Have You Been Brainwashed As A Child To Not Notice Certain Things?

To make sense of the world as small children, we absorb our parents' version of it almost on contact, and from there we start discarding whatever doesn't match. The question I keep coming back to: how much of what our own eyes and ears report do we throw out just to belong? Researchers have shown that sounds absent from our native language fade if we never use them. So what else withers from neglect? The people raising us decide which things deserve our attention and which don't, and in doing that they narrow the range of what our senses are allowed to bring in. Some of that pruning has to happen. A child flooded by every signal with no filter would be overwhelmed and unable to concentrate at all.

Take a common example from my own field, psychology. Plenty of professionals still insist that children don't really see monsters in their bedrooms at night, and they coach parents to calmly tell the child it isn't real and not to make a fuss over it. I'd argue that teaching a child to distrust what they perceive is itself a kind of manipulation.

I no longer think the standard advice holds up. A dark bedroom with nothing but a night light, or a sliver of hallway light through a cracked door, genuinely does look different. Our pupils widen in that setting and we take in more from the little light available. The work is done by the rods, the black-and-white receptors packed into the retina, which are far more sensitive in low light. Their trade-off is poor resolution; the cones, which handle bright light with much sharper detail, have shut down. One reason rods win out in the dark is simply that there are a lot more of them than cones.

I've tested this myself, awake in the middle of the night. Familiar objects turn strange, and for a moment I can't place what I'm looking at, including my own spouse lying next to me. That's me, a grown adult who understands exactly what's going on. Now picture a child, who already sees differently when the light drops, staring at shapes with no clear edges and getting scared. A parent who denies any of this happens hasn't changed a thing about what the child actually sees in that dim room. All they've done is train the child to call their own experience a lie.

What usually follows is that the child figures out asking for reassurance gets them nowhere. So they stop asking, keep the fear private, and grow afraid of the dark, which is what happened to me. As a kid I could only sleep easily with another person in the room or a low-wattage light within view. When parents keep insisting children deny what they see and how it makes them feel, that fear tends to reach into other corners of life.

There was a stretch of research on the so-called double bind, which showed up often in families of people with schizophrenia, a serious illness that commonly interferes with thinking and reasoning. A relative would say one thing while plainly looking or sounding like they meant the opposite. Picture an adult holding a small child at arm's length while announcing, "I love you." Sometimes grown-ups believe they're being polite doing this, and people get trained not to notice the contradiction, or, if they do notice, to say nothing. For a child, that scrambles everything. They lose any confidence that what they're seeing and hearing is actually what they're seeing and hearing.

Keep that up and honesty between people starts to feel rare. The child's gut registers one thing while an adult tells them the person doesn't feel that way at all. We hear a lot lately about trusting your intuition, your instincts. The trouble is that so many of us have overridden that quiet inner read so many times that it's gone silent. Think about how often we were taught not only what to think but what to feel. The word propaganda comes to mind. It begins the moment a parent grows uneasy with a child who perceives things accurately, because the accurate version isn't the one the parent wants reflected back. Something about the truth makes them uncomfortable. I'm not sure where the line sits between that and plain deliberate lying.

Perceiving a wide range of things comes naturally to us, and it's often easier for people to deny that ability in someone else, because denying it lets them steer not just what the other person does but what they think. We aren't livestock to be driven wherever the "shepherd" finds it convenient, or worse.

"No, I'm not angry," we've all heard, from someone who clearly is. Lying is convenient. It greases the manipulation of other people and has nearly become a default setting for most of us, maybe all of us. And in this culture we tear people down constantly, frequently right after we've talked them into being honest.

Stop knocking people down. The world has no shortage of volunteers for that job. Lift them instead. It's no mystery why so many of us are thin-skinned; some days I feel like I should be wearing armor. This gets done mostly in childhood, when it takes the least effort. Children are trusting and have no idea what's being done to them. Do people run others down purely to prop themselves up? Hollow, isn't it?

So, what's your read? As we keep pulling at this thread, I'll ask: was the unspoken rule in your childhood home "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? I'll pick this up again later.

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