The Artificial Grownup

This collection of talks and conversations are here to help deepen self-awareness with profound self-compassion.

Many of them were first recorded for the Henny Flynn podcast and are now re-crafted especially for the Insight Timer community.

This is a time to rest and reflect,

To settle in and listen and see where the episode takes you.

What are the strategies that we adopt to try to become the person we think we ought to be?

And how can those strategies become so misguided at times that we turn into someone maybe even we don't recognise?

That's what I'd like to explore today with this topic,

The artificial grown-up.

And I'd also like to welcome you back to season seven of the podcast.

It feels just wonderful every time we begin a new season I just really notice the body of episodes that we've already laid down together and I'm really grateful that you're here.

So this idea of the artificial grown-up,

It was something that came out of a conversation with my dear friend Abby Laith who some of you already know and actually Abby and I did a couple of episodes right at the very beginning of season one so if you'd like to hear her voice then go and have a listen there.

Now this idea really springs from the fact that all through life we have crossroads or as Gwyneth Paltrow might say there are sliding doors and we make choices in our life that take us down a particular path and then we find another crossroad or another junction and then another and then another and then another until before we know it we can be a long way from home and no clear map on how to return or rather we might think we're a long way from home without a map because of course home is where the heart is and that's inside us so technically we're always home and the reason for sharing that is that even if we feel that we've strayed a long way from what feels like our core self there is always a route back.

Now I'm not really going to focus on that today but I just want to sort of plant that seed because if the rest of this episode triggers or activates any thoughts for you then that might be a useful thing just to keep remembering that we always have choices there is always a way home and home is always where the heart is.

So these strategies that we adopt in this quest to be grown up they can be things we've learned from caregivers.

We emulate our caregivers behaviours the positive ones and the more challenging ones as a way of expressing our loyalty to them as a way of demonstrating love and even when we think we're rejecting something from our past we can find ourselves repeating it.

So an example for me a kind of light-hearted example but a true one nonetheless when I was little every year at Christmas my mum was sent an enormous box of Swiss chocolates by a dear friend of hers I mean it was like massive box single layer but huge and as a child obviously it seemed much bigger and these chocolates were not for general consumption by us for kids and they were something to be revered there's a little bit of a aha around them and despite this being something that I absolutely swore I would never emulate you know this idea of like holding things for best keeping things for adults giving things this kind of special value.

This week I happened to have a really lovely box of chocolates in the house and I heard myself telling Anton that he was eating them too fast and the chocolates had taken on the patina of grown-upness and he was eating them like a child that's how I felt anyway which of course I had to put a stop to as a way of showing loyalty to my own parent and as a way of being a grown-up or as I say in the title to this an artificial grown-up a kind of pretend grown-up.

So we carry hundreds maybe thousands of stories about what it is to be or not be a grown-up and we can even hate the parts that behave childishly so we can feel shame,

We can reject parts perhaps mimicking some of the words or experiences we had when we were a child and I'm going to talk a bit more about this because we can see this as playing out these three ego states of parent adult and child and these are behaviours observed by Eric Byrne in his transactional analysis theory.

So I'll talk a bit more about them but essentially we might behave in ways that we think we'll earn as approval from others so getting a good job that could be our ego state showing up wanting the approval of other people and being able to see that you know we've done well we've got a good job or we might be really critical of how others behave for example we might judge people who wear clothes that are too young or who behave in a really silly way when they're having fun so that could be our parent ego state showing up and then when we come into our true adult self we're able to move on from the place of self-criticism and judgment of others and become more internally aware rather than externally motivated in how we behave.

So just to explain this a little bit more so the parent ego state is made up of the behaviours,

The thoughts,

The feelings that we've copied from our parents or other parental figures and our parent is made up of hidden and overt messages such as you or I should,

Under no circumstances,

Always and never forget and then sort of commands like don't lie or cheat or steal.

So when you find yourself saying the word should a lot you are talking like a parent and actually that reminds me of one of my favourite sayings is stop shoulding all over yourself you know this idea of like you know you should do it.

So and there are two principal parent ego states.

So one is nurturing,

The nurturing parent that represents you know very affirming or pleasant qualities of what parents and society does for a person and then we've got the critical part and the critical parent behaviours they generally represent the corrective behaviours of real parents and the prohibitive messages of society.

So that can be where shame about sort of nudity or something like that can come from both from real parents and from society's messages about things like nudity.

So our parent is formed by external events and influences upon us as we grow through early childhood and as functioning adults we've got the ability to change those messages but it does require awareness and effort and the parent state can also be described as being taught it's the stuff that we've been taught and just mention Anton again in the podcast I actually heard him use a very parent phrase this morning.

