February 16, 2018
Kids in closets
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I once bought a battered old paperback copy of Andre Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs because of a single sentence I found on its first page.
There is no such thing as a grown-up person,
it read.
That struck me as a great truth.
Forty years later, it still does.
Every client I meet in my therapy practice confirms it.
Yet it’s one of those obvious truths — like the inevitability of aging or death — that everyone tries to ignore.
We all want to forget the Kid we carry inside us.
Partly this is because we need and want the world to see us as fully grown-up.
And partly it’s because of what I call the worst curse — the sense that we can can never escape the pains and anxieties of childhood.
So we hide our Kid, even from ourselves.
We keep our Kid in the closet.
We lock the door.
And we yell at our Kid should it try to escape.
Unfortunately this only perpetuates the curse.
Part 3 of a series on monkeytraps and adult children.
Read part 1 here.
February 16th, 2018 at 11:07 am
My kid keeps coming out of the closet to play and laugh spontaneously but the ‘grown-ups’ are not sure how to react when you are ‘supposed’ to act your age, not your shoe size! Our kid is often held in the cupboard for fear of the grown-ups thinking we are stupid and will not be taken seriously. Like in the Wizard of Oz, where the lion wants to have courage. Courage to let the child out to play occasionally, the cupboard can be a lonely place.
February 17th, 2018 at 10:48 am
In the 1939 movie Oz tells the Lion that he already has courage — what he lacks is a medal signifying it. To me the medal suggests validation, which is exactly what we need in order to let our Kid out of the closet. The answer, then, is to find and surround yourself with “grownups” mature enough to accept and nurture this indispensable part of every human being’s personality. .
February 19th, 2018 at 8:55 am
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