristics of observed creatures (eg, bird has wings, two legs, feathers, beak) or ‘signals’ associated with experiences (eg, threatening/non-threatening, dangerous/non-dangerous, edible/non-edible, pleasant/unpleasant). The perceptual system checks for matching against the databank, but the databank may be incomplete (or faulty) or new information may be sketchy, so the perceptual system fills in the blanks or joins up the dots. The perceptual system does the best it can with what it has, so perceptions may not always be accurate.
For a young child, there is not going to be a lot of information in the databank so their perceptual system relies heavily on feelings and does a lot of filling in the blanks, so may not always be accurate. Therefore parenting behaviour needs
to be somewhat specific and meaningful to the child in order to elicit the required feeling. This is because 'learning’ is biologically selective to evolutionarily prepared stimuli – in feeling valued, there is a range of specific ‘prepared’ parenting behaviours which elicit the relevant feelings in the child. Dad may work eighty hours a week to make a good life for his family, motivated by love. However, ‘working eighty hours’ is not a ‘prepared’ behaviour that elicits the warm fuzzy sensation of ‘feeling loved’ or ‘feeling important to Dad’. Dad may work eighty hours a week to make a good life for his family, motivated by love, but what the children experience is Dad’s absence. They may form a perception that Dad’s work is ‘more important’ than they are. Any attempt by the parents to explain why Dad isn’t home much will not make any difference to how the children feel. Due to the ego-centric focus, if Dad is absent for much of the time, the children attribute the reason for
this absence to themselves. Instead of thinking, “Dad is away a lot because he loves his family and has to work hard so he can pay to support us”, the subconscious response is more like, “Dad doesn’t spend much time home with me because I am unimportant to him”. This will result in experiencing some degree of low Self Worth. ‘Time poor’ working parents may express their love with expensive toys and electronic ‘must haves’ – but this does not produce the warm fuzzy experience of ‘feeling loved’.
Mum’s lack of affectionate behaviour may not mean that she does not love her child but quite simply that she didn’t learn from her own mother how to be demonstratively affectionate. Probably, her mother didn’t learn from her mother either. Mum may express her love through cooking, washing and taking care of the family and home, but this does not produce the warm fuzzy experience of ‘feeling loved’ that a hug does. Hence, for better or worse, parenting styles are learned and passed down from one generation to the next, requiring awareness and effort to break patterns of dysfunctional and less-than-optimal parenting.
Children’s belief in how they are valued by parents is a perception which may not be an accurate indicator of how the parents actually feel or value the child. Children are not mind readers and can only assess their value to their parents based on parental treatment and the feelings they experience in response to that treatment. For example, a mother may love her daughter but if she is not affectionate in her behaviour (ie, there is a lack of hugs and cuddles and verbal, ‘I love you’), the daughter does not feel loved. The child lacks information on what the parent actually thinks and feels so perception may be inaccurate and the conclusions drawn will inevitably be inaccurate. However, regardless of what the parents actually think and feel, it is the child’s feelings and perceptual conclusions that count.
Consequently, parents are often likely to be puzzled and react with disbelief when confronted with their children’s perceptions, since they loved their children and believed they had always acted with the best of intentions. There is the oft quoted catch cry of New Age pop psychology: “They did the best they knew how”. Unfortunately, what they knew was mainly what they learnt from their own parents – unless they had awareness that their parents skills were lacking and vowed to be better or different when their turn came to be parents. However, doing things differently does not always mean better and often they fall into the trap of simply making a different mistake or ironically, making the same one, but in a different guise.
Which comes first – the chicken or the egg?
There has long been an absence of consensus as to which comes first – feeling or thought? There are those who strongly
believe that a thought always precedes a feeling. However, I believe that any thought associated with a learned belief can’t come first – there has to be some preceding events in the learning process. If perception is the thought, then in an infant, there is not going to be much categorised information derived from experience or observation of life in the database in their subconscious mind for the perceptual system to compare any incoming info. Therefore, the perceptions are going to be more dependent on the more primal communication centres in the brain responsible for feelings (such as fear, pleasure or pain). To the young child, whatever they are experiencing will trigger good feelings or bad feelings. My reasoning is that once we have
accumulated info from experiences and learnt associations between events, then the feeling-thought (or thought-feeling) connection becomes a two-way pathway so that thoughts can trigger feelings and feelings can trigger thoughts.
For those who feel more comfortable with the view that thoughts precede feelings for a baby learning these basic associations between parental behaviour and how valued they feel, the CAARP-ALIAS model will still work.
Role of logic:
How does parent behaviour lead to perception of how the parent values the child and end up internalised by the child as Self Worth? The connection is probably made by logic, the pre-cognitive processes of assessment, categorisation and identifying relationships between cause and effect that the human brain uses to assist in understanding the world around us.
Borrowing from Aristotle’s syllogisms of deductive reasoning and applying to child perception, below is an example that shows the conclusion drawn in response to statements by a parent: “That was a dumb/stupid thing to do”.
Major Premise: People who do dumb/stupid things are dumb/stupid
Minor Premise: I do dumb/stupid things
Conclusion: Therefore, I am dumb/stupid.
Conclusions such as this are the basis of beliefs about self, and even though a parent may criticise the behaviour rather than the child, (as has been a recommendation for parents), the child will still likely identify with the behaviour. Subsequently, children will be sensitive to evidence that falsifies or confirms these self-beliefs (eg, any actual ‘dumb’ behaviour or similar criticism by a significant person such as teacher or peer will serve to confirm the parent’s words and the child’s conclusion).
Following are examples applying this pre-cognitive reasoning process to the CAARP-ALIAS Model:
Major premise: People who are given hugs and kisses are loved
Minor premise: I am given hugs and kisses
Conclusion: Therefore, I am loved.
Then -
Major premise: People who are loved are worthy of love
Minor premise: I am loved
Conclusion: Therefore, I am worthy of love.
Negative form:
Major premise: People who are loved are treated with affection
Minor premise: I am not treated with affection
Conclusion: Therefore, I am not loved.
Then -
Major premise: People who are loved are lovable/worthy of love
Minor premise: I am unloved
Conclusion: Therefore, I am unlovable/unworthy of love.
Application in interpreting parent behaviour -
Positive form:
Behaviour: “My mother gives me hugs and kisses which means she loves me”,
Implication: “She considers me lovable, deserving and worthy of her love”
Therefore: “I am lovable and worthy of love”.
Negative form:
Behaviour: “My mother does not give me hugs and kisses which means she does not love me”,
Implication: “She considers me unlovable and unworthy of her love”
Therefore: “I am unlovable, unworthy and undeserving of love”.
The process of deductive reasoning is not infallible since it is based on limited observations or experience - and information may be missing. A classical example of this fallibility is the conclusion in an oft quoted example that ‘all swans are white’ which was based on observations limited to the northern hemisphere – before information was available that there were black swans in Western Australia. Likewise, the process of children drawing conclusions is not infallible. Their conclusions are not necessarily correct since they are based only on the child’s subjective experience – lacking information on how parents actually feel and think.
It is important to emphasise here that in identifying the relevance of early parenting to child development, it isn’t about a witch hunt blaming parents. It is simply about identifying origins of problems to gain a better understanding of the why certain psychological and emotional problems arise for the adult. This is useful to adults who want to understand why they are the way they are, how they became that way, and what they need to do to achieve self improvement and emotional wellbeing. This is also useful to parents wanting to understand their own children’s behaviour and the part they, as parents, play in shaping that behaviour.
Responsibility for eliciting caring behavior:
Why would the child (subconsciously) interpret their parents’ behaviour as a reflection on them and their worthiness, implying they are somehow responsible for their parents’ behaviour? The answer is that innately, the onus for receiving care is largely on the child. There are several probable reasons:
(i) Parenting instincts are not all that reliable, not automatically triggered by giving birth.
(ii) Caregivers are not always the biological parents of the child.
(iii) Society as a whole (ie, all adults) has a complementary /supplementary responsibility to play a role in guidance and protection of children, as in, “It takes a village to raise a child”.
An infant is innately programmed to perform ‘care eliciting’ behaviour and the parent is supposed to respond with the appropriate ‘caring’ behaviour. For example, when an infant is crying distressingly, the care giver (or almost any other nearby adult) feels compelled to pick it up and offer comfort. Likewise, when an infant is smiling, cooing, gurgling and waving arms in the air (requesting attention/human interaction), it is performing ‘care eliciting’ behaviour. When you observe how adults go ga -ga over a baby being ‘cute’, you can see how effective this strategy is.
