The princess Amalia from Holland He became the center of world attention in recent days after announcing his latest decision: break with the family mandate and not study at the same university as their predecessors.
The 18-year-old girl has communicated through the Information Service of the Royal House (RVD) that after finishing her sabbatical year, she will begin studying a degree oriented towards Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics at the University of Amsterdam. In this way, she breaks with the family tradition of training like her father and grandmother, the former queen and now Princess Beatrice.
The future queen and successor to the current King William of Orange publicly recounted in her biography book written by Claudia de Breij, that as a child she went to a child psychologist and still visits him when she needs to vent: “Sometimes everything becomes too much for me , school, friends… If I feel the need, I ask for a date. I let off steam, I take it all out and I’m ready for a month”
Also the one who alluded to this same topic was his mother, Queen Máxima, who last year during the inauguration of the Mind Us Foundation said that both Amalia and her other two daughters resort to therapy when they feel overwhelmed with the intense life they lead.
In addition to the decision of not study at the historic University of Leiden, the oldest in her country, Amalia has made controversial decisions that break with the “family law” of the Oranges. At the beginning of 2021, she issued a statement addressed to the Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, where renounced the annual personal allowance of 300,000 euros that corresponded to him from his 18th birthday. He also caused concern when he openly confessed that at the moment “He has no desire to reign” and that, if his father were to die suddenly, he would ask his mother to take the throne, at least temporarily.
Other similar events have happened with well-known royalty characters, as happened with the prince Harry, son of Carlos and Lady Di, who in 2020 caused a stir after announcing that he was resigning from his duties as a member of the British royal family and would settle in the United States with his wife, Meghan Markle.
What all these royal stories have in common is that they renounce “family mandates”, those unconscious and even, in some cases, implicit laws. As the word says, they “command” what one has to do and, in some cases, it contradicts the true purpose of life that a person has.
Millions of people face this problem and although it affects more during adolescence and youth, they can also be “slaves” of these family laws, adults who have lived a life based on the mandates.
But what exactly is a family mandate? To begin with, it is understood as a order or precept that parents say explicitly to their children or act implicitly; they are, in short, decisions that are made for one and that are not freely chosen.
Each family builds a system of beliefs, expectations and notions regarding social progress, the job one has to have, the importance of leaving offspring and what is “morally correct”, among other things. For Carolina Moché, a graduate in Psychology and a specialist in emotion-focused therapy, the word mandate speaks of a high degree of need to comply with something that one believes will make one more worthy of love or respect. “It’s as if you thought, if I don’t comply with that I won’t be valued or loved, so in my search for acceptance I am forced to follow a family tradition or expectation,” says Moché.
As in the case of Amalia de Orange, for the most part, young people face vocational problems due to this question of following the wishes of parents or other relatives. “Not all mandates go against the feeling of being, important is to be able to have the freedom to make the decision of what to do with your own life”, affirms the Bachelor of Psychopedagogy, Stella Maris De Vita. She adds the professional that there are cases in which some young people follow the same professional career as their parents and are happy doing so. “The problem appears when the family conditions you and fractures your decision-making, there we are already talking about a toxic situation,” says De Vita.
A research made by the Department of Psychology at the University of Cologne in Germany has found that in their sample study, 42% of university students surveyed attended their respective university because their relatives had also done so. When asked about their decision to study there, they mentioned family as the main factor. In contrast, the rest of the students who were not guided by family reasons agreed that their decision was based on factors such as: vocation, professional plans and academic prestige.
The point is that these mandates they carry a high emotional charge and in order to be encouraged to break them, one must first be aware that it is an alien imposition and not something that has been freely chosen.
In order to get rid of them and follow your own individual life purpose, you can follow certain steps. Ms. De Vita recommends taking into account the following:
Specialists agree that Patience is essential in these situations. since the process can take years and it may involve unlocking issues that come from childhood and even from previous generations.
As for the consequences of following these “orders” and not ending up doing what you really want, they are many and can trigger serious difficulties. “We are talking about people who, when you receive them as adults, have a history of not listening to themselves that does not have to do only with work or vocational matters, but with thousands of other decisions such as where to live, how to live, with whom to form a relationship. partner, how many children to have and more”, says Moché. And he adds: “This can trigger pathologies or serious disorders in the cases of adults who register that they have not lived their liveswho have not decided how they wanted to live and can become unhappy and suffer from depressive symptoms”.
Therefore, it is essential reconsider whether the path being followed coincides with personal motivations or with imposed mandates. We must remember that not all mandates are bad, as Miguel Espeche says: “it is not the fault of the mandates, but of their misuse. ANDThere are the passions of the parents that are genuinely “infected” to the childrenthe healthy customs, the ways that each family has of loving, of respecting, of living spirituality, of valuing things”.
Once you are sure that the decisions made are unique and your own, you can start a life path that will bring happiness and allow you to find answers to everything that previously seemed inexplicable.