One doesn't simply grow up to become an adult

Each of us is the product of our past. Every part of our childhood, teenage years and the years afterwards have left their mark on us, whether positive or negative. Our personalities have been shaped by these experiences, and the way that we responded to them back then. As a result, much of our behaviour as adults is the result of these earlier years. This shows us both why these years are so important, and also why it is so hard to change one's personality and behaviour afterwards.

Recently, a friend pointed me towards schema therapy [1], which is a form of integrative psychotherapy, aimed at addressing and treating personality disorders which result from such issues in one's past. The concept is that by reflecting on one's past and analysing one's current personality traits and behaviour, one can link the two, deducing the kind of deficit or traumas in one's past that led to these personality disorders.

Schema therapy uses the concept of 'modes', to group certain states of mind, differentiating between 'child' and 'parent' modes. The child mode is hereby essentially about one's own behaviour, whereas the parent mode is about how one judges one's own behaviour. Every adult human has a child and parent mode, which allows a healthy human being to switch between the responsible state of being an adult (healthy adult) with the carefree state of a healthy child during which the person can relax and have fun. The latter being crucial to avoiding burnout and other effects of stress.


Sometimes when reading stories or playing certain video games which have the themes of growing up into adulthood I can feel this understanding of what is involved in this process of growing up and learning to deal with not only oneself, but also others and society. It also makes me painfully aware of this child that found itself too afraid of contact with others because of childhood abuse to do anything but hide, read books and lose itself in the world of science and technology. A child whose emotional state of maturity is consequently wholly insufficient to match the demands of adulthood.

There are hints of 'healthy child' and 'healthy adult' in my behaviour, but what strongly resonates with me is the 'Vulnerable Child' mode, with the 'Detached Protector' as dysfunctional coping mechanism. Dysfunctional adult mode is the 'Punitive Parent'. Essentially this means a personality with at its core a child that tries its best, but finds itself falling short by the standards of its parent mode, with reprimands and other (perceived) signs of negativity or indifference from both the parent mode and one's environment triggering the dysfunctional coping mechanism.

"Detached Protector is based in escape. Patients in Detached Protector schema mode withdraw, dissociate, alienate, or hide in some way. This may be triggered by numerous stress factors or feelings of being overwhelmed. When a patient with insufficient skills is in a situation involving excessive demands, it can trigger a Detached Protector response mode. Stated simply, patients become numb in order to protect themselves from the harm or stress of what they fear is to come, or to protect themselves from fear of the unknown in general."

While obviously one cannot travel back into time to undo the events and choices that led to such a personality disorder, being aware of it is the first step towards being able to address it. For myself, the struggle to understand myself and my environment has been something with which I have dealt for most of my life. The perceived rejection by my environment, the sense of not living up to anyone's standards, as well as my difficulties with social interactions and relationships, all of it is making my life today so much harder than it should be.

One cannot just decide to become a healthy, functional adult. Most of the responsibility there lies with one's environment as one grows up, with especially the way one was treated and taught during the early formative years having laid the foundations of one's personality and sense of self.


One day I hope to find a way to become a better parent to myself, to the child that still finds itself trapped in this dark room, with the abuse and accusations still fresh in its mind.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy

A patchwork human and the religion called gender

People in general prefer to think in straight lines. This is why societies end up being formed as a construction of such straight lines. These are the rules. This is how society works. This is what is normal. This is not normal. This is acceptable. This is not acceptable. All quite simple and easy to understand.

People are motivated to grow and develop along these lines. To follow the lines of expectations and hopes. To reach goal after goal on these lines, until the expected and well-deserved nothing as there are no more lines that can be followed. Yet all goals have been reached. To what end, nobody is quite sure, but it has to be important.


This system of lines is rather problematic when one isn't one to think in lines, or if one's physical body does not lend itself to following these lines and the expectations which they create. This causes a dissonance on the lines, as a trapped insect might on a spider's web.