The basics of the parenting response is instinctive, such as the response to comfort a distressed infant, to nurture and protect. However, in species that require substantial time for the offspring to achieve independence, much of parenting behaviour needs to be learned. Even animals need to learn parenting. When animals are bred or fostered in captivity and have not observed parenting by others of their species as they would in the wild, there is always concern about whether a ‘first time’ mother will actually be a ‘good mother’ or reject her young.
In an ideal world, children would grow up exposed to ideal parenting and in turn, become ideal parents themselves. And therein lies the crux of the problem in a society where material values prevail and children’s emotional needs are inadvertently overlooked. Much of parenting is inadequate, dysfunctional, neglectful, pathogenic or abusive – mostly, it is misguided. Hence, when we learn from our parents, we perpetuate any less-than-ideal parenting. Parenting information is available for those who choose to access it, but for the most part, parents believe that parenting comes naturally, even
though they complain that, “Babies don’t come with a manual”.
Failure to meet CAARP-ALIAS emotional developmental needs is generally unintentional, out of lack of awareness of the true needs of children and how to meet these needs. ‘Minor’ violation of needs can also occur due to indifference, but serious violations reflect a more callous attitude by parents with deliberate intent to neglect, exploit, punish or harm the child.
The child whose needs were met adequately will feel emotionally secure and have a healthy sense of Self Worth and as an adult, will not ‘need’ approval of others in order to feel validated. Due to the flexibility inherent in ‘care eliciting’ behaviour, the child may modify the behaviour (ie, adaptive behaviour) or adopt alternative strategies to achieve meeting their needs. Whatever was successful to some degree as a child will continue to be used as an adult. However, strategies that were ‘sort of’ successful in receiving validation as a child may fail to do so as an adult and may actually be dysfunctional or even self
defeating.
Needs of the child not met by the parents don’t simply go away and the adult will continue the pursuit of having these needs met by others (friends, lovers, spouses, work colleagues, employers). Hence derogatory terms such as: ‘people pleaser’, ‘rescuer’, ‘attention seeking’, ‘needy, or ‘emotionally needy’. Adults may attempt to suppress unmet needs and deny they exist, but they are merely buried in the subconscious mind from where they exert their influence on feelings and subconscious motivations.
Implications of onus for receiving care being on child:
1) Children feel responsible for how they are treated. For example, young children often feel responsible for the parents
splitting up, believing that, “Daddy wouldn’t have left if I had been good”. Another example is children who are sexually abused may feel that they are responsible, since they were treated as they ‘deserved’.
2) Children’s behaviour has to always be acceptable to the care giver so any unacceptable behaviour (such as anger) has
to be repressed so as not to alienate the care giver (who may then punish the child, be indifferent, ignore, neglect, reject, abandon or abuse the child). Adaptive behaviour may involve repression or hiding of true feelings so as to meet parental approval. Revealing true feelings may risk parental disapproval. Adaptive behaviour can be mistaken for resilience. The child has not really gotten over a problem or a hurtful event or circumstances – they are just good at hiding it. This will particularly be the case if told, “Don’t cry like a baby”, “ Don’t be a baby”, “Only babies cry”, “You’re too big/old to cry”. Childhood is where we learn to wear masks.
Repressed anger:
A surprise I found with clients in hypnosis was the frequency with which I encountered repressed anger, ie, a Child Ego State who felt anger towards a parent. This anger appeared to be the result of a parent violating the child’s needs or failing to meet the child’s needs in spite of the child putting in extra effort to gain parental approval. The degree of this repressed anger appears to be relative to: (i) the seriousness of a parent failing or violating their responsibility towards meeting the needs of the child and (ii) the amount of extra effort the child puts into adaptive behaviour in an attempt to elicit parental approval, but this approval is still not forthcoming.
The emotional impact of needs unmet or violated is a matter of degree. Negative effects may be exacerbated or ameliorated by other childhood factors and subsequent treatment by parents. The temperament of the child may also influence the form of behaviour manifested as a result of needs being unmet or violated. For example, a child with a timid or avoidant temperament may give up easily whereas a temperament characterised by persistence may persevere with attempts to prove ‘worthiness’ to the parent. Temperament may also determine the way in which repressed anger is dealt with. It is displaced away from the object of anger (ie, the parent) and may be internalized against the self, (expressed in self harm, drug use or depression) or it may be externalised (ie, expressed against a target that is unlikely to ‘hit back’ such as bullying, cruelty to animals, vandalism, violence, particularly after consumption of alcohol).
Why the anger?
I have explained the situation in which anger is likely to be experienced by a child and why it is repressed, but that does not explain ‘why’ anger occurs? If children feel responsible for how they are treated and accept this treatment as a reflection of what they deserve – then why the anger when parents violate child needs and also violate their parenting responsibilities? Is that not what the child believes they deserve? At first glance there would appear to be a contradiction here, but contradictions
are not permitted in a model if it is to achieve credibility.
A plausible explanation goes thus: Parents and children engage in this hardwired interactive process of ‘care eliciting behaviour’ and ‘reciprocal parental response’. If we look at what underpins this interactive process what we find goes something like this: Kids have innate ‘needs’ with an innate ‘right’ to have these needs met and parents have an innate ‘responsibility’ to meet these needs. We could say that this is the basis of the innate ‘contract’ parents enter into when bringing a child into the world (whether they are aware of this contract or not).
Children are hardwired to utilize a range of ‘first line’ care eliciting behaviour and through feedback, have the capacity to modify behaviour and engage in ‘second line’ adaptive behaviour. It could be suggested that there are innate rules to this innate contract and there is an element of trust that parents are expected to respond to adequate or reasonable effort by the child. Accordingly, there is a limit to what can be considered reasonable effort for a child to undertake in exercising adaptive behaviour. Therefore, if a child has made effort that could be regarded as beyond reasonable to gain approval but it is being withheld by the parent, the child is likely to be angry. When the parent violates the child’s needs and their parental responsibility or withholds approval when beyond reasonable effort has been made, it could be argued that the parent has violated the rules of the innate contract, ie, violated the child’s innate ‘needs’, innate ‘rights’ and their own innate
‘responsibilities’. This could be considered as violation or betrayal of the child’s trust so the child is justified in feeling angry.
Further, the child does not feel responsible for parent’s betrayal of trust.
The child can feel responsible for one aspect of the parent behavior (ie, not meeting child needs, resulting in low self worth) and simultaneously not feel responsible for another aspect of the behaviour (ie, parent violating the rules, resulting in anger). So, the contradiction is resolved.
This element of violation or betrayal may increase the need in the child to repress the anger. When ALIAS needs are unmet, children may believe that their parents do not place a high value on them, which can result in the child feeling ‘hurt’. Violations may be perceived to imply that the parent places a very low value on the child, which can result in feeling ‘very hurt plus a sense of injustice’. This perceived low value may pose an increased risk of alienating the parent if the child were to express their anger directly at the parent. Hence, repressing anger is a must for survival (ie, being taken care of).
Is anger always repressed?
My clinical experience has been only with repressed anger which had its origins in the situations I have described. However, in child studies on attachment and separation, a frequent observation was the child expressing anger towards a parent returning after a temporary separation (Bowlby, 1973). The rationale is that the anger expressed serves to reproach the parent for leaving and serves as a future deterrent. The real question I would ask is why was this anger expressed when my clinical experience with adults is that anger was repressed? One explanation has been that in the instance of a single temporary separation, these children expressing their anger had secure attachment so felt secure in the loving relationship they had with their parents, hence there was virtually zero risk of alienation. However, as if in contradiction, the child’s behaviour subsequently reflected insecurity, becoming anxious, babyish and not allowing the parent out of sight. Therefore, a more likely explanation of anger is that it is a reflection of an insecure attachment, or simply a reflection of violation of the child’s need – but that does not explain why they would risk alienation by the parent.
