Stress and Illness
| Creativity and Health
Why our childhood can predict relationship stress in later life
| Creative Relationships
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Childhood stress and relationships in later life
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The remedy
During our childhood, “stress forces” like fear
can imprint into us not just fixed beliefs, but a set of entitlements (for “Prima Donnas” especially) and duties (most particularly for “Cinderellas”), as can shape us in our upbringing. Now, our expectations of others - and others’ expectations of us - can become matters of habit. As a consequence, our relationships can become stilted and crimped, with our personal development - and our real, creative personality - starved of oxygen.
When this is the case, we can find ourselves escorted down the classic “Cinderella” and “Prima Donna” routes, as illustrated below, by gloom, fear
and inward-directed anger/ shame; and compulsive desire, pride and outward-directed anger.
This explains how some of us emerge from our early years as a dead ringer for the “Cinderella” type, and others graduate as the classic “Prima Donna”. As such, we can end up stuck within ourselves as well as in our relationships.
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Any democratic sharing of roles and leadership needs creative space to succeed, but readily becomes squeezed.
It’s dangerous to trivialise the realm of inner reality and feeling, like it were the “cause of all misery”. This is false, for the real menace are “stress forces” like fear
and anger
- that do their damage by being all too dominating.
Only with honest self-awareness and forgiving can any of us make any real
headway - as teammates willing to own up to our own
deficiencies, and united in trying to usher in greater transparency and fairness - and more spontaneity and possibility.
Where real, creative leadership goes missing, however, we can quickly be reduced to being servants of stress biology, with relationships (like whole communities) robbed of the space to breathe.
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