You can grow up, but never grow up. How is that possible? And so. Sometimes you just have to grow up too early - if there are no adults around who you can rely on. And these are not even necessarily alcoholic parents who beat their children to death. Mom, always busy with a sick brother or sister. Dad with mood swings - sometimes kind and affectionate, sometimes irritated and angry. Eternal swearing at home - parents are constantly on the verge of divorce - what will happen tomorrow? A grandmother who appointed her six-year-old granddaughter as a nanny for a three-month-old baby and strictly asks for it. Parents, in any conflict of the child at school or kindergarten shifting all responsibility for the conflict onto their child, just so as not to enter into it themselves - “it’s your own fault, you should have taken into account the interests of the teacher (educator, another child, anyone - just not yourself).” Infantile parents expecting acceptance from the child decisions, manipulating him with the help of resentment, blaming the child for their conditions - “look how bad I feel, it was you who brought me down,” “I’m sick because you behaved wrong.” The list is long. Each ungrown one has his own. What it has in common is that such a child has no choice but to “build up his armor”, to develop his defense against the anxiety and helplessness that is inevitable next to such adults. Anxiety and helplessness, which are too much for such a small child, who is left alone with these experiences... Defenses can be different. Some learn to carefully observe the mood of close adults and predict their behavior - and thereby somehow control the world around myself. Sometimes they also try to influence their condition - “I’ll get an A - mom won’t swear.” Others learn not to look at their real parents (by the way, up to a sharp deterioration in their vision), painting themselves an “ideal picture of mom and dad” - ignoring all manifestations indifference, anger and negativity, and carefully storing in memory any manifestation of love and care. It doesn’t matter what kind of protection is chosen - with it the child is trying to control the unsafe world around him. It is very important - without it, the child’s psyche can be destroyed. It helps to cope with helplessness, despair, pain and total loneliness - and survive. But the price of such protection can be very high. Instead of growing up - that is, learning about the world around him and himself, his place in the world, his needs, abilities and preferences - all that is actually called childhood - all the baby’s forces are spent on continuous “ monitoring” the condition and needs of surrounding adults – “Are they satisfied? Are you healthy? Are you sober? Did you have a fight or not? “ There is simply no energy or time for oneself and one’s condition, for a real study of the world around us. The image of the world and oneself in it freezes in the frame “I am helpless and alone in an unpredictable and dangerous world.” Hence, several important points: 1. Such people often have the feeling that they “haven’t coped with anything anywhere” - since it is in principle impossible to cope with the task set for themselves in childhood - to control the behavior of their parents (remember, “I get an A - my mother will not swear ”? will be, but for a different reason). Guilt and hopelessness live here.2. From the difficult but familiar, and the new but unknown, such people will choose the familiar as the safest, because the unpredictability of the world in childhood was so excessive for them that the new unpredictability frightens them more than all the hardships of the usual state of affairs. Fear of change and powerlessness live here. Such people often find themselves in codependent relationships with partners.3. From the children’s feeling “I couldn’t cope” grows “I’m not good enough”, and they try to be “good”, spending a lot of effort and time on it. Fatigue lives here.4. Having learned to “monitor” their parents in childhood, such people later continue to habitually do this in relationships with their partners. At the same time, this leads to excessive attention to others and insufficient attention to oneself, one’s needs and wants. In a marriage, this leads either to the infantilization of one