Adulthood and responsibility. Becoming - life vs death

Six Aspects of Being an Adult
Living Life as an Authentic Adult Post published by Robert Firestone Ph.D. on Jun 24, 2013 in The Human Experience

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

~ e.e. cummings

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Most people are unaware that they are conducting their lives more from a child’s frame of reference than in an adult mode. Although men and women mature physically and become more capable in their practical lives, rarely do they achieve emotional maturity. In my view, the primary barriers to maturity are unresolved childhood trauma, the defenses the child forms to ward off emotional pain and existential dread. The latter refers to a core anxiety related to growing up, facing the fact that time is passing, and giving value to life in spite of death’s inevitability.

There are six major aspects of the adult approach to life: {Many of these themes as discussed in Dąbrowski's work}

1. Rationality: Adults experience their emotions, but when it comes to their actions, they make rational decisions on the basis of self-interest and moral concerns. As Murray Bowen observed, adults “are able to distinguish between the feeling process and the intellectual process…and [have] the ability to choose between having one’s functioning guided by feelings or by thoughts.” They have a strong sense of identity and strive to live with integrity, according to their own principles and values.

2. Formulating and Implementing Goals: Adults formulate goals and take the appropriate actions to achieve them. In this respect, they establish their priorities in life. In contrast, people living within a child’s frame of reference often overreact emotionally to events that are insignificant in the overall scheme of their lives, and fail to respond to events that are important or crucial to their well-being. Because adults tend to pursue their goals and priorities honestly, their actions are more likely to correspond to their words.

3. Equality in Relationships: Adults seek equality in their relationships whereas those who operate from a child’s perspective often assume the role of either the parent or the child in relation to their loved ones. In Voice Therapy (link is external), I described how adult individuals interact in a close relationship: “People whose actions are based primarily on the adult mode relate to each other as independent individuals with considerable give and take in terms of reciprocal need gratification.” They have developed their capacity for both giving and accepting love and do not attempt to recreate a parent in their partner by forming an imagined connection or fantasy bond (link is external) with them for safety and security.

4. Active versus Passive: Adults are proactive and self-assertive, rather than passive and dependent. They don’t feel victimized by life or complain or dump their problems onto other people; instead, they face their problems or challenges directly and work out solutions rather than depending on others for direction. They seek help only in relation to what they actually need, as in areas where they lack expertise, not in relation to unresolved emotional needs from the past.

5. Non-defensiveness and Openness: People who are emotionally mature do not have defensive or angry reactions to feedback; they do not offhandedly disagree with negative commentary. Instead they are open to exploring new ideas, welcome constructive criticism and, in this way, they expand their self-knowledge and self-awareness.

Adults seek self knowledge to know themselves and develop an accurate self-concept; they are aware of both the positive and negative aspects of their personalities and have a realistic perspective of themselves in relation to others. In their pursuit of self-knowledge, they are aware of unconscious motivation, open to the analyis of that dimension of mental life and attempt to integrate it to the best of their ability.

6. Personal Power: People do not have control over their thoughts and feelings; these arise unbidden in the course of everyday life. However, adults take full power (link is external)over every part of their conscious existence. Indeed, they change any behavior or characteristic that they dislike in themselves, such as being overweight or abusing substances. In this sense, adults approach their lives from the standpoint of being responsible for their destiny.

The Child Mode

When people experience the world in the child mode, they feel powerless and at the mercy of others as well as overpowered by their own feeling reactions. In the actual world of the child, the child is helpless and totally dependent and is often the victim of negative circumstances that are beyond his/her control. Children feel, but they are generally unable to act or protest outwardly in their own defense (link is external).

I was impressed with the way one woman described a child’s perspective in a personal narrative (link is external):

Recently, someone reminded me about the unconscious desire to be a child, and it hit me. I never heard it that clearly. It’s ruining my life and making me unhappy. I’m 41, and I’m sick of it.

The life of a child is helpless, scary and powerless. Functioning in an adult world as a child creates a never-ending misery of inequality, fear and paranoia. As a child, anyone can control and overrun you. As an adult, of course, you own your life and destiny. But if you remain a child in your adult life, you look at the world around you as dominating, controlling and dangerous. That’s a miserable life.

I’ve lived my adult years searching for my parents; not the obvious ones I was born to, but their replacements. My subconscious desire to have parents in my adult life has caused me years of discontent.

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The major deterrent to living an adult existence lies in the fear of growing up. This includes the fear of breaking imagined connections with parents, being alone, standing out as an individual, having a strong point of view, recognizing one’s value and confronting the inevitability of death, the ultimate separation from self. Like this woman, many people have a strong desire to hold on to fantasy bonds or imagined connections to parents and their symbolic substitutes that offer safety, yet at great cost to their personal development. To live like a child in an adult world is itself a defense against death anxiety (link is external).

