Of all the red flags I’ve learned to detect, there’s one that really makes my “danger” radar go off, and that’s when a grown man or woman says they never want to grow up.
What does that mean? In the people I’ve known, it means they don’t have their sh** together – and they’re pretending that there’s this “fun” reason why.
Here’s what I notice: When someone says they don’t want to grow up, it usually means they have a need to avoid what grown-up life requires – things like taking responsibility and working when you’re tired and controlling the impulse to betray other people. Saying you “don’t want to grow up” is kind of like “I want to follow my heart” – it can be a way to paint over and romanticize actions that are really more like escape behaviors – avoidance dressed up like freedom.
What this really is, is a child’s mindset, and I can tell you from experience, it doesn’t work. Not in ourselves, and not in people we fall in love with and let into our lives, hoping that quick whiff of “freedom” they advertise will give us a thrill of liberation but with a safety net — they can still be trustworthy and steadfast.
That would be what adults can offer – people who have their sh** together. And how you know you confused freedom with something much more selfish is, you don’t feel free, and innstead feel ripped off, abandoned, and left behind.
People talk about having an inner child, which can be a helpful lens, or metaphor for healing trauma. But even that methodology includes the important idea of re-parenting, in other words, finding that adult inside.
Now I should mention, I’m not a therapist and what I’m going to tell you doesn’t take the place of professional help. But I’ve had to get my sh** together in a big way, not just once, but level after level. And like a lot of people traumatized as children, I had a blind spot that caused me to attach to people who didn’t have the emotional maturity to be counted on, and and also to doubt my own common sense. I was influenced by this rhetoric that growing up and having your sh** together was somehow old-school, bad, repressed. I had to learn the hard way (and thank God I did) that accepting responsibility for our lives isn’t the opposite of freedom, it’s how freedom to be our strong, and fully expressed and real selves opens up to us.
There are a hundred ways that early trauma makes it hard to take responsibility for our lives, and a hundred ways our culture tells us that all the problems are someone else’s fault. And it is true that people harmed us. But they aren’t going to come along now and get our lives on track for us. They’re not going to give us a second chance at childhood. It’s sad, but that ship has sailed. Still, we can become happy and fulfilled! Not however, when the “child” in us is in control of the adult in us.
I think I understand what people mean when they say they never want to grow up: they want to feel carefree and authentic and not turn out bitter and burdened like (maybe) a negative parent figure in their life.
But if you’re having a hard time creating happy, stable relationships, and if you’re spending a lot of time broke, angry, or disappointed with other people — or like you’re unfairly rejected and overlooked — it’s possible that childhood trauma has actually kept you stuck in an old childhood mindset. That, and the popular rhetoric that claims trauma wounds are life-defining – might be blocking you from having functional and equal relationships with the people in your life.
I had to grow up really fast in some respects. I was exposed to things that kids are not supposed to see — grownups using drugs, hitting, sexual stuff, a kitchen with no food in it half the time. I had to help with childcare, sometimes late at night because no adults were in the house. And long before I was even a teenager, if I wanted any money I had to earn it myself, even for basic stuff sometimes — clothes and food and taking art classes at the community center. So I started a whole series of little kid businesses to pay for that. And there have been good sides of that, which made me stronger.
But what they call “growing up fast” is not really growing up.” It’s toughness but it’s not maturity. And so that’s why I sometimes call Childhood PTSD a kind of developmental delay. This is a term that usually refers to a long timeline for learning to talk and walk and read, for example. I’ve noticed that many of us with Childhood PTSD have a long timeline to develop emotional maturity. We can be hugely street-smart, but still a little vague on how to take responsibility for the direction of our lives.
Some of us stay in a never-ending battle with our parents — kind of an extended adolescence where we’re trying to get them to see how hurtful they were, and make right what they did. Or we try to drag out of them the approval and love that never came while we were kids. Healing from that is part of maturation too, It’s hard but it doesn’t have to take a lifetime! It’s starts by just opening up your mind to the possibility, that the hurt “kid” in you is compromising the adult you need to be today.
So how would you know if this were happening? There are a few markers of adulthood, and we can start by asking questions about those.
The first question is: Do you have an identity that is independent of your parents and their influence? We might choose to live in a similar way to our parents — same values, same affiliations with churches or politics — and there’s nothing wrong with that. But part of adulthood is that, we find what we really believe and how we really want to participate in the world, even if it’s different. And it doesn’t have to be done with anger or criticism of our parents. You might have criticisms, but now that you’re an adult, you’re free and they’re free. Everyone gets to be themselves!
