Domestic Adult

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What are you doing with what has been done to you?

Jean Paul Sartre

Do we agree to give up the right to adulthood?

just for the reason that they kept

archaic children's vision of oneself and the world, that you need to protect with all your might?

What is it about - go ahead, protect this inner child, as it should be, just don't give him

dispose of your adult life.

James Hollis

It is my deep conviction that the goal of any work with a psychologist or psychotherapist is to acquire a new quality of life for a person and help him to grow up adequately.

If a person has experienced deep childhood traumas, then the normal and natural course of his growing up is disrupted. And it is for this that we need to look back, to our past, in order to get out of the captivity of our own childhood, to give ourselves with the help of our inner parent what we once did not receive, and allow ourselves to live on. To grow up, you need to go through all the stages. Without returning to childhood and living what has not been experienced, growing up is hardly possible. It seems to me that this is exactly the way of growing up - it is to give love and acceptance, as well as satisfaction of the needs of our inner wounded child, to form the figure of an inner, rather good inner parent; accept that our own parents were not perfect, listen to the desires of our inner child, and, as a result, get the opportunity

build your relationships with others from an adult position.

Just as we have the figure of the Inner Child, the Inner Parent, we also have the figure of the Inner Adult, which is the figure that unites all subpersonalities. With the advent of the Adult, a person becomes whole.

In my opinion, an adult is characterized by the following qualities:

1. He understands and realizes his needs and understands how and where, in a safe way for himself and others, he can satisfy them.

2. He does not shift his responsibility to others; one of his basic needs is to be the master of his own life. Being the master of our own life also means that we live our own life, and not the life of our parents or our children.

3. An adult respects his own feelings and thoughts, as well as the feelings and thoughts of others, and gives them the right to be different from him.

4. An adult has the quality of self-respect.

5. An adult is capable of making decisions. At the same time, he understands that these decisions may not please his loved ones.

6. He recognizes his vulnerability and gives himself and others the right to be wrong.

7. An adult accepts and is aware of his feelings and is capable of their healthy, mature expression.

So, throwing, yelling, throwing things in anger is usually not a mature manifestation of anger, anger can be experienced in different ways.

8. An adult is able to take care of himself. Often, when a client comes to me for a consultation, I ask: "How do you take care of yourself?" For some reason, the first thing I often hear in response is the following words: "Well, sometimes I go for a manicure, and I can also go to a cafe and have a cup of coffee before work." A manicure and a cup of coffee are wonderful. But taking care of yourself is not limited to this, and it is far from only that. Sometimes it consists in the most elementary things, for example, in the fact that you have time to eat normally on time, and not always intercept something on the run. The fact that you understand the signals of your body, and rest before you are ready to tumble down from fatigue. The fact that you do not tolerate the flu and colds on your feet, performing feats of labor, and give your body time to recover. This, too, is taking care of yourself, not just taking care of your body and applying makeup in the morning. In addition, self-care can be attributed to the ability to seek help when you realize that you yourself are not coping with life's tasks. Seeking help from a psychologist or psychotherapist can also be attributed to this point.

9. An adult is realistic about himself, he does not strive to be ideal and perfect in everything.

10. An adult is able to give responsibility to the one to whom it really is due. This point is closely related to point number two, but I decided to take it out separately. And here I would like to talk in more detail about our relationship with parents and about our parenting role.

Some clients, coming to me for consultations and groups, feel as if they are traitors to their parents. As if they "slander" them that in fact there was nothing like that, that there are families where it is even worse - those in which the parents are alcoholics or drug addicts who beat their children and mock them, which is even less for some lucky - they grew up in an orphanage. Yes, admitting that something was wrong in our childhood is not easy enough. And at the same time, it is a necessary step on the way forward. I usually answer clients: "If everything was so good for you, then why are you so bad now?" I am a supporter of trusting my feelings and sensations. Sooner or later, we will have to take our parents off the pedestal. To go through the stage of mourning what was not in our childhood, to understand that our parents did everything in their power at that moment, that they themselves were not perfect people, that they also have a wounded child who is wounded inside them so much so that they are afraid to let go of their grown children from themselves. When you break away from your parents and begin to see them as ordinary people with their own problems and shortcomings, imbalances in character, you do not betray them. In fact, by doing so, you are giving not only yourself, but also them a chance to grow up. No one can do it instead of them. Perhaps this will be a somewhat exaggerated example, but are you allowing someone to eat instead of yourself? If someone eats your lunch for you, you will still be hungry. The same is the case with your parents - if you constantly do something instead of them (well, for example, fill the void in their life after you have already started your family, but must constantly come at the first request of your parents), you do not fill the void anyway. Only they can do this.

It was not by chance that I put into the epigraph the words of J. P. Sartre "What are you doing with what has been done to you?" Yes, it was - it was important to accept and mourn your past. But in order to have the strength to live on, and to live with a different, healthier sense of self, responsibility for what we are doing now must be taken for ourselves. In another way, it is unlikely to work.

And one moment. An adult understands that there are different situations. There are those where you can "release" your inner child, there are those where you can give a voice (or not give) the inner criticism. And it is an adult who can live his own life.

An excerpt from the book "Healing the Inner Child"