Despair at the Edge of Repair

Why the Adultified Child Doubles Down,

Just When Things are Getting Good

When the adultified child begins to heal, it can look a lot like falling apart.

What we often call progress in partnership; feeling more, seeing more, being seen more, daring to soften and receive . . . can feel like danger to the adultified child who has spent a lifetime surviving by being in charge, independent and invulnerable.

It’s at the very threshold of real transformation that the adultified child might panic. They’ve spent years trying to get well, to figure it out, to finally experience safety in relationships. But the closer they come to true contact with others, the child inside, the one who carries the unbearable despair and helplessness, doubles down on the old survival strategy:

What are you thinking? You will be betrayed! Look . . . see . . . so much evidence . . . and your partner didn't even do the laundry like they said they would . . . SEEEEE!!! Not safe!!! I know what will fix this. Let's get out of here so we don't have to feel that loneliness again!! Let's go to a place where people do what they say they are going to do!! I know a great spiritual community where we can go . . . a place where everyone is trustworthy . . . your partner can't really do this growth work, anyway!! Let's get out of here!!

Turning Up the Volume on Protection

The adultified child was trained by necessity to manage chaos.

Maybe there was too much emotion in the house, or none at all.

They learned that feeling deeply was dangerous and that acting with grown-up competence and false confidence was relational currency. They grew up prematurely . . . parenting themselves, their siblings, soothing adults, decoding moods and sorting energetics in their homes. The small, lonely child disappeared beneath the responsible one. Not being dependent was a signature of the adultfied child's survival strategy. (At least not showing or feeling the depth of their dependence!)

So when therapy, partnership, plant medicine or so many other healing modalities begin to touch the buried grief of that long ago separation from self and denial of need, the adultification habits and too-grown-up-for-my-size personalities scramble to regain control. The adutlified child, bigger than their britches and taking up the space of "knowing" without the wisdom or experience to back it up, starts diminishing their therapist who clearly “doesn’t get it.” The partner is perceived as “emotionally immature, incapable and unsafe.” The processes and people that were once meant to bring healing, and have literally brought them to the threshhold, now are perceived as threatening and need to be controlled or escaped.

Any suggestion toward surrender to the pain and loneliness that might be triggered by an undone pile of laundry is interpreted as annihilation. In the abject fear of being swallowed by the young child's heartbreak, the adultified child will double-down on the righteousness of their position and attack the partner, the therapist or helper.

It’s not that they don’t want to heal . . . it’s that their tender, wounded nervous system has equated the vulnerability of healing and surrender with the death of the self they experienced so long ago. Most adults don't know how to be in relationships or in life generally, while being with themselves, too.

The Inner Mechanics of Panic

At the moment genuine integration and maturation is near, two opposing currents meet:

• The child’s longing to be seen, held, and loved without condition.

• The child's terror that if those longings are met, but then retracted or lost, the entire structure of protection will have been undone and death will ensue.

The psyche revolts: This is too much. I need out. I'll die if I stay here.

The adultified child puts on her too-big pants and too-big boots and begins to look for the exit . . . planning separation, changing therapists, spiritualizing the rupture. Anything to restore the sense of control.

James Hollis once wrote that “the psyche would rather return to familiar suffering than risk the unknown.”

The adultified child lives by that law. Familiar pain feels safer than the uncharted peace of release.

Blame, Shame, and the Endless Loop

Two maneuvers keep the adultified child circling the same waters: blame and shame.

Blame projects the unbearable outward; “You’re the problem.”

”Shame internalizes it; “I should be better by now.” "I'll do better next time." The problem is, the adultified child is unconsciously attracted to and depending on a "next time." A next time, perpetuates the need to remain adultified.

Both blame and shame preserve the illusion of control. Both prevent descent into the raw helplessness of the child’s despair. The result? The endless need for repeated proof that life and relationships are unsafe; the endless need for evidence that dependency and intimacy are unsurvivable.

Cycles of crisis and reconciliation that reinforce these deeply unconscious beliefs are what generally bring individuals and couples into therapy and therapeutic processes.

But rest and recovery doesn’t come from mastering concepts. It comes from surrender. And surrender happens, often, when a couple come to an agreement that they're done; they're going to divorce.

When the child, (or children) finally give up, and admit that trying to be in partnership is too much for the adultified child to comprehend or master; when the adutified child can admit failure and accept their limitations, it can be the beginning of inner individuation and differentiation between the inner child and the inner adult. The discovery of this release, this personal freedom can transform the course of a marriage or partnership.

The Partner as Mirror, Not Enemy

The partner is often . . . usually . . . the clearest mirror of the child’s unhealed grief.

What feels like conflict is usually reflection: the partner embodying the disowned parts; neediness, anger, fear . . . that the adultified child in us can’t yet allow.

And so they begin to prepare for divorce, convinced that separation will bring clarity.

But what they are really trying to separate from is the unbearable feeling of dependency and the terror that arises when they start to need someone again.

They can’t see that the partner isn’t causing the pain; they’re revealing or reflecting it.

Staying at the Edge

In this stage of awakening, the task is not to solve but to stay. To pause at the edge of inner repair long enough to notice and deepen into the impulse to flee.

To recognize that the urge to leave the relationship, the therapist, or the process is often an attempt to leave or abandon the child's deeply triggered, original suffering and loneliness.

As Pema Chödrön teaches, the moment of groundlessness is the moment of possibility. When the adultified child can stand at that edge . . . trembling, uncertain, undone . . . and not rush to put up a wall or run screaming into the wilderness of divorce, the first true breath of freedom arrives.

When you sense the impulse to leave . . . an argument, a therapist, a relationship . . . pause.

Ask: What feeling is rising that I most want to avoid right now? Let that be the beginning, not the end, of the conversation.