Our Vision of the Growth Path

What are the advantages of describing a growth path as moving from Adapted Child to a mature Adult state – in compari son to other, perhaps more familiar, ways of looking at change and growth? 

The first thing that comes to mind is that Adapted Child is synymous with the ways we learned to survive.   Survival is both a personal, individual issues and an issue for cultures and societies.  That is to say that individuals must learn how to adapt in order to survive in our families, culture and society.  At the same time, cultures and societies strive to survive in a world of inter-related, and sometimes competing, cultures and societies. 

The process of moving from and Adapted Child to a more mature Adult state both honors how we have learned to survive and exhorts us to move beyond our survival adaptations.  In order to function well in an increasingly relational and interdependent world, individuals, cultures and societies must be able to value both their own and others’ ways of being.  This is only possible when we can access the most mature, Adult capacities available to us as human beings. 

Thus, one of the advantages of describing a growth path in this way is that it enables us to see individual growth in the context of larger cultural and societal issues.

This is important because what we have classically and historically done for survival, both indivividually and culturally, now is destructive to the very  survival it was intended to ensure.  We now recognize that our old short-term survival strategies are most likely to lead to long-term extinction.  

Another advantage we see to this way of describing growth is that it combines a descriptive with a prescriptive ways of looking at this rich and complex subject.  More about this next time.

The Path of the Happy Misfit

is the title of our book.  In it we address a major crisis of our times.  At a time when the fate of the earth is in the hands of humans to a degree never seen before, we are stuck in a crisis of growth or development as a species.  If we continue down the path our culture  has been travelling, we, and the planet, are likely not to survive long enough for us to evolve further.  Therefore, we believe that being a misfit in our culture is necessary for meeting the challenges of our time.

In order to successfully take on the challenge of preserving the human race and the planet, we must call upon our highest capacities as human beings.  Unfortuately, our culture, and perhaps our species, has not yet evolved to the point of being able to support its members in achieving fully mature human functioning.  Therefore, we must learn to grow beyond the survival strategies that we have learned in our families and our culture. (more…)

We’re writing a book!

• After 35+ years of working together, we (Mary and John) have decided to write a book.  Now, at last, it seems time to do this.  We realize that we are a “good team” in many ways.  Without John, the visionary, we would never get started.  Without Mary,  the “closer”, we would never finish!
• Anyway, at first, we planned to call the book, Seeking Wisdom.   More recently, we have come up with the title, Happy Misfits: Living with Wisdom, Compassion and Kindness in a Troubled World – or something like that. 
• So, why write a book?  And, why is time?  We want to write a book because we think we have something important to say about our journey with psychotherapy as a pursuit of wisdom both for ourselves and for others. 
• We believe that our long collaboration, including the ways our lives and work have intertwined, illuminates the psychotherapeutic journey in ways that may be useful to others embarking  on this “wisdom path.” (more…)

The Future of Love

One of the most basic aspects of “growing up” is being able to be motivated more by love than by fear.  A life more and more based on love and not on fear is not without pain.  I think fear keeps us in “stuck pain” and love motivates us to experience “growing pain” when that is necessary. 

The Past of love, that for which we as mammals are hard-wired, is attachment love.  It is the love of parents for children that has enabled the human race to survive. 

The Present of love is most easily seen in the love between healthy, happy couples.  This is the adult form of attachment love.  At its best, it provides a secure base and safe haven for partners as well as for their children.  However, this love can only be achieved from an adult state.  When we operate from an Adapted Child state, we cannot be a safe haven for others.

The Future of love is in community, a sense of caring about “all of us”.  It includes the lessons learned from successful couple love and transcends the limitations of couple love.  It means extending love beyond the boundaries of couplehood while respecting these boundaries as well.

Growing Up #5

The Adapted Child, or survival, ego state is driven primarily by fear.  There are different levels at which this fear operates.  There can be fear of physical survival, not usually an issue in most of our lives.  There can be fear of the unknown or the “different”.  We can be afraid of not “fitting in,” being socially unacceptable.  We can be afraid of losing support from, or connection with, others.  We can be afraid of being seen as “less than” others, or of being shamed.

The Adapted Child state also tends to be able to see only two options – either you OR me, either us OR them, either right OR wrong, good OR bad – you get the point.  For this reason, all conflicts are viewed as “win/lose.”  It is very difficult to value and respect both myself AND others when I see everything in these terms.  Others’ wants, needs and ideas appear to be in competition with mine.  Fear can easily kick in – fear that, if they get what they want (win), I will, of course, lose; fear that, if they are “right”, I will be wrong.  And on it goes!