Perhaps the answer lies in examining the balance of responsibility for attachment and care. Initially, although the infant is equipped with basic ‘proximity’ or ‘care eliciting’ behaviours such as crying, smiling and babbling, the main responsibility is on the mother via her mothering instincts. However, as time passes, the main responsibility shifts from mother to child and when this shift occurs, it is accompanied by an unconscious awareness in the child that they now bear the onus of responsibility to ensure they receive the care they need. With this major shift comes the unconscious awareness of the implication - that to gain parental approval or attention and avoid parental disapproval or alienation, behaviour must always be acceptable to the parent, so unacceptable behaviour and feelings towards a parent (such as anger) have to be concealed
from the parent. When a young child expresses anger toward a parent without any fear of consequences for receiving care, this suggests that the shift in responsibility has not yet taken place.
In addition, I suspect that even though anger may have been expressed toward a parent by a young child, any ongoing anger or resentment may be repressed as the child develops this unconscious awareness of the risk of alienation of the parent. Which would account for my clinical experience of adults who have repressed anger for parenting that occurred or began during infancy.
Excessive CAARP Parenting:
So - the solution to Self Worth is to give unlimited connection, affection, attention, recognition, protection - right? Not so! Just as with anything else in life, the extreme opposite can bring its own problems. Hence, parents engaging in the five classes of behaviours excessively, are likely to contribute to less-than-desirable outcomes for their children. As with anything else in
life, it is about moderation and balance. Parenting behaviour needs to be appropriate to the situation and consistent between forms of behavior (ie, action, verbal, non-verbal, physical, facial expressions) and across occasions. I do not regard excessive
CAARP behaviours by parents as being part of the CAARP-ALIAS model. Rather, I regard these as more about the parents, reflecting their needs (eg, control, domination) or fears (eg, over-protection) or their unmet childhood emotional needs (eg, the need to feel loved or liked and accepted). They will be discussed because of their impact on children and to illustrate that ‘more does not mean better’.
Applications of the CAARP-ALIAS Model:
Currently, there are available books providing parenting advice and there is information on specific parenting skills to assist meeting challenges of parenting. There are various theories and models in psychology developed in the exploration of personality, human behaviour and the workings of the mind. Attachment Theory explains the long term consequences of quality of the ATTACHMENT on emotional security and psychopathology. Gestalt principles of perception and cognitive theories account for the flawed thinking involved in limiting beliefs and psychopathology. There are theories on personality and abnormal psychology. All these theories reflect the perspective and experiences of their authors so there may be some overlap between them, with each adding to the understanding of the various areas of psychology. All psychological theories can be regarded as supplementary and complementary. The CAARP-ALIAS model makes a contribution to furthering the understanding of child emotional development and adult mental and emotional wellbeing and also allows for incorporation of other psychological theories. This comprehensive model identifies basic emotional needs for normal development of Self Worth, how parents can meet these needs and the long term consequences of needs not being met or being violated.
While a link between childhood experiences and later psychopathology is common knowledge, what is not always understood is the underlying path of ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this link. The CAARP-ALIAS model of emotional development provides
a credible account of the mechanism of this ‘hard wired’ link between childhood events and adult mental and emotional wellbeing or negative self beliefs, problematic emotional reactions and self defeating repetitive behavior patterns.
The link is ‘two-way’, so the model provides a ‘two-way’ path of knowledge. Knowing what is currently problematic for the adult, it is possible to trace back reliably to the causal factors and address them in therapy. This is also useful for readers in helping to understand themselves and ‘why they are the way they are’, particularly if they are into ‘self improvement’.
Conversely, knowing the type of parenting a child is exposed to and specific events and circumstances in the child’s life will allow a fairly reliable prediction of the long term impact. Just as for adults, the model is also useful in assisting therapists treating children and adolescents. While this is not a ‘how to’ parenting manual per se, the model does outline guidelines in what I regard as ‘Essential Principles of Parenting’. This provides a rationale for the five classes of behaviour required to meet the developmental emotional needs of children, from early infancy, continuing throughout childhood and adolescence.
Summarising:
What is the role of validation?
* Survival - If parents value their children they are more likely to take care of them
- If valued by society, more likely to survive and/or be taken care of
* Children engage in goal-directed instinctive-like behaviour in order to feel valued by parents so they will be taken care of
‘First line’ care-eliciting behaviour, eg, smiles, affection
‘Second line’ care-eliciting behaviour, eg, adaptive behavior
- masks to hide feelings
- armour to protect feelings
- role adopted to gain approval/avoid disapproval
- behaviour has to always meet parental approval
- repression of emotions that might elicit parental disapproval, eg, anger
* We accept how our parents treated us as an indicator of what we are worth, what we deserve
* Self Worth represents the value we perceive our parents place on us, which we adopt and internalize
* Self Worth is a measure of what we subconsciously believe we deserve in life.
What is the key to being a good parent?
* Engaging in CAARP parenting behavior that results in a child’s ALIAS needs being met so the child feels valued.
(Information in the CAARP-ALIAS model summarized in Tables 1, 2, and 3 is detailed under the "SELF ESTEEM PARENTING" section, from 'Five-Part Model' onwards).
Note: This version is the original model from which the 'Secrets' version of Self Esteem Parenting and the Five-Part Model was extracted/adapted for parents and other general readers. The first part of this original version provides more psychological explanation and rationales of developing the model. The second part (CAARP-ALIAS: Parenting Behaviour) is virtually the same as Part 1 to Part 5.
Self Worth, the Common Denominator
Regardless of what problem has led a client to seek therapy, my observation is that there is a common denominator. Often, as clients tell about their childhood, their reports indicate that they did not feel valued by one or both parents (ie felt unloved, alone, not important, lacked approval, not felt accepted for who they were, not receive acknowledgement for efforts and achievements, feel not good enough in spite of efforts, repeatedly let down with broken promises, treated to abuse /violence, not protected from abuse/violence, trust violated).
Sometimes clients will state they have low self esteem or lack self confidence in some area of their lives, or ‘do not feel good’ about themselves. There may have been acceptance or tolerance of life circumstances or treatment by others which implies they place a low value on themselves. This is generally combined with a lack of sense of empowerment to change distressing or unsatisfactory circumstances in their life. There appeared to be a link between not feeling valued by parents and not feeling good about the self.
Links between parenting and psychopathology
Parental Bonding Instrument
Needs unmet or violated during childhood may pose some degree of risk for depression during the lifetime. This link between childhood and depression has been formalised in the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), a research questionnaire designed to assess quality of parenting received (Parker, Tupling and Brown, 1979). In depression studies, adult participants are required to answer questions on how caring, protective or controlling their parents were, based on recollections and perceptions of their parents.
Attachment-Based Family Therapy (ABFT)
ABFT is a family therapy that focuses on negative attitudes towards their parents and adolescent behaviour, when treating depressed and suicidal adolescents (Diarmond, Reis, Diarmond, Siqueland and Isaacs, 2002). This therapeutic approach is based on evidence that parental rejection, criticism, control and lack of warmth result in children having low self worth, self-critical tendencies, depressogenic attributions and poor problem-solving skills - all risk factors for depression. Longitudinal studies have found that such negative parental experiences and behaviour predict increased risk of depressive symptoms and the onset of major depression from two to twenty years later.
This link between childhood and experiencing some degree of ‘not feeling good about self’ is not necessarily about having a horrible emotionally deprived or violent and abusive childhood. Mostly, it is about having an ‘ordinary’, ‘average’, ‘normal’ childhood with parents who cared about their kids and ‘did the best they knew how’. But, they really didn’t know how and besides, “Babies don’t come with a manual”.
This has led me to conclude that (in addition to survival) the most significant outcome that everyone acquires from their childhood is their sense of self worth. Children need to feel valued by their parents. This validation is adopted and internalised as their own sense of self worth and has long term implications for emotional and mental wellbeing. If a particular adaptive behaviour or attribute is perceived by the child to be the source of parental validation, the child will identify with this behaviour or attribute. It will be adopted as their identity or role, as their source of validation (by self and the expected source of validation from others) throughout life. As an adult, this adopted role may continue to be a source of validation and bring satisfaction and enjoyment, thus reaffirming their sense of self worth. Alternatively, it may fail to elicit validation and instead be dysfunctional or even maladaptive.
I would say that the most important fundamental human need is validation – we need to feel valued for who we are and for what we do – by those who are significant to us - starting with our parents. (Check out the 'Validation Hypothesis').
So what do I mean by this ‘Self Worth’?
