Sample

Introduction

‘I cannot tell the truth about anything
unless I confess being a student,
growing and learning something new every day.
The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes.’
– Sonia Sanchez

Although we talk about growing up, in fact, apart from growing to your full height, you do not grow up; you just become more of who you are. Up is not a place where growing comes to an end, where you are all complete and perfect. Growing is a life-long process. However, for the purposes of this book, I use the term ‘grown up’ as the dictionary defines it, to mean adult, or mature, although some adults are more mature than others. I also use it to describe a feeling and a temporary, but recurring, state of being.
That feeling of being grown up makes me happy. I feel real, at home with myself and glad to be me. I feel capable and, while I have that feeling, complete. I have a sense of achievement. For me, maturity is a good feeling.
This book is my attempt to share these feelings with you, to explain to you that being grown up can be a joy. I want to share with you that part of my view of the world that has become clearer. I think, in many ways, being grown up has had bad press and maturity has not been given the respect it deserves. As a child, I got the impression that being an adult meant responsibility, which implied burden and hard work, and that meant suffering. I often heard ‘getting old’ used to explain tiredness, weakness and infirmity in older people.
At the same time, being grown up promised to be a magical state I would one day attain, when I would be able to do all the things I seemed to be unable or forbidden to do as a child. I was impatient to grow up. But I was also confused. For me, as an adult, growing up has been, and continues to be, a struggle at times, because of a lack of adequate models. I have had to find these models for myself and now hope to share them with you. I have learned that becoming grown up does not happen at any one time; it is an ongoing journey.
As I have worked as a psychotherapist with my clients, and with myself, for more than twenty-five years, I have come to understand that responsibility chosen carefully and taken on willingly brings freedom and fulfilment. I now know that our physical abilities do change as we get older, but this does not mean that illness and infirmity are necessary results of aging.
I have seen many people using models of dependency to manage the responsibilities of adulthood, and continuing to believe they are still as helpless as they were when they were children. I have also seen extreme models of independence, which I call pseudo-independence, that are both proud and defensive. In my experience, these models are unproductive and ultimately work against you. I have come to understand that they are used to fend off the feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy that come with dependency. Until I learned that, as an adult, I am not powerless, helpless or inadequate, I also felt these feelings. I learned, and am still learning, how to use my adult resources fully and effectively. I am still growing up.
I have seen how these models can be handed down through generations. However it is possible to create your own models for going further than what may have been the limitations of the previous generation, even if you have to make similar mistakes to them along the way. I find there are always new lessons to learn in life and new things to try. No parents or teachers could have taught you all you need to know anyway; and life would be so boring if they had. For me, part of the joy of growing up is experiencing it as it happens, at various stages of my life.
In this book, I explain how adult dependency and pseudo-independence keep you enmeshed in the past and burdened in the present. They also limit you in what you can expect in the future. With these models you age, but you are much less likely to mature.
This book is an attempt to show you how to enjoy the freedom that comes with true independence, which allows you to interdepend with others. As you grow, you gradually develop your resources, physical, emotional, intellectual, as well as spiritual; from the cutting of your first tooth, your first step, to the struggle for separation and independence, which reaches its peak at adolescence, stepping out into the world and earning your living; and then learning to live with other people, becoming sexually active, partnering and possibly raising your own children too. If your models for using your resources are immature and inappropriate to your current age, you find yourself failing in what you want to do. I aim to teach you simple, practical and workable skills, so you can enjoy using your resources more effectively.
In Part One I look at the processes of growing and changing. Then I attempt to identify, differentiate, clarify and illustrate dependence, which is natural and healthy and belongs in childhood; then independence, which is the healthy, gradual separation from childhood and the gaining of autonomy; and lastly interdependence, which is the sharing of this independence and autonomy through mutual support and exchange of resources. Thus dependence is used throughout to represent immature dependency and interdependence to mean mature dependability. Dependence, independence and interdependence are the stages I now believe you need to grow through before you can truly experience being grown up.
I use the word ‘immature’ to describe behaviour that more appropriately belongs in childhood, which is not grown up yet. I do not mean this as a judgement. Most of us use immature behaviour at times.
Part One will enable you to see not only where you can go, and how, but also where you have been in getting to where you are today. I explain why you might want to cling to dependency, compensating by overly asserting independence, yet avoiding maturity and responsibility. I also describe the disadvantages of adult dependency and also pseudo-independence, neither of which, in my experience, allows you to develop yourself completely. You will see what you sacrifice by remaining dependent and feigning independence. I hope you will be able to use my description of growth, change, dependence, independence and interdependence as a map to understand your process of growing.
In Part Two, I offer you what I see as the benefits of being grown up and explain how to use these as resources in your life now. By explaining what being grown up is, I will attempt to show you how to live in the present, understand the past and take practical steps to realise your dreams and visions in the future. It is my intention that the illustrations in this book give you models for maturity that enable you to make the transition from feelings of helplessness and inadequacy to feelings of personal power and integrity, demonstrating the many gifts, joys and advantages you can enjoy as a mature adult.
Having dealt with the practicalities, in Part Three, I address the spiritual implications of growth and potential and the urge towards wholeness, linking this to your self and your soul, and the child that you once were, to your relationship with your own divinity as a fragment of that divinity that is the whole you may understand as God, or the Universe.
Throughout this book, I share stories of how the pain of helplessness and dependency and the loneliness of pseudo-independence can be healed and how the transitions between dependence, independence and interdependence can be completed smoothly at any time. I have had the privilege of witnessing, supporting and facilitating the growing up processes of many people. These stories are a combination of some of their experiences. They also include my own experiences in learning how to grow beyond the age when the models available to me appeared to become redundant; ineffective in supporting a creative and fulfilling adult life.
My key to growing up joyfully, youthfully and effectively is to learn to manage change and live through uncertainty. I offer you tools to help you allow uncertainty, develop flexibility and face the future creatively, with more confidence and less anxiety.
I am not a great believer in theory that is not grounded in experience, which I value. I believe that our personal truth lies in what we experience and our experience comes from what we feel. No one can take this truth away from you, even though they, and you, out of necessity, may deny it. I believe that, ultimately, this truth is your authority, without which you cannot have integrity, both of which are essential elements of maturity.
It is my intention for you to use the ideas I put forward, gleaned from my own experience, as tools, rather than theories, to help you enjoy being fully mature. These ideas form the foundations on which this book is based and I will develop them gradually. I hope they will be useful to you.
I work with psychology because it gives me models for understanding what motivates us and makes us tick. I believe in rationality, in using intelligence and analytical ability, which are not fully present in childhood but develop with age and experience. Above all I see this development of logic and reasoning ability as a gift of adulthood, which is often under or misused. I also see it as being the greatest difference between being an adult and being a child. Even though many children would appear to reason more adequately than many adults, they usually do not have enough information available to them to come to adequate conclusions.
Lastly, a word about behaviour; in this book, I do urge you to change strategies that no longer work for you, which, of course, means changing behaviour. I explain how certain behaviours defeat you. However, in my experience, changing behaviour alone is ineffective; (it is a short-term measure only), if your current experience is being influenced by emotions that you were not able to acknowledge, manage or effectively express in the past, and decisions which are determined by the immature and distorted interpretation of those emotions. So, from time to time, I may suggest that you examine your motivations. Your early experiences may be colouring your interpretation of your present feelings and current experience. I will make suggestions for interpretations that are likely to be more appropriate to your present age and understanding and give you tools for channelling your emotions creatively, rather than destructively.

‘The important thing is this:
to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are
for what we could become.’
– Charles Du Bos

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