Recovering From Childhood

Little kids sometimes notice how ‘stupid’ grown-ups are.  Grown-ups get into fights with their friends and go days and days and days without talking to them.  Grown-ups worry about lots of stuff that they don’t have to.  Grown-ups are scared of stuff that really can’t hurt them.  Grown-ups get embarrassed of stuff that is just plain funny.  To kids, sometimes grown-ups make no sense and sometimes kids even feel kinda sorry for them.

That feeling can be amplified during the teenage years.  Teens start to try to determine the motives that adults have for doing the ‘stupid’ things they do and they find that, in many cases, there just doesn’t seem to be a good motive.  To teens, adults appear motivated by fear, anger, shame, guilt, depression, pain, longing, or false hope.

Teens start to notice that the dysfunctional behavior of adults is not only harmful to the adults themselves, but also harmful to countless nearby others – their children, their spouses, their parents, co-workers, and so on.

That’s one of the reasons that some teens get so angry.  That’s one of the main reasons that teens argue with adults.  They still have a very pure sense of right and wrong and they think, “How dare you?”  They think, “You adults have everything and we kids have nothing, and you’re misusing everything you have.”  Adults have money, jobs, power, cars, houses, fishing licenses, jet skis, health club memberships, motorcycles, college degrees, children, cable TV, dishwashers, dogs, cats, and parrots, and yet, they spend their lives stressed out, crabby, angry, and fearful.

They are miserable and they pass that misery down to the teens.  So teens frequently wrap themselves up in that misery and live it themselves – especially when the parents are so busy that they don’t even have time to be miserable for themselves.

Teens paint their nails black, wear frightening make-up, color their hair shocking colors, put metal in their face or tongue or belly and they listen to appalling music.  They do drugs, break into cars, and get into fist fights.  These are all ways that they try to cope with the misery the adults put on them.  They can easily spend the next 2-20 years miserable, destroying their lives, all the while having no clue why they are doing it.

They make bad choice after bad choice after bad choice and suffer some immediate consequences.  They do some things that have irreversible lifelong consequences.  They keep on going until they hit whatever will turn out to be their all-time low, then they finally start to crawl out from underneath what the grown-ups had put on them.

The grown-ups put their junk on their kids, and the kids, not knowing any better, just take it.  They take it and they walk around with it for years and years and years.  It’s not until they recognize that the baggage isn’t theirs that they can put it down.  However, the good news is that they can put it down.  They can just put it down and walk away from it.  Whew, what a relief!

At that point, young adults must get busy repairing the damage, reparenting themselves, healing those childhood wounds.  They look around and find that all the ‘grown-ups’ of their childhood are now in their 50’s or 60’s and have finally figured some of it out.  The older generation realizes that some of what they did was wrong and they are routinely sorry for it.

They are finally able to explain why they had done what they had done and the explanation is usually quite simple – they were carrying the baggage their own parents had put on them and it had taken them the same 30-40 years to get out from underneath it.  The problem with this scenario is that each generation typically reproduces and raises their children to adulthood before they really figure it all out, so the patterns manage to get repeated over and over and over, each successive generation.

This is where the important concept of grandparents comes in.  Grandparents are just parents who have finally figured it out.  They’re the same people that wounded their own kids and they’re the same people that put their own baggage and issues on their children, but they’re old enough to have finally figured it out.  We need to let our own parents help us raise our children.

One of the reasons we sometimes don’t let that happen is because we were so wounded by them and we fear that they will wound our children in the same way, so we seek to keep our children away from them.

Well, unless they are truly evil people, which is rare, that logic is flawed.  Instead, your own parents are in a much better position to positively influence your children than you are.  They’ve made the mistakes – on you – and they’ve probably figured a good many of them out by now and won’t repeat those mistakes on your kids.  What you must do is to actively work on recovering from their parenting if it was damaging.  Go to therapy, get a life coach, read self-help books, go to church - whatever you find helpful to recover from your childhood.

But we generally don’t.  Instead, we buy houses and cars and jet skis and RV’s and time-shares in Mexico and trips to Hawaii and we just try to forget.  We vow we’ll never do things the way our parents did and we strive to do exactly the opposite.

This generally works to avoid the mistakes our parents made.  However, all it really does is assure that we mess our kids up in totally new and creative ways that are merely different from how our parents messed us up, but, unfortunately, no less messed up.

As hard as it is to do the work of marriage, it’s equally hard to do the work of parenting and to understand that an important part of parenting your own children is to do the work you need to do in order to heal from your own childhood and reconnect in a loving way with your own parents.

No matter how messed up they were, they probably loved you and gave you some good qualities and good experiences and hopefully, after all this time, they’ve learned a whole lot about life and about themselves and they can truly be someone to your children that they could never have been to you – and that you cannot be for your own children.

We need to let grandparents do that for children, be the loving caregivers that they could not be two decades ago.  Sometimes that’s the only thing that can allow your little children to hang onto themselves - their self-esteem, their truth, their heart.

Marlo J. Archer, Ph.D
Licensed Psychologist
1250 E. Baseline Rd.
Suite 102
Tempe, AZ 85283
480-705-5007
www.DrMarlo.com