My definition: Self Worth is a measure of what we subconsciously believe we deserve in life. Having a strong or healthy sense of Self Worth means recognition that you have needs and acknowledgement that you are worthy of these needs being met (eg, acknowledging that you are lovable and worthy of being loved - including, being loved by yourself). Having a healthy sense of Self Worth also means having the ability to ensure these needs are met, being able to be assertive when
required in achieving needs - in a calm, confident, polite manner, without being selfish, without use of aggression or manipulation or having a sense of entitlement and without interfering with, overriding or ignoring the competing needs of others.
Self Worth (or lack of) has a significant impact across all areas of life. It determines expectations we have of what we subconsciously believe we deserve: what we will get out of life (the best available or the ‘short end of the stick’); how we will be treated by others (with respect or disrespect, used, abused); whether we will have the confidence to be assertive (non-aggressively, non-selfishly) in ensuring our own needs are met and speak up in seeking justice and a fair go (for self and
others); seek to improve our situation in life or always settling for second best (in jobs and relationships) in the subconscious belief that we don’t deserve anything better and should be grateful that we have anything at all. A person with low sense of Self Worth has poorly defined personal boundaries and may live a life of compromise – compromising their needs, compromising their self respect, allowing transgression of their personal boundaries, never ‘speaking up’ so as not to be disliked. A strong healthy sense of Self Worth developed in childhood means a greater chance of long term mental and emotional wellbeing. Conversely, poor Self Worth as a child means less chance of achieving long term mental and
emotional wellbeing - regardless of successful achievements.
A person with low Self Worth may constantly engage in ‘self-less’ behaviour. Most people will engage in self-less behaviour at times, but a person with a strong or healthy sense of Self Worth will do so without compromising or having to
always sacrifice their own needs. However, totally ‘selfless’ people lack a sense of self, lack an awareness of their own needs or if they do, lack acknowledgment that they are worthy of these needs being met. Individuals who are habitually self-less and
‘love’ (ie, need) to be of service to others are this way because they have learnt as children that their needs are regarded as unimportant, less important than the needs of others. Subconsciously, they believe they are worthless and undeserving and their only source of validation is in serving others. ‘Selfless’ people are both valued and exploited for their selflessness. What the ‘selfless’ person does not realise is that other people treat us the way we treat ourselves. If we ignore our own needs as unimportant, others will ignore them as unimportant, too. (The exception is a saint who has made a conscious decision to live a life of service to God and helping others). People with low self worth are likely to be vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation, due to their need for approval and their inability to say ‘no’ out of fear of being disliked.
Individuals with low self worth are likely to remain in unfulfilling jobs in the belief that they do not deserve anything better and/or believe they lack the ability to improve their position. They are more likely to settle for second best in
relationships that may be dysfunctional or unhappy, putting up with disrespect and even violence, in the subconscious belief they do not deserve anything better and should be grateful that anyone would want them at all. In relationships, the person with low self worth is too much – too insecure, too needy, too caring, too giving, too eager to please, too acquiescent, too grateful, too tolerant, too forgiving. An example that is easy to recognise is Jennifer Aniston’s character in the movie, “The Break Up”. Other examples are women who repeatedly forgive partners or husbands for emotional abuse, violence or betrayal and humiliation of repeated infidelities or desperately cling to a man wanting to leave the relationship.
Women with poor self worth may be more vulnerable to getting into relationships with married men. Since they lack respect for themselves, they are also likely to lack respect for the man’s marriage or his wife and obviously, the man lacks respect for both of the women. Often, these women’s low self worth is due to not feeling valued by their fathers who were ‘emotionally unavailable’ to them (or even absent from their lives). Hence, they continue this expectation pattern of being attracted to men who do not value them and are unavailable.
Lack of a healthy sense of self Worth may be compensated for by:
* Covering up or masking
* Adopting a persona of confidence.
* ‘Out there’ attention-seeking behaviour
Lack of healthy Self Worth may be disguised or overcompensated for and mistaken as a high sense of Self Worth by:
* Loud, boorish, rude, outspoken and insensitive, or a bully, aggressively achieving personal needs without concern
for the impact on others. In terms of adaptive behaviour, it is like a mouse wearing a lion mask and adopting the role
of a dominant lion. Other individuals with low self worth do not see the mouse behind the mask so mistakenly misinterpret
the boorish individual to be a ‘strong personality’ or a ‘big personality’ and they may feel intimidated. Those with a healthier
sense of self worth can see through the facade.
* Sense of entitlement which may reflect:
(i) a false, exaggerated sense of self worth (ie, narcissistic) that is due to a parent having fed the individual’s ego with
inappropriate and excessive praise during childhood or
(ii) an adult feels they deserve everything now as compensation for missing out as a child.
Summarising characteristics of Self Worth:
Strong, healthy sense of Self Worth:
* Acknowledging worthy of having needs met
* Able to meet needs without making a 'big deal' out of it
* Assertive in meeting needs, non-aggressively
* Do not buy into belief that aggression = strength
* Considerate of needs of others
* Comfortable putting needs of others first
Poor or low Self Worth:
* Living a life of compromise, settling for second best
* Putting own needs last all or most of the time
* Needs approval, may be a 'people pleaser', unable to say 'no'
* Fear of upsetting others and being disliked
Compensating for low Self Worth:
* Covering up, mask with persona of confidence
* May strive for career success
* Seeks self-improvement, read self-help books
* May self-medicate with drugs/alcohol, reliant on alcohol
Over-compensating for low Self Worth , disguised - may be mistaken for high Self Worth:
* 'Out there' attention seeking behaviour, loud, boorish
* Ensuring their needs are met, aggressively, selfishly
* Ignoring, overriding or violating needs of others
* May have a sense of entitlement due to
- being spoilt by parents, given inappropriate praise (narcissistic personality)
- making up for deprivations as a child.
Beliefs about self worth are self-fulfilling because subconsciously we are attracted to people and situations (or subconsciously create them) where we will be treated as we subconsciously expect. Hence, behaviour based on negative beliefs or schemas about Self Worth can be self sabotaging, self defeating or self destructive.
Low Self Esteem is regarded as a risk factor for depression. However, this link is unlikely to be a direct one but is indirect. A person with low Self Worth is perhaps more likely to be in circumstances that become a depressogenic
‘trap’. This means that the life situation deteriorates to the extent that the individual feels trapped, powerless to improve the situation or extricate themself and hopeless in that they can’t see their life ever changing for the better. This may be due to lack of self empowerment to take control and change the circumstances. It may be due to fear of upsetting significant others whose approval we ‘need’ and in whom we rely on for our emotional security.
Measures of Self Value:
Self Worth and Self Esteem are terms of Self Value that tend to be used interchangeably, but are
they actually the same? I believe that although Self Worth and Self Esteem are both a reflection of Self Value, they are from different perspectives and differ in their origins and temporal emergence.
Self Worth is a subconscious belief, a received value from parents, an internalised perception of value held by parents. This value is stable across time unless there is therapeutic intervention or ‘life changing’ life events.
Self Esteem can be regarded as a conscious, self-constructed value that is more akin to the self image presented
to the world. This may be constructed from self-assessment of what the individual values about him/herself: character; personality; body image, physical beauty, fitness; skills, performance and achievement; popularity, acknowledgment; self-improvement efforts. Self Esteem can be boosted by positive experiences or consciously working on the specific areas of
interest. Conversely, Self Esteem can take a beating from negative life experiences.
It is probable that Self Esteem overlays Self Worth, so that if a healthy sense of Self Worth provides a strong foundation, Self Esteem with also be strong and healthy. Conversely, if the foundation is poor Self Worth, then Self Esteem may serve to mask or compensate, but may be fragile and crumble when confronted with negative experiences that challenge what they value about themself. If people are asked about their Self Worth or Self Esteem, they are likely to refer to the more
socially desirable self-constructed version of Self Value.
Summary: Self Worth can be defined as a measure of what an individual subconsciously believes they deserve in life. Self Worth represents internalization of the perceived value placed on children by the parents and has a lifelong impact on mental and emotional wellbeing. Self Worth is the foundation for Self Esteem. Low Self Worth can increase risk of non-endogenous depression.
CAARP-ALIAS: Model of Development of Self Worth:
For the development of a healthy sense of Self Worth, what children need is to feel valued by their parents. The parental
role it to treat their children (from early infancy) in ways that result in their children feeling valued by them. Ironically, the onus for being valued by parents is on the child. Information from clients and information obtained in hypnosis from their child ego states suggest that in addition to the need for ATTACHMENT, there are four other supplementary components to this need to feel valued. The model being developed around Self Worth appears to link into ATTACHMENT which I regard as also being a developmental context for the other four components of Self Worth identified. Hence, I have adopted the aspect of ATTACHMENT that I regard as being relevant to Self Worth and it has been incorporated into the model as the first component. In this proposed model, each component consists of two complementary parts: (i) the feeling the child needs to
experience and (ii) the parenting behaviour that elicits the feeling in the child.