In her story, the woman revealed how, in an attempt to preserve the illusory connection to her parents, she recreated her father in her husband and her mother in close women friends. She went on to describe why she held on to her identity of being “the bad child” for so many years.

To hang on to this old identity with all my might, for many years, was so compelling…why? All I can answer to this is remaining a child, although miserable, is farther away from the agony of aging and death. So the compelling draw is hard to let go of.

Of course, I still have my moments of childish reactions, but I’m learning to catch them, notice the almost physical feeling that comes on, and stop it before I engage. I will make mistakes, but I plan to forge forward as an adult, and search instead for equality. Nonetheless, this leaves me very alone. And the aloneness leaves me anxious, and sad…but it’s real. And life as an equal, although painful, is fuller. And I’m ready for the challenge.

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In summary, living in the child mode is largely chaotic and dysfunctional, whereas living one’s life as a adult is generally more adaptive and successful. Retaining a child’s frame of reference has numerous disadvantages: for example, people who operate from this perspective often find it difficult to formulate their goals and priorities in life and tend to feel helpless and victimized (link is external). They blame others for the problems they encounter rather than taking responsibility for how people react to them. In reality, people largely determine the course of their lives and determine the way that others respond. Lastly, reacting to life in a childlike manner can be quite emotional but often lacks a depth of genuine feeling.

Accepting the premise that living in the adult mode is obviously preferable, why is it that so many people function as children emotionally and stubbornly refuse to grow up? This question will be answered and the psychodynamics of the situation elaborated in part two of this blog.

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Why People Fear Growing Up and Functioning as Adults
There are five major aspects to the fear of growing up. Post published by Robert Firestone Ph.D. on Jul 01, 2013 in The Human Experience

In a previous blog, “6 Aspects of Being an Adult (link is external)," I briefly described the reasons why so many people operate as children emotionally and refuse to grow up. I discussed how, to varying degrees, individuals are restricted in their ability to function in an adult mode because of “unresolved childhood trauma and the defenses (link is external) they form to relieve emotional pain and existential dread.” In this blog, I explore the psychodynamics underlying the tendency to hold onto a child’s perspective despite the emotional turmoil, maladaptation and unhappiness it creates.

The principle barriers to living an adult existence are the fears associated with becoming adult. There are five major aspects to the fear of growing up:

1. Symbolic separation from parents and other individuals who have offered some sense of security. This occurs as we mature, form a new and different identity, choose our own path in life and establish new relationships. These types of separation experiences can arouse a sense of loss related and fear. When we are anxious or frightened, we tend to reconnect to dependency bonds. {Birthdays always created quote a lot of nameless existential dread and loneliness in me}

2. Preference for fantasy as a defense mechanism over reality considerations. Painful events in childhood often lead to suppression, dissociation and varying degrees of retreat into fantasy processes. These habit patterns become addictive and long lasting.

3. The threat of feeling one’s aloneness. Knowing ourselves as independent, authentic adults makes us acutely aware of painful existential issues. In addition, there is a fear of being different or standing out from the crowd. This is related to the primitive evolutionarily based threat of being separated or ostracized from the tribe, which is emotionally equivalent to being left to die.

4. Adults have more responsibilities for self and others. In general, adults carry a heavier dependency load, as they are looked to for direction, support and actual parenting. This makes them more cognizant of the fact that their own unresolved dependency needs from childhood will remain unfulfilled. {Taking Dąbrowski's view, being aware of these things is a blessing. As such, taking responsibility for yourself and others can be the fuel for growth.}

5. Death anxiety. Death fears (link is external) are triggered by both negative and positive events. As people sense time passing, are confronted with sickness, frustrations in life and reminders of death, they fear about their mortality. Paradoxically, as men and women give special value to their lives, experience unusual successes, and find new and unique gratifications, they tend to suffer more death anxiety. The more we value life, the more we have to lose in death. {Which brings us back to Love as quoted above}

Generally speaking, most people retreat from being fully alive adults in order to avoid reawakening the unconscious, as well as conscious, feelings of terror surrounding death. Indeed, systematic research indicates that people respond to the fear of personal mortality at a subliminal level yet modify their lives accordingly, often without any awareness of their death anxiety.

