Just because you had parents and lived under the same roof as they did, doesn’t mean that they took ownership of you. It is more than possible to be an orphan with parents. Let’s explore this dynamic and pull back the gaslight that is hiding it.
Parents who orphan their children (but keep them) usually point to certain things as a way to discredit the idea that they were bad parents. They say things like: “You had a roof over your head. You had food on the table. You had clothes on your back. Look at all the things we bought you.” This is the gaslight that the orphan with parents dynamic hides behind. And this is an illusion that almost everyone falls into. The parents fall into it. The child falls into it. Family friends fall into it. Teachers fall into it. As a result, the hell of neglect that the child is experiencing is never actually seen for what it is. In fact, they are constantly gaslit that the reality is the opposite, despite the fact that their wellbeing continued to decline due to deprivation and starvation on many levels.
The first way to crack through this gaslight is to look at an orphanage. When a child is put into the government system or into an orphanage, they have shelter. They have clothing. They have food. They have toys. In many countries, they have education. They have the basic physical necessities. They have the very things that people point to as proof that a person was parented and has a home. So, the question is: What is missing? What makes having parents and a family so different from being in an orphanage? By doing this, you will see the needs that are necessary, but were never met in your childhood. Needs that had to be met in order for you to actually develop in a healthy way and thrive. I would like you to stop this video and actually think about this question I’ve asked for a minute before you resume.
In order for a child to actually thrive and therefore, in order for us to be able to say that they were parented, here is a short list of thing that a child needs… They need to feel owned by their parents. If you want to understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Own People. Positive ownership is the thing that makes all the other necessary expressions of parenting possible. To truly own something is to see it as part of yourself. If you see something as part of yourself, it becomes impossible to hurt that thing without hurting yourself. You cannot usurp its free will without harming yourself. Therefore, in true ownership, which is for something to be a part of you and therefore to belong to you, the best interests of that other thing is of the utmost concern. A child needs to be made to feel a sense of belonging. They need to feel as if they have an important place within the family/social group. They need to feel taken responsibility for. They need to be protected from harm on all levels. They need to feel a sense of security, both regarding their relationship with their parent and within the world. This implies stable, consistent and secure attachments. They need to have proper nutrition. They need good quality sleep. They need good hygiene. Access to good medical care. They need social interaction and stimulation. They need positive role models. A child needs to feel a sense of being able to have things that are theirs and theirs to control, that can’t just be taken away. They need to feel valued and wanted and loved. They need to feel seen, heard, felt and understood. This is emotional intimacy. They need their boundaries and personhood to be seen and honored. They need play and exploration. They need mirroring. They need to be able to develop a sense of themselves and autonomy without that threatening their relationship with the people around them. They need physical activity. They need a sense of empowerment. They need to feel received. They need encouragement. They need to be enabled. They need age appropriate challenges to build their self-esteem. They need guidance. They need communication. They need appropriate limits. They need physical affection. They need emotional support and to be emotionally co-regulated. They need a deep sense of connection. They need to be able to trust those upon whom their life depends. They need attention and engagement from the people around them. They need to feel like a priority. They need a sense of connection to wider community. They need a sense of accomplishment. They need to be given a positive self image by their caregivers. They need to be given self-awareness. They need consistency and structure and predictability. They need to be taught self-discipline. They need to be taught and enabled to learn. They need empathy. They need validation. They need respect. They need to feel that others are committed to them. They need support regarding the achievement of their goals and their desires. They need quality time. They need words of affirmation. They need acts of service. They need gifts. They need acceptance. They need the freedom to express themselves. They need honesty and openness. They need companionship. They need to feel like they can go to their caregivers with whatever they are struggling with and whatever they need. And this list could be longer. By the way, some people will feel like this is a lot… too much even. But what does that say about us and our relationship to children and each other? Looking at this list, isn’t it even more obvious that we are meant to be living in tribes? Also, looking at this list, you may find that your needs were met even less in your childhood home than they were for some children who were actually a system kid or put in an orphanage or put into foster care.
