"Respect Your Elders" Shaming

           Respect your elders. That was a religious teaching that messed with my head a lot. It caused me to think up was down and down was up. Whenever a teacher or parent or aunt or grandparent shamed me or other kids, I felt deep sadness and unfairness. I could not understand why we deserved to be hurt so bad, what made us such bad kids. I looked at them as Gods and any question I had about their authority to step on us kids were considered rebellious and terribly wrong. So I became the hidden shell I was, hiding my true thoughts and feelings in order to be a "good girl" and do what was expected of me. But the hurt was still there, and it stung so deeply. My entire self was in question and on fire in order to appear the way they needed me to.

And I slowly lost my sense of worth.

        What is it? Why do grownups feel the need to hurt and shame young children? Pia Melody says that it is because they cannot face that behavior or expression that the child has in themselves, so they jump to punish it in others. They put the disgusting icky feeling they have of themselves outward, and spray it all over the child. The child feels shame and worthless thanks to this elder person and authority, and begins to hate that feeling in himself and repress it too. 

       How, my friends, is a child supposed to respect this behavior in their elders? Doing so is absolutely detrimental to their self-esteems, and this is where the whole problem of feeling worthless comes from. Followed by addictions to cover it, and generally messing up their lives because of the feeling their elders gave them when they tried to express their feelings in their innocent years. Innocence gone, and the respect they were forced into by the ones they looked up to caused them to squander their own hearts in shame.

        So next time you hear the expression respect your elders, tell your kids and yourself to take it with a grain of salt and have proper discernment for which elder is truly respectable and which is acting from a child in a grown-up's body.