Bowlby’s ATTACHMENT refers to the interactive/whole relationship between mother and infant, but for consistency, I have separated this into attachment as what the child needs to feel, and connection to describe the type of parenting behaviour required for the child to experience feeling attached. To avoid confusion, any further references to attachment will be distinguished by: Bowlby’s ATTACHMENT (ie, upper case) as representing the developmental context that is the mother-infant relationship, while for the first component of the Self Worth model, ‘attachment’ (ie, lower case) representing the feeling the child needs to experience in order to feel valued.
Model design:
CAARP-ALIAS is a psychodynamic model of ‘bottom-up’ construction. It is not ‘theory-driven’ or based on ideology (‘top-down’), with data sought to fit a pre-designed model and support a theory. The model has been extracted as providing the best fit for the available clinical data and the theory has been developed to explain that fit. Although not yet tested for ‘internal validity’, it does have real world ‘external validity’.
Retrospectively, the model can be seen to link with ‘attachment’ as an aspect of Bowlby’s ‘internal working model’ in the subconscious mind. Self Worth qualifies for inclusion, since it can be seen to underpin the role of ‘confidence’ in believing care will always be available when needed.
There are five components to the child’s need to feel valued: five feelings by the child - Attached, Loved, Important, Approval (Accepted and Acknowledged) and Safe; and five corresponding classes of relevant parenting behaviour - Connection, Affection, Attention, Recognition and Protection that elicit the child’s feelings. While I regard these five components as being independent of each other, the feelings are all linked by a common outcome (sense of value) and functionally, the parenting behaviours are all interconnected. ATTACHMENT is innate; love exists within the context of ATTACHMENT, we accept those we love for who they are, acknowledge their efforts and their successes with support and praise, regard them as important to us and want to keep them safe.
Here proposed is a model of child emotional developmental needs and parenting behaviour based on the five
identified components of value that explains the development of the child’s sense of Self Worth. I have arbitrarily named this model CAARP-ALIAS, joint acronyms of parenting behavior (CAARP) and feelings (ALIAS) the child needs to experience. This
model, which I regard as a component of Bowlby’s ‘inner working model’ could also be subtitled: Essential Principles of Parenting.
Example of steps to a child feeling loved in response to parenting behavior:
A mother gives hugs and cuddles to her infant daughter, accompanied by smiles and statements of affection such as,
“Mummy loves her beautiful little bunniekins”. From Mum’s words, the infant is able to interpret Mum’s ‘affectionate’ behaviour to mean that ‘Mum loves me’ and also enables the infant to label the inner experience as ‘feeling loved’. The implication is that Mum regards the child as ‘worthy of love’. The child then internalises this as ‘I am worthy of love’.
Key steps: (i) parent behaviour, (ii) feelings elicited in the child by that behaviour, (iii) implication of parent behaviour as perceived by the child (ie, the subliminal message).
The hypothesised sequence of steps from parenting behaviour to internalized value:
(i) Parent engages in appropriate ‘parenting behaviour’ which
(ii) elicits a positive feeling in the child,
(iii) who interprets this feeling and the parenting behaviour to mean that the parent has positive feelings/intentions
towards the child (ie, the child attributes this perceived meaning to the behaviour),
(iv) the implication being that the parent must regard the child as worthy of the parenting behaviour and thus value
the child (ie, subliminal message which is implicit in the parenting behaviour) and
(v) the child’s feeling activates the process of internalisation of this value the parent is perceived to put on the child, as the child’s own sense of self worth.
Conversely, if the parenting behaviour fails to elicit positive feelings in the child (or elicits negative feelings), then the child is not going to feel valued by the parents. Instead, the child will believe that they are regarded by the parent as ‘not worthy’ of their efforts and will internalise this belief as ‘I am unworthy’, ie, ‘low Self Worth’.
I am repeating an important, fundamental point here: The ultimate feeling for children is the subconscious feeling of being valued by their parents. Hypothetically, parent behaviour (ie, what parents say and do or don’t say and don’t do) elicits a feeling in the child and communicates two sets of information which the child receives via ‘perceptual antennae’. One can be regarded as a low frequency message in the interpretation explicit in parenting behaviour, the perceived meaning attributed by the child (eg, a hug from Mum means “Mum loves me”). The other can be regarded as a higher frequency message on how the child subconsciously feels valued by the parent, received in the subliminal message which is implicit in the parenting behavior (eg, “Mum loves me because she regards me as worthy of love”). This perceived value or worthiness is what is internalised as the child’s subconscious belief in it’s own sense of Self Worth.
However, words can often be empty if other behaviour does not back them up. Saying “I love you” every day has a hollow sound if the actual parenting of a young child is ‘outsourced’, parents are not involved in the child’s life and do not attend functions in which the child is a participant, pay them off by spending money on expensive gifts in lieu of spending time with them, break promises, fail to acknowledge achievements and effort or they are highly critical, neglectful or abusive to
the child.
Hence, more important and of greater significance than the explicit message in what parents say and do or
don’t say and don’t do, is the subliminal message – the hidden or implicit meaning in their behaviour. This is the implication that the child is valued by the parents as worthy of the commitment they have made to love, nurture, guide and protect their child. This subconscious sense of being regarded by our parents as worthy of the commitment they have made to us and worthy of the effort this involves, is our true sense of how they value us. This subconscious feeling of being valued can be regarded as the ‘prime feeling’. Explicit behaviour by parents may elicit ALIAS feelings but does not produces the feeling of being valued and worthy of parental commitment to provide care. This is the role of the implicit or hidden meaning in their behaviour. It is this 'prime feeling’ of feeling valued (or not) that we internalise as our own sense of Self Worth.
The following tables summarise the sequence of steps for each CAARP-ALIAS component. Table 1 shows the sequence for needs being met, Table 2 for needs unmet and Table 3, for needs violated.
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Table 1. CAARP-ALIAS Model of Child Emotional Needs and Parenting Behaviour in Development of Self Worth.
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I II III IV V
Parenting Behaviour Child Feeling Perceived meaning Subliminal message Internalised self Worth
of PB implicit in PB as subconscious Belief
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1. Connection Attached P desires attachment Worthy of I am worthy of security/
to me attachment attachment
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2. Affection Loved P loves me Worthy of love I am worthy of love
I am lovable
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3. Attention Important I am important to P Worthy of attention I am worthy of attention
My needs are important
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4. Recognition Approved P accepts me and Worthy of I am worthy just as I am
- Accepted acknowledges my recognition I am worthy for what I do
- Acknowledged achievements/efforts
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5. Protection Safe P wants me to be safe Worthy of I am worthy of protection
protection I deserve to be safe
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P = Parent; PB = Parenting Behaviour.
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Table 2. CAARP-ALIAS Model of Child Emotional Needs: Summary of Child Needs not being met because Parental Behaviour is INADEQUATE in some way (or completely LACKING).
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Parenting Behaviour Child Feeling Perceived meaning Subliminal message Internalised Self Worth
Lacking of PB implicit in PB as subconscious Belief
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1. Connection: Insecurity/ P does not desire UN-worthy of I am UN-worthy of security
Detached anxiety attachment to me security
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2. Affection: UN-loved P does not love me UN-worthy of love I am UN-worthy of love
Unaffectionate I am UN-lovable
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3. Attention: UN-important I am not important to P UN-worthy of I am UN-important
Uninvolved attention My needs are not important
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4. Recognition: Lack approval P not accept me and UN-worthy of I am not worthwhile
Ignore not acknowledge my acceptance/ I am not good enough
achievements/efforts acknowledgment
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5. Protection: UN-safe P not care if I am safe UN-worthy of I am UN-worthy of
Lack of protection protection protection
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Table 3. CAARP-ALIAS Model of Child Emotional Needs: Summary of Child Needs not met because the Parental Behaviour VIOLATES the child's needs.