These needs are needs. What I mean by this is, they are non-negotiables. Without these things, a child cannot grow into a healthy adult. They may find coping mechanisms to be able to make it to adulthood. But the after effects of the missing of these needs will be there and will make thriving in their adulthood hard. Most especially, it will make their relationships hard. So many people who were orphans with parents, have no idea why they are so messed up because they have fallen into the gaslight of having parents that kept them and having all their basic necessities provided for them. This is even more true if the family uses gaslighting verbiage. Things like “This is the best family”. Or “We are so close” or saying “I love you” when most of the behavior or actions in the family are out of alignment with this. Or “You always have a place with us” when it doesn’t feel like that at all. This is also far more extreme for children who grew up in wealthy households. Society has the total misconception that it is impossible to be an orphan if you come from a wealthy home. After all, it isn’t that your basic needs of food and water are just met. They are met to a higher degree than most people will ever experience. Rather than just having shelter, you may have grown up in a mansion. Rather than just being fed, you may have been cooked for by a private chef. But guess what? You can still be orphaned in a wealthy family. You can still be missing the very most important things that are necessary for you to have developed in a heathy way. You may be completely emotionally neglected.
As people, we need to stop telling the lie that physical needs are more important than emotional needs. In fact, the reverse is true. There are a great many truly poor people, whose basic necessities are a daily struggle, but whom are thriving far more than other people who have everything and more on a physical level, but whose emotional needs are not met If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Today’s Great Epidemic and How to Solve It.
People love to tell the story that once you reach a certain age, you do not need certain things that you needed in childhood. As if, regardless of whether you had those needs met in childhood, you reach some arbitrary age where the need simply went away and you were fine on your own. In this same vein, people love to tell the story that it is impossible to abandon an adult. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: 8 Truths About Adult Abandonment. It makes people feel less dependent and more empowered to think this, after all, we can’t control whether other people actually will or won’t meet our dependency needs and we don’t want to accept that needs not being met in childhood will, without exception, have an effect on our adulthood. It also lets us off the hook regarding meeting each other’s dependency needs. By telling these stories, we can make the person with the need the problem for putting pressure on us to show up in a relationship, rather than make ourself them problem for not wanting to take any responsibility for other people and not wanting to meet other people’s needs. The problem with these stories we tell is that they are not true. Not by any stretch of the imagination. We have dependency needs. And these needs continue into our adult life. Even more so, if you lacked them in childhood. In fact, a great deal of conscious relationships is about consciously re-parenting each other’s inner child and by doing so, becoming the healing element in their life. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Dependency Needs - The Thing That No One Will Accept They Have. The reality is, these needs that were not met in your childhood, must be met in your adulthood. And the more creative that we get with this within human society, the better off every single person within society will be. When you look at what any person was missing in childhood, you will quickly see that these are the very things they are looking for in their primary partner. And so it should be. They should be looking for these things from more people than just their partner. This story that we tell that it is dysfunctional to look for the parent they never had in a partner, makes every single person within society dysfunctional. This is what everyone is doing subconsciously. And the needs becomes more extreme the less that need was met. Think about it… If a person had no predictability or attention from their parents and were not prioritized by them, they will look for a partner who is predictable, pays attention to them and prioritizes them. This is how it should be. This is the basis of healing relationships. And the more conscious we become about this, finding people whose needs are met and who are healed by meeting these needs that we have, the better. To learn more about this, watch my video titled: Be Consciously Transactional.
It is important to remember that because you live inside your own skin every day, your relationship with yourself matters. This means, every need that was not met by your parents, you should be offering to yourself. For example, if your parents did not offer understanding, you should be putting energy into understanding yourself. But do not believe anyone who tells you that this will be sufficient. This only takes care of your relationship with yourself. In fact, for people who were orphaned, these ideologies that center around a person meeting their own needs, only enhance and reinforce their sense of abandonment and aloneness. Because of this, these ideologies are re-traumatizing. You need to ALSO get these unmet needs met by other people. This is the most critical act of self-love relative to dependency needs.
It is time for us to stop falling into the gaslight. As a society, we need to accept that it is more than possible for parents to keep the child they created rather than give them away and still turn them into an orphan within the home. And we need to start recognizing when this is the case, so we can put energy into meeting those critical needs that are not actually being met for that child by their parents.