Sometime between the ages of 3 and 7, children first realize the fact that they will eventually die. They handle this crisis by repressing the loneliness (link is external), hopelessness, rage and terror surrounding the evolving awareness of their finite existence. They institute numerous defenses (link is external) to surpress and deny the reality of death and form fantasies of fusion (link is external) in an effort to insure that the unconscious pain and dread will not resurface. Once the child suppresses the fear of death, certain events in life arouse or intensify it, whereas other circumstances and defenses relieve it. The defenses that ameliorate or quiet death anxiety act as a major interference to becoming an authentic adult.
{One of my reoccurring dreams from those years where that of my own death}

Defenses that reduce death anxiety but act as a barrier to personal growth and maturity.

The Fantasy Bond (link is external): The core defense is the fantasy bond, originally an imagined connection with one’s parents, that offers a modicum of safety and security. Early in life, children form this illusion to compensate for personal trauma, i.e. to reduce feelings of emotional hunger (link is external) and frustration brought about by deprivation, rejection, separation and loss. Later, these same fantasy connections are transferred to new relationships, groups and causes. Because of this propensity to cling to unreasonable dependency ties, people tend to remain fixated at a child’s level of functioning. They project negative aspects of the attachment (link is external)with their parents onto current situations often recreating their early trauma in the present day. The extent to which people come to rely on fantasies of fusion while reliving the past is proportional to the degree of psychological pain they experienced in childhood. People excessively involved in fantasy bonds tend to be overly dependent on others, progressively maladaptive and fail to function successfully as adults.

Under conditions of stress, when parents are largely mis-attuned or punitive, children cease identifying with themselves as the helpless child, identify with the powerful, punishing parent and take on those negative traits as their own. In other words, they incorporate their parents at their worst not as they are typically, and find safety in thinking, acting and feeling like their parents. To preserve this imagined connection, one must retain a sense of sameness and avoid differentiation (link is external). People feel frightened to both move away from the merged identity with their parents and to break with any negative identity (link is external) they acquired in their families.

During this process of incorporation, when children feel overwhelmed by fear, they fragment into both the parent and the child. As they grow older, they continue to treat themselves much as they were treated, both nourishing and punishing themselves in the same manner their parents did. The result is that people tend to vacillate between the parental and childish state, both of which are immature. Consequently, they spend only a small por­tion of their time in the adult mode.
{Here we can see the 'negative introject' and taking on negative/narcissistic programming from parents and society}

Literal and symbolic denial of death: The fear of death drives people to form belief systems and worldviews that deny existential realities by offering literal or symbolic immortality. In Beyond Death Anxiety: Achieving Life-Affirming Death Awareness (link is external), I described literal immortality as manifested “in beliefs in an after-life or reincarnation, which have a calming effect on unconscious death anxiety.” People who approach life from a child’s perspective often extend the fantasized connection with their all-powerful parents to various religious belief systems and share with fellow believers the magical conclusion that there is a God in the heavens acting as a parental figure who rewards and punishes them. They are truly God’s children.
{Authoritarian followers and those raised in atheist families suddenly 'finding god'?}

Symbolic immortality is manifested in the imagination that one can live on through one’s works, through the accumulation of power and wealth, or through one’s children. However, children are capable of relieving their parents’ death anxiety only if they make similar choices, entertain the same political and religious beliefs, and exhibit similar personality traits. Many parents attempt to defend themselves by molding a child in their image, insisting on sameness and discouraging their child’s unique interests and goals.

Vanity:{Narcissism and ego defined 'self-esteem'} People who exist in a child mode often possess an exaggerated positive image of themselves in certain areas. This sense of being special offers a kind of magical thinking that denies their vulnerability to death. On an unconscious level, they believe that death happens to someone else, never to them. They retain an image of invincibility and omnipotence, which served as a survival mechanism in early childhood, and utilize it whenever they become anxious regarding their mortality. The trouble is that vanity and narcissism (link is external)set people up for painful experiences of disillusionment and rejection. Attempting to maintain a superior image causes them a good deal of unnecessary stress and anxiety. {Disillusionment and anxiety are excellent fuels for Positive Disintegration}

Preoccupation with trivial issues and problems: The certainty of death can lead to a basic paranoia that many people project onto other aspects of life that do not warrant an intense reaction of helplessness and powerlessness. People distract themselves with everyday problems and trivial events to which they over react with anger, fear and panic. When preoccupied in this way, they are able to shut out feelings about life and death concerns but at the expense of feeling childish and powerless. {I think that sums up society and the 'war on of terror'}

