During my consultancy period, a young woman came to my office and started saying, "I have a big problem, I don't know what to do". Then she swallowed and stood there with her head down. She paused for a while. I offered water and said "There is no problem in life without a solution, a solution will be found." But she could not hear me, she was looking absently. What was it that made a young woman so upset? Is it violence, hunger or loneliness? The woman was like a bombshell ready to explode, she looked way over her age, she had aged ahead of time. The woman soon opened and started to tell: “I never turn off the stove at home in winter, but I cannot put my five-year-old daughter on socks. I force it, I tell it, I say you will be sick, I say okay, then I take it out, I try it until the evening, it does not work, I am in a position to lose my mind”. "Why does this upset you so much?" When I asked, the woman looked at my face in a meaningful way and said, "Why does she not listen to my words, I wear this, if she does not she will be sick, which scares me." When I asked how the child did not listen to her, she opened the door of the backyard and started to explain: “He does not respect me as a mother, does not listen to my words, does not love me…” The way the woman perceives the events takes her not to the future, but to the past, and she is exhausting. He was afraid of being unloved, ignored and saddened. She wanted to be loved, she wanted to feel loved by her husband, by her mother, by her siblings, by her children, but how would it be?
One of our professors, who contributed greatly to my thought horizon, would say, "If a person sees something as a problem, it is a problem for that person, do not underestimate it". If a six-year-old refusing to wear socks was seen as a problem for a mother, it was a problem for her, whatever the dynamic. But there must have been scab-covered wounds in the lower layer of it, and indeed, the woman was unwittingly drawing attention to these wounds and emphasizing love.
The mother complained that her child was not obeying her. The child's non-obedience, listening or obedience, insisting on doing the same made the mother feel worthless and inadequate. The mother was worried and continued to put pressure on the child, thinking that if I were a successful person, I could make my child listen to my word, if my child valued me, he would have followed my word. Although the mother worried that the child would be sick, it was a curtain used to cover the wound, and when you lifted that curtain you could see that the mother was trapped in inadequacy, worthlessness, and lovelessness. When the mother learned to reach the love she needed with her own means, she would overcome her problem.
The mother believed that she was not loved, that she could not reach the value she deserved, and that she was an inadequate mother, and reflected her inner dissatisfaction and endless conflicts in her relationships with her child.
There may be residues behind our attitudes and behaviors that we reflect in our relationships with people. In such cases, we have to reach the memories we keep hidden in our backyard and the scabed wounds and find ointment. So what is a backyard? We express and share very few of the events we experience. We do not mention the traces of the events and the wounds they bleed, we throw them in the backyard. In the backyard, there are traces of our secrets, mistakes, memories of joy and sorrow, what we cannot tell and cannot share, that we do not allow anyone but us to enter here. As soon as we lock the door we hit, we don't want things we don't want to know to surface. We try to protect our self, spiritual and bodily integrity, and we do not want our dignity to be harmed. This is a humanitarian situation, but if there is a situation that negatively affects our relations with our children, relatives and people around us, we have to open the backyard door and enter and heal our wounds.