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Parenting Child Feeling Perceived meaning Subliminal message Internalised Self Worth as
Violating Behaviour of PB implicit in PB subconscious Belief + Anger
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1. Connection: Insecurity/ P not desire UN-worthy of I am UN-worthy of security
Abandonment anxiety/fear attachment to me attachment
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2. Affection: Un-loved/ P does not love me UN-worthy of love I am UN-worthy of love
Emotional abuse betrayed I am UN-deserving of love
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3. Attention: UN-important/ I am UN-important to P UN-worthy of I am UN-important
Break promises let down attention My needs are unimportant
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4. Recognition: Dis-approval/ P reject me and UN-worthy of I am not worthwhile
Rejection/ridicule demeaned my achievements acceptance/ I am not good enough
acknowledgement I am useless/worthless
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5. Protection: UN-safe/ P not want me UN-worthy of I don't deserve to be safe
Abuse/violence betrayed to be safe protection I deserve to be treated
badly
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Significance of Feelings:
Feelings + Perception >>> Meaning >>> Subconscious Belief
In the example of a mother engaging in affectionate behaviour with her infant daughter, it is the child’s experience of warm fuzzy inner feelings that is significant and essential to ‘feeling loved’ and feeling valued.
In the absence of this affectionate behaviour from the mother, there will be an absence of positive feeling in the infant. Initially, the infant is likely to experience an inner emptiness rather than actually ‘feeling unloved’. It is probable then, that as the infant develops an awareness of its environment, it observes affectionate behaviour by others and the positive
response from the recipient of this affectionate behaviour. The child is then able to develop an awareness of the meaning of affectionate behaviour and an awareness of the lack of affection shown by its own parents. The child is able to label the inner
experience of emptiness as ‘feeling unloved’ and interpret the parents’ lack of affection to mean they do not love the child and believe the child to be unworthy of love.
It is the feeling that is crucial since it could be regarded as serving multiple roles: (i) a ‘qualitative indicator’, providing ‘meaning’ in interpreting parent behavior which is the basis of ‘perception’, (ii) a ‘quantitative measure’ of perceived value (or lack of) the parent places on the child and (iii) also activates the cognitive processing of internalization of perceived parent value as self worth.
Parenting behaviour must also be consistent. If there is inconsistency between action and words, the child may be more likely to believe the message in the more negative of the two as representing the parent’s true value of the child. Likewise, there needs to be consistency between the behaviour of both parents since if one gives praise and the other gives criticism only, the child may regard the criticism as a more accurate reflection of their worth and dismiss the praise. One parent cannot compensate for shortcomings of the other – if Mum is affectionate but Dad is emotionally unavailable, feeling loved by Mum
is not going to make up for not feeling loved by Dad. If a parent sends ‘mixed messages’ by constantly telling the child “I love you”, (high value) but also constantly breaks promises (low value) or sometimes calls the child an ‘idiot’ (low value), then the negative messages contradict the positive one, and may render the words of affection meaningless. If the contradictory (negative) behaviour is abusive, then the child may interpret this as an expression of parental love, thereby growing up with a distorted idea of what constitutes ‘normal’ expressions of love.
Child's subjective experience vs parent's thoughts and feelings:
A child’s feelings of being loved, and the subsequent perception of value and worthiness to be loved has nothing to do with how a parent actually feels. The child’s feelings are based purely on their ‘subjective experience’ of what the parents say and do, or fail to say and do. Children are not mind readers, so judge a parent’s feelings and attitudes by their words, actions
and facial expressions or absence of validating words and action.
Perception - the Subjective Experience:
Feelings + Perception >>> Meaning >>> Subconscious Belief
The perceptual system in the brain plays a role in making sense of the world around us. Observations and experiences are categorised by key features and stored in the databank in our subconscious mind so that future observations and experiences can be identified by checking for a match. These key features may be descriptive physical characteristics of observed creatures (eg, bird has wings, two legs, feathers, beak) or ‘signals’ associated with experiences (eg, threatening/non-threatening, dangerous/non-dangerous, edible/non-edible, pleasant/unpleasant). The perceptual system checks for matching against the databank, but the databank may be incomplete (or faulty) or new information may be sketchy, so the perceptual system fills in the blanks or joins up the dots. The perceptual system does the best it can with what it has, so perceptions may not always be accurate.
For a young child, there is not going to be a lot of information in the databank so their perceptual system relies heavily on feelings and does a lot of filling in the blanks, so may not always be accurate. Therefore parenting behaviour needs
to be somewhat specific and meaningful to the child in order to elicit the required feeling. This is because 'learning’ is biologically selective to evolutionarily prepared stimuli – in feeling valued, there is a range of specific ‘prepared’ parenting behaviours which elicit the relevant feelings in the child. Dad may work eighty hours a week to make a good life for his family, motivated by love. However, ‘working eighty hours’ is not a ‘prepared’ behaviour that elicits the warm fuzzy sensation of ‘feeling loved’ or ‘feeling important to Dad’. Dad may work eighty hours a week to make a good life for his family, motivated by love, but what the children experience is Dad’s absence. They may form a perception that Dad’s work is ‘more important’ than they are. Any attempt by the parents to explain why Dad isn’t home much will not make any difference to how the children feel. Due to the ego-centric focus, if Dad is absent for much of the time, the children attribute the reason for
this absence to themselves. Instead of thinking, “Dad is away a lot because he loves his family and has to work hard so he can pay to support us”, the subconscious response is more like, “Dad doesn’t spend much time home with me because I am unimportant to him”. This will result in experiencing some degree of low Self Worth. ‘Time poor’ working parents may express their love with expensive toys and electronic ‘must haves’ – but this does not produce the warm fuzzy experience of ‘feeling loved’.
Mum’s lack of affectionate behaviour may not mean that she does not love her child but quite simply that she didn’t learn from her own mother how to be demonstratively affectionate. Probably, her mother didn’t learn from her mother either. Mum may express her love through cooking, washing and taking care of the family and home, but this does not produce the warm fuzzy experience of ‘feeling loved’ that a hug does. Hence, for better or worse, parenting styles are learned and passed down from one generation to the next, requiring awareness and effort to break patterns of dysfunctional and less-than-optimal parenting.
Children’s belief in how they are valued by parents is a perception which may not be an accurate indicator of how the parents actually feel or value the child. Children are not mind readers and can only assess their value to their parents based on parental treatment and the feelings they experience in response to that treatment. For example, a mother may love her daughter but if she is not affectionate in her behaviour (ie, there is a lack of hugs and cuddles and verbal, ‘I love you’), the daughter does not feel loved. The child lacks information on what the parent actually thinks and feels so perception may be inaccurate and the conclusions drawn will inevitably be inaccurate. However, regardless of what the parents actually think and feel, it is the child’s feelings and perceptual conclusions that count.
Consequently, parents are often likely to be puzzled and react with disbelief when confronted with their children’s perceptions, since they loved their children and believed they had always acted with the best of intentions. There is the oft quoted catch cry of New Age pop psychology: “They did the best they knew how”. Unfortunately, what they knew was mainly what they learnt from their own parents – unless they had awareness that their parents skills were lacking and vowed to be better or different when their turn came to be parents. However, doing things differently does not always mean better and often they fall into the trap of simply making a different mistake or ironically, making the same one, but in a different guise.
Which comes first – the chicken or the egg?
There has long been an absence of consensus as to which comes first – feeling or thought? There are those who strongly
believe that a thought always precedes a feeling. However, I believe that any thought associated with a learned belief can’t come first – there has to be some preceding events in the learning process. If perception is the thought, then in an infant, there is not going to be much categorised information derived from experience or observation of life in the database in their subconscious mind for the perceptual system to compare any incoming info. Therefore, the perceptions are going to be more dependent on the more primal communication centres in the brain responsible for feelings (such as fear, pleasure or pain). To the young child, whatever they are experiencing will trigger good feelings or bad feelings. My reasoning is that once we have
accumulated info from experiences and learnt associations between events, then the feeling-thought (or thought-feeling) connection becomes a two-way pathway so that thoughts can trigger feelings and feelings can trigger thoughts.
For those who feel more comfortable with the view that thoughts precede feelings for a baby learning these basic associations between parental behaviour and how valued they feel, the CAARP-ALIAS model will still work.
Role of logic:
How does parent behaviour lead to perception of how the parent values the child and end up internalised by the child as Self Worth? The connection is probably made by logic, the pre-cognitive processes of assessment, categorisation and identifying relationships between cause and effect that the human brain uses to assist in understanding the world around us.