Microsuicide:{I wonder if this is what causes 'essence to die', as described by G that some people are hollow and dead inside} Microsuicide refers to a myriad of defenses that interfere with the attainment of emotional maturity by accommodating to death anxiety through attacking or limiting oneself. In trying to exert control over their fate, people narrow their experience and gratification thereby giving up important aspects of living, including meaningful relationships, mature sexuality and significant priorities and goals. In retaining attitudes of progressive self-denial and self-hatred (link is external)along with maintaining addictions (link is external), dangerous risk-taking behaviors and other self-defeating habit patterns, people shut out pain and create a false sense of omnipotence with respect to the reality of death. By diminishing their lives, they have less to lose in dying. However, in their retreat, they tend to experience painful feelings of existential guilt about their self-betrayal and feel regret for a life not fully lived.
{Pause an ask yourself: How do I limit myself? How do I beat down or diminish my existence?}

In Conclusion

Fear, especially the fear of death, constitutes the ultimate resistance to a fulfilling and successful life. Living as mature adults with a minimum of the defenses described in this blog, leaves people acutely aware of their aloneness and of the uncertainty and ambiguity of life. At the same time, it offers virtually unlimited possibilities for personal gratification and self-expression, and is well worth fighting for.

People can aspire to developing a mature approach to life and move toward a more satisfying and freer existence. This subject will be addressed in my next blog.

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How to Become More Adult and Successful in Your Life
Fear is the primary enemy to becoming an adult. Psychological defenses that are limiting and to some extent dysfunctional are strengthened and intensified when people become anxious. Yet anxiety states are often reacted to subliminally and defenses are instituted and affect our behavior without conscious awareness. In that sense, you cannot approach your fear directly; however, you can address the problem of being an adult by recognizing and challenging defenses and altering childish behavior patterns. Besides, people can become alert to situations and personal interactions that trigger their fear of growing up and can take control over negative actions that relieve or quiet the fear. In this blog, I address key issues that are significantly helpful in maintaining an adult posture in life.

Learn how you are childish and challenge a passive-dependent orientation.

Identify behaviors that are symptomatic of the child mode and change them by adopting more adult responses. Among the more straightforward, easily identifiable childish behaviors are sulking, whining, complaining, manipulating to get sympathy, continually seeking direction, acting in a disor­ganized, incompetent and irresponsible manner, procrastinating, habitual lateness, driving recklessly, carelessness and slovenliness and being neglectful in relation to one’s health.
In addition, it is important to challenge feelings of inferiority, submissiveness and a passive-dependent orientation in relation to authority figures, friends and loved ones. By holding on to parental substitutes and continuing to depend excessively on others by acquiescing to their wants, needs and points of view, it is evident that you will remain a child. It is also important to recognize when you are being defiant or rebellious in your responses and strive to take a more rational adult position. Submission and defiance are equally childish; both are outer directed and tend to elicit pa­rental responses of either approval or disapproval.

Take power over your life.

Anything under conscious control can be changed deliberately. People can consciously change negative character traits, destructive habit patterns and addictions. Only thoughts and feelings are automatic; they can only be understood and changed indirectly through insight into unconscious phenomena. One method is to look for discrepancies between your actions and your stated goals; these contradictions are often caused by unconscious or partly conscious “critical inner voices.” By bringing these voices into conscious awareness and recognizing how they are influencing your behavior, you can change behaviors that are dictated by the internal negative thought process and gain insight into areas of your life where you have difficulty maintaining an adult perspective.

The “critical inner voice” is made up of a system of negative thoughts, beliefs and attitudes toward oneself and others that predispose varying degrees of alienation. The voice can be harsh, punishing and demeaning, or seemingly positive, self-protective and indulgent. It strongly influences the acting out of self-defeating microsuicidal behaviors that adversely effect one’s life. The voice represents the internalization of parents’ rejecting, negative attitudes or actual hostility toward the child, as well as their maladaptive point of view about life. A person can learn to identify their self-attacks, recognize their source, estimate their effect on their behavior and counter them by taking constructive action. I have developed systematic Voice Therapy procedures to help clients with this negative process that effectively improves their lives. If you are in trouble psychologically or merely wish to further develop yourself, I strongly recommend seeking out a personal psychotherapy experience. It will offer a unique opportunity to understand yourself and expand your life.

Observe your emotions, but govern your actions by rationality. Your choice of actions should further your best interests and goals and fit your moral considerations.

People are capable of acting rationally in spite of strong feeling reactions. This works most efficiently when they observe and regulate their emotional responses and identify the primal elements in their reactions. Primal feelings are typically intense and dramatic, and there is an urgency to express them. These powerful feelings represent a reliving of emotions you suffered in childhood. Being aware of primal components in your feelings helps diminish their intensity and defuses melodrama and overreactions.

Taking time to reflect on your emotions {see the Dialectic Toolset} and considering the consequences of your actions fosters a rational approach to problem solving.