Some of us stay in a childlike state through dependence on parents, whether it’s for money or a place to live or just emotionally, we’re very caught up from day to day in what they did, what they said, how they judged us or disapproved us, in the past or just last week. If you’re holding on to that stuff and it’s affecting whether you can be happy or not today, I’d say the child in you is blocking you from full adulthood. You can spend your whole life very focused on those hurts, but to start enjoying the freedoms of adulthood, it’s important to start facing not just what happened, but our own limitations that may be connected to that. It’s not our fault we got hurt as kids, but today, if we want to start having good, real, fulfilling connections to other people, we’ve got to climb up out of that identity of a person at war with the past.
And yet, a lot of us get stuck in the psychological bonds and beliefs that what happened in the past still dictates who we are now. It can be this never ending fantasy that it’s the parents who have to do something so that we can get free, even when we’re 30, 40, 50 years old! We think they must apologize, or they have to acknowledge what they did, or they have to help us get on our feet because the trauma was so debilitating.
That’s a war where, whether you win or lose, you lose. There’s a tiny chance your parents will change or give you the love they couldn’t in the past. If they do, it will be through some shift in their own hearts, and almost certainly not because of pressure from you. Fake apologies never hit the spot. The miracle that you’re really looking for is the one inside, where you’re free of what happened, and you start making the happy life you deserve.
For a few people that means cutting ties with parents. But for most people that’s not necessary at all. When you have less fear and resentment — and in my courses I teach exactly how to achieve this — you have more flexibility to enjoy people who used to piss you off. And I’ll be honest with you: Everyone likes you better when you put down your sword — when you stop trying to make anyone apologize or compensate you or validate you or change in any way. They are who they are, and we are who we are. We can make requests but we can’t force change and that’s a core meaning of what it is to be an adult. We work on ourselves.
Adults have freedom to change or not change and to create their own identity distinct from their parents. That’s a very powerful freedom. There are the simple freedoms of doing what you like and behaving how you like. You don’t have to be polite or cooperative, even, as long as you follow the law.
You can wear t-shirts that say the f-word on them. You can troll people on the internet, you can eat junk food all day if you want. And if people in your life don’t like it, you can push them away. That’s a certain kind of freedom that comes with adulthood that I call casual freedom, but it’s not the kind I’m suggesting you stretch out of your comfort zone to obtain.
What I’m really talking about is the kind of freedom that comes with a cost, which always entails responsibility. This includes adult privileges like having sex, earning money, creating a home, forming a partnership or even a family, serving your community… If you long for those things, but you can’t seem to have them, it could be that the “child” in you is controlling the adult you. And it may be time to take a step up and into the responsibilities and freedom of that comes with setting the past behind you, and blossoming as your full, autonomous grown up self. That’s my nice way of saying, “This is how to get your sh** together.”
We all want that. but what can happen with Childhood PTSD is we’re not doing what it would take to get there. It feels like too much — the responsibility is exhausting just to think about. And what if you try but totally fail? What if you succeed but then make some mistake and all those eyes are on you. What if your Childhood PTSD symptoms overwhelm you, but you’ve taken some big job and you don’t have the option anymore to stay in bed all morning, or get in your car and drive all night to get away from it all, to flat out avoid whatever was too painful to face?
Everybody feels this way sometimes, especially people who were traumatized as kids. But the quest to avoid that triggered feeling takes too much away from us! There comes a time when what happened in the past doesn’t explain all the problems anymore.
Sure we have obstacles — We can be socially awkward, we have money problems, a lot of us missed out on a full education, we’ve got health issues, we we’ve got depression or ADHD, we don’t know the right people, we don’t know how you’re supposed to act in a job or on a date (that was me).
And that’s real and it’s not our fault we grew up in that void but you know what? We can learn. We can get our sh** together. And Every day we spend throwing up our hands in helplessness is a day wasted.
You want to know how to do a job interview? Get on YouTube right now. Read a book on dating, or take an online course. Don’t just give up now! Your instinct for self-protection has served you well. But right now it might be keeping you from becoming your real self.
Now we can protect ourselves not by retreating but by opening up those capacities, and practicing and learning and reaching for those milestones of adulthood — work, financial independence, learning and social participation, intimate relationships and a family, if that’s your heart’s desire.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll achieve all of these things in your life, or that you’ll handle the responsibility without a few bumps in the road. But don’t let your good self collapse into bitterness and helplessness. You can reach for your own freedom. You were made to grow and take your place among the strong people who lift up peoples’ lives all over the world.