Borrowing from Aristotle’s syllogisms of deductive reasoning and applying to child perception, below is an example that shows the conclusion drawn in response to statements by a parent: “That was a dumb/stupid thing to do”.
Major Premise: People who do dumb/stupid things are dumb/stupid
Minor Premise: I do dumb/stupid things
Conclusion: Therefore, I am dumb/stupid.
Conclusions such as this are the basis of beliefs about self, and even though a parent may criticise the behaviour rather than the child, (as has been a recommendation for parents), the child will still likely identify with the behaviour. Subsequently, children will be sensitive to evidence that falsifies or confirms these self-beliefs (eg, any actual ‘dumb’ behaviour or similar criticism by a significant person such as teacher or peer will serve to confirm the parent’s words and the child’s conclusion).
Following are examples applying this pre-cognitive reasoning process to the CAARP-ALIAS Model:
Major premise: People who are given hugs and kisses are loved
Minor premise: I am given hugs and kisses
Conclusion: Therefore, I am loved.
Then -
Major premise: People who are loved are worthy of love
Minor premise: I am loved
Conclusion: Therefore, I am worthy of love.
Negative form:
Major premise: People who are loved are treated with affection
Minor premise: I am not treated with affection
Conclusion: Therefore, I am not loved.
Then -
Major premise: People who are loved are lovable/worthy of love
Minor premise: I am unloved
Conclusion: Therefore, I am unlovable/unworthy of love.
Application in interpreting parent behaviour -
Positive form:
Behaviour: “My mother gives me hugs and kisses which means she loves me”,
Implication: “She considers me lovable, deserving and worthy of her love”
Therefore: “I am lovable and worthy of love”.
Negative form:
Behaviour: “My mother does not give me hugs and kisses which means she does not love me”,
Implication: “She considers me unlovable and unworthy of her love”
Therefore: “I am unlovable, unworthy and undeserving of love”.
The process of deductive reasoning is not infallible since it is based on limited observations or experience - and information may be missing. A classical example of this fallibility is the conclusion in an oft quoted example that ‘all swans are white’ which was based on observations limited to the northern hemisphere – before information was available that there were black swans in Western Australia. Likewise, the process of children drawing conclusions is not infallible. Their conclusions are not necessarily correct since they are based only on the child’s subjective experience – lacking information on how parents actually feel and think.
It is important to emphasise here that in identifying the relevance of early parenting to child development, it isn’t about a witch hunt blaming parents. It is simply about identifying origins of problems to gain a better understanding of the why certain psychological and emotional problems arise for the adult. This is useful to adults who want to understand why they are the way they are, how they became that way, and what they need to do to achieve self improvement and emotional wellbeing. This is also useful to parents wanting to understand their own children’s behaviour and the part they, as parents, play in shaping that behaviour.
Responsibility for eliciting caring behavior:
Why would the child (subconsciously) interpret their parents’ behaviour as a reflection on them and their worthiness, implying they are somehow responsible for their parents’ behaviour? The answer is that innately, the onus for receiving care is largely on the child. There are several probable reasons:
(i) Parenting instincts are not all that reliable, not automatically triggered by giving birth.
(ii) Caregivers are not always the biological parents of the child.
(iii) Society as a whole (ie, all adults) has a complementary /supplementary responsibility to play a role in guidance and protection of children, as in, “It takes a village to raise a child”.
An infant is innately programmed to perform ‘care eliciting’ behaviour and the parent is supposed to respond with the appropriate ‘caring’ behaviour. For example, when an infant is crying distressingly, the care giver (or almost any other nearby adult) feels compelled to pick it up and offer comfort. Likewise, when an infant is smiling, cooing, gurgling and waving arms in the air (requesting attention/human interaction), it is performing ‘care eliciting’ behaviour. When you observe how adults go ga -ga over a baby being ‘cute’, you can see how effective this strategy is.
The basics of the parenting response is instinctive, such as the response to comfort a distressed infant, to nurture and protect. However, in species that require substantial time for the offspring to achieve independence, much of parenting behaviour needs to be learned. Even animals need to learn parenting. When animals are bred or fostered in captivity and have not observed parenting by others of their species as they would in the wild, there is always concern about whether a ‘first time’ mother will actually be a ‘good mother’ or reject her young.
In an ideal world, children would grow up exposed to ideal parenting and in turn, become ideal parents themselves. And therein lies the crux of the problem in a society where material values prevail and children’s emotional needs are inadvertently overlooked. Much of parenting is inadequate, dysfunctional, neglectful, pathogenic or abusive – mostly, it is misguided. Hence, when we learn from our parents, we perpetuate any less-than-ideal parenting. Parenting information is available for those who choose to access it, but for the most part, parents believe that parenting comes naturally, even
though they complain that, “Babies don’t come with a manual”.
Failure to meet CAARP-ALIAS emotional developmental needs is generally unintentional, out of lack of awareness of the true needs of children and how to meet these needs. ‘Minor’ violation of needs can also occur due to indifference, but serious violations reflect a more callous attitude by parents with deliberate intent to neglect, exploit, punish or harm the child.
The child whose needs were met adequately will feel emotionally secure and have a healthy sense of Self Worth and as an adult, will not ‘need’ approval of others in order to feel validated. Due to the flexibility inherent in ‘care eliciting’ behaviour, the child may modify the behaviour (ie, adaptive behaviour) or adopt alternative strategies to achieve meeting their needs. Whatever was successful to some degree as a child will continue to be used as an adult. However, strategies that were ‘sort of’ successful in receiving validation as a child may fail to do so as an adult and may actually be dysfunctional or even self
defeating.
Needs of the child not met by the parents don’t simply go away and the adult will continue the pursuit of having these needs met by others (friends, lovers, spouses, work colleagues, employers). Hence derogatory terms such as: ‘people pleaser’, ‘rescuer’, ‘attention seeking’, ‘needy, or ‘emotionally needy’. Adults may attempt to suppress unmet needs and deny they exist, but they are merely buried in the subconscious mind from where they exert their influence on feelings and subconscious motivations.
Implications of onus for receiving care being on child:
1) Children feel responsible for how they are treated. For example, young children often feel responsible for the parents
splitting up, believing that, “Daddy wouldn’t have left if I had been good”. Another example is children who are sexually abused may feel that they are responsible, since they were treated as they ‘deserved’.
2) Children’s behaviour has to always be acceptable to the care giver so any unacceptable behaviour (such as anger) has
to be repressed so as not to alienate the care giver (who may then punish the child, be indifferent, ignore, neglect, reject, abandon or abuse the child). Adaptive behaviour may involve repression or hiding of true feelings so as to meet parental approval. Revealing true feelings may risk parental disapproval. Adaptive behaviour can be mistaken for resilience. The child has not really gotten over a problem or a hurtful event or circumstances – they are just good at hiding it. This will particularly be the case if told, “Don’t cry like a baby”, “ Don’t be a baby”, “Only babies cry”, “You’re too big/old to cry”. Childhood is where we learn to wear masks.
Repressed anger:
A surprise I found with clients in hypnosis was the frequency with which I encountered repressed anger, ie, a Child Ego State who felt anger towards a parent. This anger appeared to be the result of a parent violating the child’s needs or failing to meet the child’s needs in spite of the child putting in extra effort to gain parental approval. The degree of this repressed anger appears to be relative to: (i) the seriousness of a parent failing or violating their responsibility towards meeting the needs of the child and (ii) the amount of extra effort the child puts into adaptive behaviour in an attempt to elicit parental approval, but this approval is still not forthcoming.
The emotional impact of needs unmet or violated is a matter of degree. Negative effects may be exacerbated or ameliorated by other childhood factors and subsequent treatment by parents. The temperament of the child may also influence the form of behaviour manifested as a result of needs being unmet or violated. For example, a child with a timid or avoidant temperament may give up easily whereas a temperament characterised by persistence may persevere with attempts to prove ‘worthiness’ to the parent. Temperament may also determine the way in which repressed anger is dealt with. It is displaced away from the object of anger (ie, the parent) and may be internalized against the self, (expressed in self harm, drug use or depression) or it may be externalised (ie, expressed against a target that is unlikely to ‘hit back’ such as bullying, cruelty to animals, vandalism, violence, particularly after consumption of alcohol).
Why the anger?