It is particularly important to learn to accept angry emotions. Anger is a normal reaction to frustration that is proportional to the degree of frustration experienced. Anger, like all feelings, must be allowed free reign in consciousness, while the acting out of anger must be subject to both ethical and reality considerations. Incidentally, angry feelings can be a source of energy and vitality when they are under your control.

Don’t blame others for your failures or rejections. You create your own world.

Refrain from blaming other people or circumstances for your mistakes, failures or rejections. People are largely unaware of the degree that they are responsible for the situations that they face in life. For example, we recreate the world of our childhood through our selection of partners, in the way we actually distort them and finally in the way we provoke them.

Recognize that perceiving others as responsible for your problems is immature and maladaptive. In actuality, you create your own circumstances, so you can be active in changing them. Furthermore, when things go wrong, it serves no purpose to attack or punish yourself as well. With the right attitude, you can simply learn from negative experiences and handle things differently. Be more accepting of your mistakes, because if you believe that you dare not fail, then you cannot act. People are paralyzed by insisting on perfection and end up berating themselves and others for their failures.

Don’t be defensive; seek out feedback, particularly criticism, and respond accordingly.

It is valuable to seek objective criticism. Honestly‑stated critical percep­tions of you are actually gifts that can contribute to your self-knowledge and understanding. You are fortunate to find out the truth about yourself, even if it is negative. In a relationship, refrain from reacting to feedback by attacking your partner, crying or falling apart, punishing with the silent treatment or “stonewalling.” These are childish responses that effectively silence the other person and gradually lead to a shutting down of lines of communication within couples. Instead, look for the truth in any information you hear that is negative, even though your knee-jerk reaction may understandably be one of anger or embarrassment. Carefully consider or explore feedback rather than reject it summarily, then decide which aspects of the feedback you agree or disagree with, and respond from an adult perspective.

Develop goals, both personal and transcendent, and live by them with integrity. {See Dąbrowski's Positive Disintegration}

An important aspect of being an adult involves envisioning goals that express your unique identity and interests, and then taking the actions necessary to achieve these goals. Actively strive and compete for your objectives, both personal and vocational, rather than seeking satisfaction in fantasy. Make a concerted effort to maintain personal integrity in your life by insisting that your actions correspond to your words.
Investing energy in transcendent goals and activities that extend beyond one’s self interest, for example, contributing to a humanitarian cause or trying, in some way, to improve the lot of future generations, helps build self-esteem. In a certain sense, it is selfish to be generous and giving, and it is a sound mental health approach.

Become aware of your defenses and challenge them.

Psychological defenses that protected you from painful feelings as a child are now dysfunctional, restrictive of your life and interfere with your developing a mature, adult perspective. It is important to challenge the methods you still use to protect yourself from pain and anxiety. Be especially aware of reliance on fantasy, additive patterns and actual addictions.

In a very real sense, it is safer to be vulnerable and open in relationships. Adults, unlike children, can cope with the possibility of rejection and loss; they are not dependent on others for maintaining their lives. {Context is important here though. Knowledge of psychopaths and narcissism in yourself and others is critical. Perhaps your way of not being an adult is to seek submissive or exciting relationships - i.e. attraction to abusers} Besides, remaining defended tends to guarantee negative outcomes or failure in developing close, satisfying and loving relationships. Beware of forming fantasy bonds or illusions of connection with your partner; although they may reduce anxiety and offer a sense of security, they limit your ability to love or accept real love in your life. Utilizing others for safety or as a defense against one’s sense of aloneness and existential pain seriously interferes with genuine relating.

Cope with the fear of death.

Latent or actual death anxiety acts as a core resistance to adult development. In Beyond Death Anxiety: Achieving Life-Affirming Death Awareness, I wrote, “Facing issues of mortality can imbue life with a special meaning in relation to its finality and heighten an awareness of the preciousness of each moment…” When death fears surface in the course of everyday life, you can face up to the realization of your personal mortality, identify the accompanying emotions of fear, sadness and rage, and find a way to communicate your thoughts and feelings to those people you trust.

Focus your attention on living fully in the present rather than imagining the future. Death is not happening to you now, and it serves no purpose to dwell on the fact that you are going to die someday, or to rehearse or ruminate about the anguish of how you might feel at that time. Actually, it is counterproductive to anticipate and pre-live negative outcomes of any kind. It causes unnecessary pain and suffering and arouses debilitating voice attacks. It requires courage to remain in the present and to live fully despite your finite existence. Living in an adult mode involves remaining vulnerable to both the joy and sadness inherent in the human condition. {And we are right back to the Dialectic Toolset - facing the dialectic of joy and sadness. And in a Work context using that friction as fuel for growth.}

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