Growing Up #4

So why bother growing any further?  If we have got this far, we have figured out how to survive at least reasonably well in our culture and society.  To get this far is both a blessing and a curse.  It is important to figure out how to survive reasonably well.  Without our basic survival needs being met, we can’t even think about going further.

The curse part comes about because surviving reasonably well is a source of great comfort.  Comfortable people do not, as a rule, change and grow.  They don’t see any reason to change and grow.  So what motivates a person to grow when they are comfortable.  The answer, unfortunately, is usually PAIN!  And, survival existence, sooner or later, generates pain.  Fortunately, it is the kind of pain that the application of more survival skills usually won’t cure.

(more…)

Growing Up #3

What is not so commonly talked about, even in therapeutic circles, is the concept of an Adapted Child ego state.  This concept refers to the strategies we learned in our families and in our culture.  This part of us is primarily interested in survival and in “getting along.”  As children, we learned the skills and developed the internal structures that make this possible for us.

As we grow, these structures become part of our “personality”.   They may work well, or not so well, in our families, culture and society.  These adaptions or structures become “who we are”, a major part of our ego identity.  If they work well in the culture we live in, our ego identity and the culture are a “good fit.”  We will have little reason or motivation to question  this “fit”.

If our survival adaptations work poorly and we struggle to find our way in our culture, we may bump along barely making it.  Various forms of anti- or a-social behavior, addictions and other compulsive behaviors are examples of more destructive survival behaviors.

Here’s the thing – good fit, poor fit or bad fit – our survival adaptions, initially learned as small children, are usually characterologically hardened into place by the time we reach “adulthood.”  AND they are limited, constricted and distorted forms of who we would have been had we grown up in a perfect world that supported our being “all we can be” rather than required us to focus on survival.

While each of us learned different strategies to adapt and survive, the point is that this Adapted Child ego state is NOT the sum total of who we are, much less who we can be.   It is the furthest our family and our culture have been able to bring us on the journey to being fully alive.

Growing Up #2

Thanks to John Bradshaw, and a host of other writers, the concept of the Wounded Child (ego state) has become part of the consciousness of many people over the last twenty to thirty years.  As an individual recognizes and acknowledges their wounded child, their understanding of their own and others’ behavior increases dramatically.  This understanding has led to deeper compassion for the wounding and pain that so often drives the difficult, confusing and sometimes destructive behavior we experience in ourselves others. 

At worst, the recognition of our own and others’ wounded child can be used to excuse or justify bad behavior and provide a rationale for not behaving in a grown-up fashion.  “After all, what can you expect of me?  I had such a terrible childhood!”  Also, part of the resistance to growing up can be the attitude that, “Look, given the cards I was dealt as  child, I am doing the best that I can.”

In brief, while we recognize the importance of the concept of the wounded child, we also recognize that this concept has led, in some circles, to a backlash against psychotherapy.  The thinking is, “It’s better not to delve into one’s childhood and wallow there, making excuses for oneself.  It’s better to concentrate only on goal-setting for one’s future.”

What is not understood in this frame of reference is that, when’s one’s present life is contaminated by unresolved childhood issues and survival strategies, any attempts to construct a better future will be built on a faulty foundation and likely will be unsustainable.

 From this understanding and awareness psychotherapists have evolved methodologies for addressing and healing the wounded child in themselves and in their clients.

Why Bother Growing Up?

A major reason why growing up is unappealing and difficult for most adults is because what we mean by “growing up” is not clear.  Up until now, a conceptual framework for growing up as adults has not existed – at least, not one that is not incredibly complex and confusing.  Most adults assume that they are grown up – or at least as grown up as they are ever going to be.  They do not realize that they are spending a large part of their lives and their life energy in what we call an “Adapted Child” ego state or level of functioning.  In our work, we define growing up as understanding and moving out of Adapted Child into a Functional Adult ego state.

In our next post, we will begin by reviewing the more commonly understood concept of the Wounded Child and then explain its relationship to the crucial additional concepts of Adapted Child and Functional Adult.  An understanding of these simple, yet fundamental, concepts leads to a clarity that is currently lacking in our culture and our society about the nature of being a true grown-up.