I have explained the situation in which anger is likely to be experienced by a child and why it is repressed, but that does not explain ‘why’ anger occurs? If children feel responsible for how they are treated and accept this treatment as a reflection of what they deserve – then why the anger when parents violate child needs and also violate their parenting responsibilities? Is that not what the child believes they deserve? At first glance there would appear to be a contradiction here, but contradictions
are not permitted in a model if it is to achieve credibility.
A plausible explanation goes thus: Parents and children engage in this hardwired interactive process of ‘care eliciting behaviour’ and ‘reciprocal parental response’. If we look at what underpins this interactive process what we find goes something like this: Kids have innate ‘needs’ with an innate ‘right’ to have these needs met and parents have an innate ‘responsibility’ to meet these needs. We could say that this is the basis of the innate ‘contract’ parents enter into when bringing a child into the world (whether they are aware of this contract or not).
Children are hardwired to utilize a range of ‘first line’ care eliciting behaviour and through feedback, have the capacity to modify behaviour and engage in ‘second line’ adaptive behaviour. It could be suggested that there are innate rules to this innate contract and there is an element of trust that parents are expected to respond to adequate or reasonable effort by the child. Accordingly, there is a limit to what can be considered reasonable effort for a child to undertake in exercising adaptive behaviour. Therefore, if a child has made effort that could be regarded as beyond reasonable to gain approval but it is being withheld by the parent, the child is likely to be angry. When the parent violates the child’s needs and their parental responsibility or withholds approval when beyond reasonable effort has been made, it could be argued that the parent has violated the rules of the innate contract, ie, violated the child’s innate ‘needs’, innate ‘rights’ and their own innate
‘responsibilities’. This could be considered as violation or betrayal of the child’s trust so the child is justified in feeling angry.
Further, the child does not feel responsible for parent’s betrayal of trust.
The child can feel responsible for one aspect of the parent behavior (ie, not meeting child needs, resulting in low self worth) and simultaneously not feel responsible for another aspect of the behaviour (ie, parent violating the rules, resulting in anger). So, the contradiction is resolved.
This element of violation or betrayal may increase the need in the child to repress the anger. When ALIAS needs are unmet, children may believe that their parents do not place a high value on them, which can result in the child feeling ‘hurt’. Violations may be perceived to imply that the parent places a very low value on the child, which can result in feeling ‘very hurt plus a sense of injustice’. This perceived low value may pose an increased risk of alienating the parent if the child were to express their anger directly at the parent. Hence, repressing anger is a must for survival (ie, being taken care of).
Is anger always repressed?
My clinical experience has been only with repressed anger which had its origins in the situations I have described. However, in child studies on attachment and separation, a frequent observation was the child expressing anger towards a parent returning after a temporary separation (Bowlby, 1973). The rationale is that the anger expressed serves to reproach the parent for leaving and serves as a future deterrent. The real question I would ask is why was this anger expressed when my clinical experience with adults is that anger was repressed? One explanation has been that in the instance of a single temporary separation, these children expressing their anger had secure attachment so felt secure in the loving relationship they had with their parents, hence there was virtually zero risk of alienation. However, as if in contradiction, the child’s behaviour subsequently reflected insecurity, becoming anxious, babyish and not allowing the parent out of sight. Therefore, a more likely explanation of anger is that it is a reflection of an insecure attachment, or simply a reflection of violation of the child’s need – but that does not explain why they would risk alienation by the parent.
Perhaps the answer lies in examining the balance of responsibility for attachment and care. Initially, although the infant is equipped with basic ‘proximity’ or ‘care eliciting’ behaviours such as crying, smiling and babbling, the main responsibility is on the mother via her mothering instincts. However, as time passes, the main responsibility shifts from mother to child and when this shift occurs, it is accompanied by an unconscious awareness in the child that they now bear the onus of responsibility to ensure they receive the care they need. With this major shift comes the unconscious awareness of the implication - that to gain parental approval or attention and avoid parental disapproval or alienation, behaviour must always be acceptable to the parent, so unacceptable behaviour and feelings towards a parent (such as anger) have to be concealed
from the parent. When a young child expresses anger toward a parent without any fear of consequences for receiving care, this suggests that the shift in responsibility has not yet taken place.
In addition, I suspect that even though anger may have been expressed toward a parent by a young child, any ongoing anger or resentment may be repressed as the child develops this unconscious awareness of the risk of alienation of the parent. Which would account for my clinical experience of adults who have repressed anger for parenting that occurred or began during infancy.
Excessive CAARP Parenting:
So - the solution to Self Worth is to give unlimited connection, affection, attention, recognition, protection - right? Not so! Just as with anything else in life, the extreme opposite can bring its own problems. Hence, parents engaging in the five classes of behaviours excessively, are likely to contribute to less-than-desirable outcomes for their children. As with anything else in
life, it is about moderation and balance. Parenting behaviour needs to be appropriate to the situation and consistent between forms of behavior (ie, action, verbal, non-verbal, physical, facial expressions) and across occasions. I do not regard excessive
CAARP behaviours by parents as being part of the CAARP-ALIAS model. Rather, I regard these as more about the parents, reflecting their needs (eg, control, domination) or fears (eg, over-protection) or their unmet childhood emotional needs (eg, the need to feel loved or liked and accepted). They will be discussed because of their impact on children and to illustrate that ‘more does not mean better’.
Applications of the CAARP-ALIAS Model:
Currently, there are available books providing parenting advice and there is information on specific parenting skills to assist meeting challenges of parenting. There are various theories and models in psychology developed in the exploration of personality, human behaviour and the workings of the mind. Attachment Theory explains the long term consequences of quality of the ATTACHMENT on emotional security and psychopathology. Gestalt principles of perception and cognitive theories account for the flawed thinking involved in limiting beliefs and psychopathology. There are theories on personality and abnormal psychology. All these theories reflect the perspective and experiences of their authors so there may be some overlap between them, with each adding to the understanding of the various areas of psychology. All psychological theories can be regarded as supplementary and complementary. The CAARP-ALIAS model makes a contribution to furthering the understanding of child emotional development and adult mental and emotional wellbeing and also allows for incorporation of other psychological theories. This comprehensive model identifies basic emotional needs for normal development of Self Worth, how parents can meet these needs and the long term consequences of needs not being met or being violated.
While a link between childhood experiences and later psychopathology is common knowledge, what is not always understood is the underlying path of ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this link. The CAARP-ALIAS model of emotional development provides
a credible account of the mechanism of this ‘hard wired’ link between childhood events and adult mental and emotional wellbeing or negative self beliefs, problematic emotional reactions and self defeating repetitive behavior patterns.
The link is ‘two-way’, so the model provides a ‘two-way’ path of knowledge. Knowing what is currently problematic for the adult, it is possible to trace back reliably to the causal factors and address them in therapy. This is also useful for readers in helping to understand themselves and ‘why they are the way they are’, particularly if they are into ‘self improvement’.
Conversely, knowing the type of parenting a child is exposed to and specific events and circumstances in the child’s life will allow a fairly reliable prediction of the long term impact. Just as for adults, the model is also useful in assisting therapists treating children and adolescents. While this is not a ‘how to’ parenting manual per se, the model does outline guidelines in what I regard as ‘Essential Principles of Parenting’. This provides a rationale for the five classes of behaviour required to meet the developmental emotional needs of children, from early infancy, continuing throughout childhood and adolescence.
Summarising:
What is the role of validation?
* Survival - If parents value their children they are more likely to take care of them
- If valued by society, more likely to survive and/or be taken care of
* Children engage in goal-directed instinctive-like behaviour in order to feel valued by parents so they will be taken care of
‘First line’ care-eliciting behaviour, eg, smiles, affection
‘Second line’ care-eliciting behaviour, eg, adaptive behavior
- masks to hide feelings
- armour to protect feelings
- role adopted to gain approval/avoid disapproval
- behaviour has to always meet parental approval
- repression of emotions that might elicit parental disapproval, eg, anger
* We accept how our parents treated us as an indicator of what we are worth, what we deserve
* Self Worth represents the value we perceive our parents place on us, which we adopt and internalize
* Self Worth is a measure of what we subconsciously believe we deserve in life.
What is the key to being a good parent?
* Engaging in CAARP parenting behavior that results in a child’s ALIAS needs being met so the child feels valued.
(Information in the CAARP-ALIAS model summarized in Tables 1, 2, and 3 is detailed under the "SELF ESTEEM PARENTING" section, from 'Five-Part Model' onwards).