The growing pains

ADOLESCENCE is about becoming adult, about leaving behind childhood dependence, about learning to stand on your own and take responsibility for your self and for your feelings, thoughts, dreams and actions. It is about letting go of blaming parents, teachers and society for how you feel, and it is about seeking the support and means to become your own person.

Adolescence is also about looking within to see what fears, anxieties, doubts and insecurities you are carrying from childhood, and becoming determined to bring to consciousness the immense power you have to be independent, separate and to live your own life.

Young people who achieve, or are on the way to attaining, such self-belief and self-responsibility are the future bedrock of a mature society, but, sadly, growing up sounds easy on paper. How many of us — teenagers and adults — really grow up?

Becoming emotionally mature has nothing to do with age, gender, role, status, education or success. The truth of this has become glaringly obvious over the last decade. Indeed, any person who is relentlessly driven to find outer validation through social, occupational, familial, political or religious position is likely to possess unconscious and unresolved emotional complexes.

The Hindu scriptures remind us of the dangers of living someone else’s life, rather than your own: “It is better to do your own duty badly than to perfectly do another’s: you are safe from harm when you do what you should be doing.”

Growing up is difficult, particularly when the adults (who parent, teach, mentor, or are idols for young people) have not grown up themselves. I have said it many times that the future of society depends on the maturity achieved by the adults who rear, educate and guide children and teenagers. It is challenging for young people to withstand the defensive actions of the significant adults in their lives. Regrettably, it is not integral to the preparation of adults, who parent or teach or manage or lead, to examine their own lives before they dare take on responsibility for others.

Where are the political leaders who will bite the bullet on the well-established fact that personal effectiveness determines professional effectiveness? The key professionals in our society are parents, teachers and politicians and not the economists, the unquestioned ‘deities’ who have come to dominate our culture.

Growing up primarily means taking psychological and spiritual responsibility for ourselves — the more common and popular social and economic responsibilities naturally flow from these. The ultimate test of the family is the degree that offspring leave-take the family — fly the nest — and return freely as more realised persons. Sometimes, the leave-taking that is best done in young adulthood takes place at a later time in adulthood — but better late than never.

I have worked with many men and women who eventually came to the decision to leave marriages wherein they had been reliving their childhood traumas — this only after their spouses had aggressively refused to pursue either personal or marital counselling.

Other leave-takings that may happen later on in adulthood are of the imposed unlived lives of parents, or of societal values that entrap or are illusional, or of roles and expectations that constrict personal and spiritual growth.

Socrates exclaimed 2,600 years ago: “Citizens of Athens, aren’t you ashamed to care so much about making all the money you can and advancing your reputation and prestige, while for truth and wisdom, and the improvement of your souls, you have no thought or care?”

It is the case that the majority of people attempt to find their security through money, prestige, reputation and dependence on others for approval and acceptance and, unconsciously, avoid life’s larger possibilities. If the dependent ambitions of youth, many of which young adults do achieve, truly served the soul, there would be a lot more healthy, happy and mature people. Among adults there would not be so much divorce, so many substance addictions and so much anti-depressant prescriptions.

There is a world of infinite scope and mystery beyond our roles and as we grow older the need to dis-identify from imposed roles becomes more urgent

Meaning is ultimately found through a feeling of rightness within. No person can give that to us, although, from places of fear, we can allow others to take it away from us.

* Dr Tony Humphreys is a consultant clinical psychologist, NUI courses director, author and national and international speaker. www.tonyhumphreys.ie