In the self-reinforcing cycle we build a detailed model of the self, and we begin to shape our behavior, as we come to be what others see us to be, especially significant ones. Whenever I interact and communicate with my mom on the self-aspect that I love, but she does not validate, it unconstructively affects the communication expectations. I expect my mother to be negative or unsympathetic to conversations or situations regarding friends she does not care for, and so this causes uncertainty in my feelings. So when I talk with my mom, I am talking seriously about feelings or situations in my life I really care about. To be dismissed or contradicted about people through her different feelings and comments would cause confusion and grief.
Cooley suggested the social self does not exist prior to social interaction, that selves arise in process of communication, and what self arises depends on what is being communicated. Relative to the topic with my mother, the relationship overwhelms the content, and we are extremely sensitive to the approval and disapproval of others.
The interpersonal relationship with my mother and the relationships with all of these friends all relate to the self-reinforcing cycle. I feel pressure from my mother having that been through situations with my friends who have had parents leave home, deaths, and hardships. The situations strained the communication between my mother and I, and the communication coordination went from greater to lesser emphasis. There have been extents where my mother knew I wasn’t being myself, ignoring her, and snapping at her on occasion. Knowing my mom wasn’t satisfied or concerned with me at times I felt almost alone, a sense of involuntary aloneness. My mother is everything in my life, and so as a significant other, Cooley relates again as we come to be as others want or see us as. I involved myself in a vicious cycle of negativity, as I became effected by my mother’s lesser view of me. I came to be pessimistic and not myself because the self that was arising was the one that came from the communicative experience with my mother, the “other”.
Emotions resulted that contributed to the communicative behavior state between my mother and I. I became very angry, emotional, and inconsistent with my feelings and self, especially around the house, where my mom and myself were always around each other. My facial expressions were automatic and involuntary and were constantly communicative of anger and sadness. Due to my facial expressions of anger, and unhappy faces, my mother received facial feedback. In response, my mom produced similar emotions that related to the interpersonal occasion of her lack of receptivity to the situation of not knowing these certain friends of mine the way I did and still do.
I realize now that during this time I was giving off negative aspects to my self in behavior with other people. I would have dramatic realization issues, as I gave deliberate efforts that highlighted characterizations of my situation with my mom. Every so often I stressed my problems with my mother, and talked badly about her to others on a regular basis. I wanted others to understand my frustration with her, when in reality I just added to the vicious cycle I was going through at the time. Rather than forget and go forward, I consistently thought about the communicative problems we were having such as bad silences, snapping, and ignoring. This affected my relationships with my friends. They didn’t know how to cope with my bad talking, and negativity and anger towards my mother. They all thought of her as she actually was and is, as a great mom and warm-hearted person. I then got in a gloomy self-fulfilling prophecy. I was being overly pessimistic. But this combined with my mother’s self-reinforcing cycle that I think started our problems, as she made comments about certain friends, comments that I hated and disagreed with.
When I interacted with others the coordinated state was then at odds with both groups. I felt ignorance from my friends simply because they could not show the understanding I wanted at the time. I felt this caused rejection feelings, and non-synchrony. A self-imposed prophecy came about because whenever I talked with others the negative issues of my relationship with my mom always arose.
John Bowlby’s theory of attachment and imprinting fully relates to my discussion. The attachment theory applies to the insecure attachment I felt with my mom, because of anxiety and bad communication at the time. I felt insecure and uncomfortable even talking or looking at her. As she is my mother I had attachment security of love and mother guidance. But in contrast I also had situations of insecure attachment because of the non-validation from the negative self-reinforcing cycle at that time. We both couldn’t be expressive to each other, and so the only expression I could vent was with others less as important as my mom was. My mother is supposed to be my most trusted companion, but our critical feedback between each other during the bad phase, destroyed this at the time.
The imprinting theory enables me to understand how we gain our attachment forms. In our early interpersonal experiences the attachment we form with the parent become imprinted on us, and become the ways we create attachment relationships with others. Whether it is with my mother or others such as family and friends, and peers. How we handle and have communicative coordination with others is affected in this early phase, as this attachment is the result of evolution and natural selection. We try to get as much proximity to the caregiver, which in my case is my mother, as much as we can.
The interpersonal events in Bowlby’s four focuses of attachment relate to the relationship with my mom. What was and was not communicated between myself as a baby girl and my mother affected the development of my growth in communication coordination. My mother has since told me that when I was an infant she did not tolerate some behaviors between my two older sisters and myself. I regularly threw things at my sisters, and fought with them, violently at times, pulling each other’s hair and my mother would get mad. But my mom’s anger provided enough to give off signals in her communication, which affected me early on. This obviously affected me early in life, and the attachment I felt with my mother became insecure at certain times, because of upsetting her, and realizing what she would and would not tolerate. As I discussed, later in my life when I wanted (or did not want) to discuss situations that I felt strong about such as friend’s problems or relationships, my mother’s non-validation can be related back to the “imprinting” earlier in our lives’ communicative experiences.
I am now an adult and I can see and appreciate the relationship and communicative interactions with my mother and social self with friends, and peers. I love my mother more than anything, as she loves me. And I know we will always have our disagreements and upsets together. But looking through the interpersonal and social communication I have learned about, I can hopefully not fall back into the same bad habits we both have had before.
