Adult Survivors of Childhood

A fellow came to see us who considered himself an adult. According to the story of his life, he had survived his painful childhood. But his interpretation of the childhood he had survived came from the distortions and misrepresentations of a child’s mind.

David had spent many years seeing different therapists and psychiatrists, examining his childhood as a way of explaining his adult failings; depression; and feelings of insufficiency, inadequacy, and insecurity. Touch on any aspect of his life and he had a string of chronological events dating back to his childhood to explain why he was the way he was. And most of these explanations pointed to his father as the reason for all of his faults. The traumatic incidents on his list of his father’s wrongdoings tripped off his tongue like a well-worn script. Everything that David considered a current failing was linked to this list and could be traced back to this familiar story.

When people are preoccupied with their internal conversations about their childhood, they become paralyzed and ineffective. Their lives become a series of investigations into why they act the way they do and what caused them to be "screwed up." There is a pitfall in rehashing one’s life. It is paradoxical:

On one hand, it is laudable to investigate those things that seem to inhibit productivity and well-being. But on the other hand, this same investigation can keep you lost in looking to blame something or someone outside yourself for how your life is showing up. When this is the case, then you will keep going back to thinking, "If I had a different family, then my life would be different, or If my parents didn’t get a divorce, then I wouldn’t have trouble in relationships."

There comes a point in each of our lives where there is an opportunity to actually take control. Taking command of your life requires putting both hands on the steering wheel and going forward. If you are addicted to looking at your past to determine your future, it is as though you are driving down the road looking in the rearview mirror to figure out what turns are coming up ahead. Then you wonder why your fenders are so dented by life. To take control, you have to let go of your past and be with what is rather than blame things on the history that came before.

What we are suggesting is that there is a possibility outside of the psychological interpretation in which your life is determined by pivotal events that happened in your childhood. If one chooses to use a psychological model, then those past pivotal moments determine one’s life. This means that there is no possibility to ever recover from those events.

There is available to humanity, at this point in time, a paradigm shift from cause and effect to "isness"—from a psychological paradigm where our lives are determined by events in our past to a transformational approach where things just are the way they are, not because of some prior event.

This is another example of the Second Principle of Instantaneous Transformation:

No two things can occupy the same space at the same time. You cannot be living your life directly if you are already preoccupied with figuring out why you are the way you are. You can either be actively engaged in your life or thinking about your life.

You cannot do both simultaneously. If you are living your life directly, you discover the possibility of true satisfaction and well-being, a sense of security and capability. As a result, you stop worrying about whether or not you are "doing it right," if other people would approve of you, or even if you would approve of yourself.