As children, we believe that we have the magical powers to change all that is wrong with our world. We need to believe that we can control our destiny in order to emotionally survive.  For example, we may have been raised by parents who were emotionally unavailable.  They lacked the capacity to be nurturing, supportive and affirming.  As a way of coping, we “performed to please,” trying every means in our arsenal to make our parents feel happy while striving to get our own needs met.  When our efforts failed in getting our needs satisfied, we turned our feelings inward and mistakenly arrived at the interpretation that somehow we were the ones who were defective, not our parents.  By turning our frustration within, we unknowingly minimized the pain that resulted from dealing with them.

As children, we turn to self-blame as a way of coping and grip tightly to the illusion that our parents will someday morph and become the loving people that we longed for.  As we transition to adulthood, many of us maintain this faulty, idealized interpretation about parental expectations.  We believe that those who care for us should eventually understand and learn to be there for us.  However, during adulthood we keep striving, pleasing, pursuing, performing, and fixing in order to fulfill the fantasy of what we want from others, including our parents.  By taking the responsibility for our parents’ failures, we let them off the hook and minimize the emotional pain connected to how they treat us.

Young children count on the soothing of comfort and safety.  They move toward that which promotes security.  Kids may mimic behavioral patterns established by their parents.  The lack of safety and a stable support system can make kids feel insecure in the midst of a chaotic world.  As they reach adulthood, they continue to search for the validation, nurturing and comfort which was lacking from their childhood experience.

Inevitably, if we are to develop and change as adults, we need to start making conscious what we have hidden in order to transcend our childhood pain.  We must begin to confront the challenges, paradoxes, problems and difficult realities that are part of adult experience.  We move into uncharted waters that present us with risks and uncomfortable feelings.  No one has prepared us for this “wilderness experience.”  This is the “groan zone,”a place where we struggle to learn and apply new skills for living.  It is our journey to flush out and grieve what didn’t work from our childhood and to establish more independent ways of behaving.

No one likes to feel the angst that accompanies change and growth, but the option is to remain stagnant, holding onto archaic childhood assumptions which block us from the freedom to establish a more meaningful lifestyle.  Worn-out childhood interpretations foster avoidance and impede everything that opens us up to a new level of consciousness.  In order to leave our childhood behind, we must first come to terms with the twin killers of personal progress - laziness and fear.  Everyone must go it alone.  We must wade into the waters of change in spite of the prospects of terror.  No one is immune from the vulnerabilities associated with fear and inertia.  As psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp once said, we all need to learn to be a “do-it-on-your-own-cause-there’s-no-one-else-to-do-it-for-you-grown up.”

James P. Krehbiel, Ed.S., LPC, CCBT is an author, freelance writer and nationally certified cognitive-behavioral therapist practicing in Scottsdale, Arizona.  His personal growth book, Stepping Out of the Bubble is available at www.booklocker.com. James can be reached at www.krehbielcounseling.com.