So we were talking about how when we were students at Nottingham University which is where we met 31 years ago we didn't ever really go out into the countryside so we had a car a lot of the time that we were there he had a car and the Peak District really isn't far and if you know anything about England you'll know the Peak District is incredibly beautiful and we just never went and he said I didn't even have the wherewithal to do that and gosh I mean God is hearing those words you know you can hear that parental voice straight away I'm not saying that's how his parents spoke to him but that is a parental voice so that judgment criticizing the lack of action or the lack of ability to take action is like the voice of a critical parent figure so I flagged it of course and and then we went on to agree that perhaps a that phrase wasn't quite accurate but also that we didn't go because we simply didn't need to we didn't think about it we were happy doing what we were doing I mean there are a number of reasons why we didn't drive to the Peak District or didn't go often anyway and and that reflective approach is the voice of the adult that's when we're in our adult ego state and the adult describes our ability to think and to determine action for ourselves based upon the here and now it draws on our understanding and our analysis of our external and internal environment and in addition the adult is the means by which we keep our parent and child in check so it's how we stop the parent being like the dominant part that is the part that only speaks or the child being the dominant part and and obviously what we're looking for is for the adult to be the dominant part but there are times in our life and there will be people that you meet where that's not the case so with the child it's the ego state in which we behave feel think similarly to how we did as a child so it could be that someone who gets a poor evaluation at work they might respond by looking at the floor or crying or getting angry so the child is the expression of feelings thoughts and emotions that are being replayed from childhood and it can be described as the felt state so the parent is the taught and the child is the felt state and the child ego has also got two main parts so there's the adapted the adapted child ego state that represents a human response which has some negativity in it some resistance some reaction maybe some deeper hostility and then there's the free and that's the part that you know gives us joy it represents a playful and spontaneous part of human behavior and and we can be the free child all the way through from infancy all the way through into old age we can access that part of us and I see the child turning up a lot in coaching sessions it's not really that surprising we do a lot of a lot of felt state work and it's the small part that feels hurt or afraid or abandoned and like the parent it's often activated when something triggers an emotional response in us and actually that child part can also hide at times so we might adopt another behavior to protect that part so for example if you had a very strict teacher who was very demanding and critical if you got things wrong it could mean that if you receive even constructive criticism as an adult that you hear it like you heard it as a child this is a really common thing that I see we can get defensive or start desperately wanting to please the person who's offered us the feedback the constructive criticism and I recognize both of those as being old behaviors of mine and and I fully freely admit they can still surface if I'm not like really on it with doing my own work with a capital W you know I'm not really kind of caring for myself if I'm not really mindful of what is going on for me emotionally so in 1970 Besser said change occurs when one becomes what he is not when he tries to become what he is not I'm just going to say that again change occurs when one becomes what he is not when he tries to become what he is not and I think that is such a brilliant articulation of this idea that I had of the artificial grown-up this idea that we're trying to become something that we're not rather than becoming something that we already are so I see this idea of the artificial grown-up almost as a as a combination of the parent and the child ego states it's when these two parts that are trying desperately to be what they think we should be trying to be the adult or trying to be the grown-up rather rather than trusting that when we are ourself without those layers of artifice and strategies and protection then we are our true adult self and actually I'm going to do another podcast in this series about my reflections on how change is really about how we reveal who we are rather than changing who we are I'll talk about that in another episode but understanding where we're getting our messages about what it means to be grown up can be really really helpful here so whose voice are we hearing or maybe a better question actually is who are we trying to impress so I know I made career choices and even like decorating choices you know so choices around lampshades and bed linen and wall paints based on an idea that I had around what was the grown-up thing to do and sinking deeper into ourselves like recognizing what is influencing those decisions that we're making and then just allowing ourselves to sink a bit deeper and really listen to our internal voice really listening to that adult self is the thing that actually is what helps us make the best kindest choices it's what it really means to be an adult so when we're in that adult place amongst many other things we recognize the obligations that we carry to care for our loved ones majority of us have those in some way whoever those loved ones might be we have some obligations to care for others it's part of what being part of society means we also acknowledge the social skills the social behaviors that help us maintain healthy relationships with others with our wider society and fundamentally when we're in our adult self we honor our own needs to care for ourselves so a few years after I consciously began my own journey and I say consciously because of course I've been on this journey my whole life just as you have been on your journey your whole life too I heard myself say to someone I've finally become the woman my 21 year old self thought I was going to be and it just stopped me in my tracks and I realized that until then whenever that was a few years ago now I realized that until then I'd been playing a part a part that I thought I was meant to play until I realized that I was holding the pen and I could write my own lines I didn't need to rely on someone else to write my story for me you