So it is that I have found myself living a life, or conceivably multiple, in which I desperately tried to stick to the lines as they were laid out for me. Yet for a variety of reasons the lines always ended up getting frayed and snapping on me. Suddenly I'd find myself cast into a world without order or goals. Why couldn't I just follow those lines? They were so clearly laid out in front of me, after all.


The real tragedy is perhaps that it takes one so long to realise just what it is that made it so hard to simply follow the lines and be an obedient part of the Line Society. It wasn't just my body. It was my way of thinking, of reasoning, which refuses to simply follow lines, but meanders and seeks new paths as a river would over the span of decades. What do I want from life? Why can't I simply learn, live, love, settle, work and die like any other human being?

Like my mind, my body is as much an outright refusal to simply conform. There were two choices, or so it was thought: either I would be born male or female. Meaning with male or female reproductive organs and matching development during puberty. Instead I am not a single person, but two: a male and female member of a twin merged into a single body. I am therefore both. And yet neither, for I am incomplete in either sense, yet I am more than each of these halves by itself.


Yet even in this realisation the lines have to interfere. For it wasn't sufficient to simply use the concept of binary sexes - based around the physical appearance of human beings - to make my life overly complicated. Now there is a new set of lines, collectively referred to as 'gender', which involves such amazing concepts like 'gender identity'. Nobody can tell you exactly what 'gender' is of course, but you know it when you feel it. It's a part of you, like a soul.

Do intersex people have souls? Do they get a gender? What does a gender look like? Does it weigh anything? Where is it located in the brain?


The truth of the matter is of course that just like a soul, there is no such thing as a 'gender', even if like other types of religion, it manages to entangle a lot of folk within its web of lines. In the end it's just another form of theology, with the human mind capable of imagining countless deities, forces and rituals which seem perfectly real and reasonable to them. Even if none of it has any connection with physical reality.

Every single one of us is the result of a highly complex interaction of biochemical processes that are the consequence of millions of years of evolution. Within our bodies rests a mind that experiences this world around it through the body's senses. We can perceive our body, too, and picky as we are, we may decide that there are aspects of this body which we do not 'like'. Thus we alter these, or request that other bodies assist in altering those aspects of our body.


Over the years that I have had this body, much of it has been a quite surreal experience. Instead of the nice, linear sequence of accomplishments on the straight and narrow, it feels like I went out of my way to experience none of that. This even before my body came into play.

I had deduced that my body had to be intersex, but during the years that followed, I found myself ever more entangled in the Church of Gender, as I have come to see it. None of what they evangelised had any relevance to my body, naturally. It never was about my body, which got waved away as 'perfectly masculine', but instead I got asked to confront my gender identity. What did I want to be? What was my gender identity? What did I feel more like? Was my soul coloured more masculine or feminine?


At this point it feels rather like I have reached the end of that torturous road, though not the end of my confrontations with the Church. I do not think that it will ever truly go away, like any mainstream religion. It has woven itself too tightly into the fabric of society. Even though I do not wish to submit myself to its dogma, or accept its baptism and teachings, I cannot see redemption for society as it exists today.

I am glad to be not bound within my mind by the dogma of gender. I am glad that I have the freedom to accept my body simply as my body. I am grateful to have stayed true to myself. I am fascinated by my body's merging of both male and female traits in a body that nevertheless appears to be that of a plain old woman.

Yet I also feel saddened and uncertain at the realisation that even after these accomplishments, my world is still just my world. As much as I would like to share it with others, show them what my world is like, I realise that this is something which requires people to look up from the lines in front of them as they shuffle onwards towards the next Really Important Life Goal.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be a child who has just created a great drawing, seen something amazing or come up with a fantastic story, but none of the adults around the child are interested in looking or listening, because they have those Very Important Adult Things as they shuffle along their lines to reach the next goal.


Our imagination should make our world more beautiful. Not fill it with things that rightfully terrify children into never wanting to grow up.


Maya