… I will find someone who will take me under their wing and take care of me forever. I won’t have to make decisions myself. I will let them assign tasks and activities to me, and I will swear total loyalty and fulfilment of those activities.
I won’t communicate what it is that I really want.
Because I don’t believe that I can get it. Because I have made the experience in my childhood that I am not getting it. The love, the attention, the care which I needed and didn’t get.
So I won’t ask directly. I will try to become someone you want to take care of.
The promise I was making
This happens in relationships, but also at work. I will do what you want me to do, and you will give me money. I won’t tell you what it is that I really want to do, and I will accept the tasks given to me.
I silently promise compliance in exchange for care, while hiding what I actually want.
But my own wishes won’t disappear because I haven’t communicated them. I have agreed to something that I don’t really want to do.
Then I don’t fulfil what I promised. I put something off. I resist. I unconsciously sabotage it, because I don’t actually want to do what I agreed to. But I don’t clearly say that either.
I get confused about what I really want and don’t want, and I confuse you too, so you don’t understand what is happening or how to move forward.
I am still trying to be the person who does what you want. And something in me is refusing.
What I discovered
What changed something for me was the realisation that it is a structure. A rather insidious structure, because part of it is not wanting to perceive the clarity of what we actually want.
This structure keeps us from perceiving the very things that would allow us to recognise it and leave it: our wishes, our anger, and our clarity.
My anger would let me recognise that I disagree. My wishes would give me a direction. Clarity would require me to say something that might disturb the arrangement.
Instead, I remain occupied with my confusion.
I explore the mechanism and its collective consequences in the accompanying article, Staying harmless through confusion.
Finding the way out
I am noticing that part which wants to be taken care of and just can’t get enough. Which takes over everything, trying to receive what it didn’t get. It kidnaps our relationships and our creative power.
The child occupies the driving seat while the adult position remains unoccupied.
From that inner child perspective, I have oh so many reasons for not wanting to grow up. Because, for example, you know, I couldn’t even be a child during my own childhood.
I am pondering whether I can find compassion for myself, for how lost I have become in this experience, and for the huge pool of pain and sadness which I still carry, even physically, and which I still need to process.
There is such a subtle line between actually feeling my pain and using it to justify how I act.
Coming back into the body means encountering what staying outside it has kept me from feeling. It means feeling the anger and finding expression for it. It means encountering what feels like frozen fear, allowing myself to feel what has been held there.
It also means letting a wish become clear before I dismiss it. Noticing when I say yes while something in me says no. Finding words for that disagreement instead of leaving both of us inside the confusion.
Alongside this, I discovered a point of decision within myself: do I want to remain in this arrangement, or do I want to take responsibility?
Really asking myself how I want to shape my life was what made the switch.
I don’t have that longing for someone to take care of me anymore, funnily enough. I have the longing to create something really beautiful. Something new, not the old anymore.
Growing up does not mean becoming better at living by the rules we learned as children.
Being an adult means I can shape my reality, my encounters, and my life anew, so that it becomes interesting and magical. It does not have to be what I imagined adulthood meant when I was a child. I do not have to become “responsible” according to that childhood picture.
I can create anew.
Clear, angry, and soft
There is this adult in me that goes: fuck it all, let’s create some magic and see what we can let happen.
But that adult in me can be harsh too. Some kind of different structure, full of expectations. Where does that come from? The harshness is also a way I have lived, a way I have been with myself.
And at the same time there is tenderness for all that was and is. I don’t know how to bring these together in me. How to step into the adult position and give this creative force room without hating myself for what has been.
I want to let go of the harshness and be responsible, loving and kind. Have tenderness for all that was and all that still is, and still be clear and sharp and angry and soft at the same time.
How the fuck does that go?