Oh, Grow up!! by Mary Simon

Have you ever been told this – or had the urge to say it to someone else? It turns out there may be a very valid reason for this common complaint!!! Most of us are not entirely grown-up in at least some aspects of our functioning. In fact, most of our “problems in daily living”, as well as more serious dysfunctions, can be understood in the context of not being fully “grown-up” emotionally.

In this article, I will help you understand the parts of each of us that are not fully grown-up and that get in the way of our living happy lives and having healthy relationships. I will also describe for you what “grown-up” or Adult functioning looks like. Later articles will describe more in detail how to move from the less mature patterns we all have into more Adult functioning.

What we’re going to talk about first is a way of understanding several different levels of processing and responding. Each of these levels of processing and responding becomes possible at different stages of our life. We will look at four stages of this development. We call them the ego states of Natural Child, Wounded Child, Adapted Child and Functional Adult.

Neurobiologists tell us that these ego states are actually “engrained neural networks”. They find that “neurons that fire together, wire together”. That means that whole sets of perceptions, physiological reactions, emotions, beliefs and behaviors that have occurred together either repeatedly or under very traumatic conditions can get “wired together”. So, when something in our current life triggers one of these neurons to fire, the whole network tends to kick in. It’s like someone turns on an “automatic pilot”.

The problem is that many of these networks developed when we were very young and so move us into thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are typical of a much younger stage in our life. They were “age-appropriate” then and helped us to protect ourselves and survive when we had few options and very little power. Most of our problems in our current lives occur when we move into these neural patterns and do the “same old, same old”! The issue is not that we are bad or stupid but that we are thinking, feeling and acting “young”.

Some of these patterns are so engrained and commonly activated that others often think of as our personality – Joe, Susan, etc. We may also identify with these patterns as “who I am.” It’s important to be aware of these patterns, to understand what triggers them and to evaluate how they work - or don’t work - for ourselves and for our relationships. Then we can begin to make conscious choices about the ways we process and respond to our environment. Doing this work enables you to live happily within yourself and to build healthy relationships with others.

To keep it simple, we’ll look at just four different ego states – each of which is most likely made up of a number of different, but inter-related neural networks. To help you understand the concepts, I will include a picture with each of the descriptions.

How we come into life as infants is what we call our Natural Child – a bundle of needs and feelings, potential abilities and ways of responding. We are valuable and precious, open and ready to connect. We are also totally vulnerable and spontaneous, “in the moment” without the ability to reflect. This Natural Child part of us persists through life. It is the source of our energy, our unique abilities and contributions to the world. It is, however, always vulnerable and needs nurturing and protection in order to be free to be his/her best self. Invariably in the process of growing up in this imperfect world, our needs don’t always get met, painful things happen AND, because we are so vulnerable, this is painful to us. So this Natural Child ends up feeling wounded in certain ways.

The most painful part of this wounding for a young child is caused by the only mode of processing experience that is available to the young mind. Since very young children experience themselves as “the center of the Universe”, they subconsciously believe that everything that happens is “because of something about me.” So, when our needs are not met or we are treated badly, we develop a belief about ourselves, e.g. I am not lovable, I am not good enough, I don’t deserve …, I don’t matter. These negative beliefs about oneself are essentially what we mean by childhood “wounds”. Consciously or unconsciously, we carry them with us unless or until we are able to change and/or “heal” them.

Along about the time we are 3-5 y.o., instead of being pretty much the “center of the Universe”, we begin to live as social beings. We become aware that there are other real people in the world and that we want and need to figure out how to live with them. Our Child, now somewhat wounded, develops a Social aspect. At this point it seems we also become aware of what’s not working for us in relating to these others. It’s as if we say to ourselves, “Wait a minute! I’m getting hurt here. I’m not getting what I need. What can I do to protect myself and get more of what I need?” So we begin to develop ways of adapting to our social environment. We call this part of ourselves the Adapted Child.

The patterns we develop will be influenced by our own natural inclinations and abilities as well as by what works in the particular family in which we find ourselves. This part of us does whatever works for us to protect our vulnerable part from being hurt and to get as much as possible of what we need and want from the people around us. Because this part of us is concerned with how to survive – both physically and psychologically – it uses a great deal of our available energy. I guess you could say it is a very powerfully engrained neural network. I like to say it’s our default “auto-pilot”.

This pattern of adaptation is what’s often called our “personality”. We tend to believe “this is who I am” when it’s most often more a result of the ways I constricted and distorted my “real self” in the effort to survive and get along in the social environments in which I grew up.

I know that I learned to adapt by trying to be very good, work hard and do things “perfectly.” I over-developed my “doing” part and, in some ways this has served me very well. However, I often ended up over-working, being “super-responsible” and feeling resentful. AND I constricted my warm, loving, connecting parts and lost the ability to play and have fun. It’s taken a lot of consciousness to bring these parts into balance. And I can still slip back into the old “auto-pilot” under stress. I’d like to ask you to take a minute to think about what worked for you when you were growing up. How did you get approval and try to protect yourself?

Because it’s a 5 y.o.’s version of what an adult would look like, this Adapted Child ego state often looks grown-up but it’s rigid and compulsive and has just a few options for ways to behave. Sad to say, most people operate much of the time, emotionally, from this 5 y.o. self. While our 5 y.o. may use a lot of adult information to justify and defend our behavior, it’s not really adult.

In an ideal world, we would all have had grown-ups around us who were able to provide us the nurturing and protection we needed and model how to take better care of ourselves as we grew older. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, most supposed adults operate from a 5-10 y.o. Adapted Child ego state much of the time. So that’s the best picture most of us got of how to be a Adult. So, for us as a culture, this is a “New Frontier” for Adult development.

Therefore, most of us are faced with the task of developing a strong Functional Adult state that can more effective and kinder job of nurturing and protecting our vulnerable Child than our 5 y.o. can.

You might be asking, “So what is that, what does an Adult ego state look/feel like?”

An overall concept that is central to being Adult is that of RESPECT. In an Adult state, I am respectful of my own and others’ intrinsic value, of each person’s right to personal safe space, and of each of our needs, thoughts, feelings and perception of “reality”. Any time I am not speaking and acting respectfully towards myself and others, I am not coming from Adult.

In addition, when I am not being respectful, I am most certainly not being loving! As Pia Melody likes to say, “Respect is the MINIMUM of love.” How contradictory it is that we so often are least likely to be respectful towards those that we say we love!

So the goal in Growing Yourself Up is to learn ways to move out of reactive (Wounded or Adapted Child) behaviors that are disrespectful of yourself and/or others so that you can develop truly loving relationships with yourself and others. This allows the Natural Child the energy to heal (change those negative self-beliefs) and grow, create and play. It also allows the Adapted (Social) Child to stop trying to do the grown-up job of taking care of the young Child and instead to use its energy to learn to “play well with others”.