So why is all this stuff about inner Kids and adult children important?
Because it’s essential to understanding ourselves as adults.
It reminds us of where we came from, and what happened to us there:
~ that we started out helpless, totally dependent on the big people around us.
~ that we had no choice but to adapt to those big people.
~ that this adaptation occurred not just on the surface of our personality, but seeped down to the very core of us.
~ that, like a lie you tell so often you come to believe it’s true, this adaptation came to feel not like something we did but something we are.
~ that as a result it left us confused at the deepest level – confused about who we really are and how to be in the world.
Psychiatrist R.D. Laing describes all this as an intergenerational hypnotic process. He writes,
In the family situation…the hypnotists (the parents) are already hypnotized (by their parents) and are carrying out their instructions, by bringing their children up to bring their children up… in such a way, which includes not realizing that one is carrying out instructions: since one instruction is not to think that one is thus instructed.
Got that?
We are hypnotized to ignore the fact that we are hypnotized.
I’m reminded of the old saying about computers: garbage in, garbage out. Misprogram a computer and it will produce only bad data.
The same happens with children.
Hypnotize a child into accepting beliefs and rules that may serve the family but which ignore the child’s feelings and needs, and you produce emotional garbage – anxiety, depression, addictions, dysfunctional relationships, and, eventually, struggles with their own parenting.
These, by the way, are the five most common problems people bring to therapy.
I’ve never met anyone, in or out of therapy, who hasn’t suffered from at least one of them.
They all flow from being tranced into functioning like kids trapped in adult bodies, and from having inner Kids they don’t know how to listen to or care for.
Adult health and happiness depend on escaping the trance.
You simply cannot be an emotionally strong and healthy adult so long as you’re carrying around a hypnotized Kid inside.
Or as Carl Jung famously put it, “Whatever we don’t own, owns us.”
And the wounds shape our perceptions, our reactions and especially our coping without our realizing it.
Adult child is the term we use to describe this phenomenon.
Adult children are people still living according to Plan A – the set of adaptations they developed as kids.
That’s one definition. Here’s another:
Adult children are grownups who still feel like kids inside.
Maybe not all the time, but often, and especially under stress.
This happens because, under stress, adult children enter the equivalent of hypnotic trance.
In that trance, they forget that they’re grownups, and experience themselves as the kids they once were – scared, guilty, angry, confused and helpless.
The worse they were wounded as children, the more powerful this trance is.
Anyone who’s ever experienced a panic attack knows what I’m describing.
So does any adult who’s ever felt him- or herself regress to the age of six in the presence of family members.
These feelings are what R.D. Laing was describing when he said, “We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in infancy.”
This means, to some extent, we are all adult children.
And that there is no such thing as a completely adult human being.
That idea is so important it bears repeating:
There is no such thing as a completely adult human being.
The inner Kid is the source of feeling, honesty, spontaneity, joy, creativity and growth.
Carl Jung wrote,
In every adult there lurks a child, an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole. [i]
Other writers have echoed Jung’s view of the child as the source of all human authenticity and potential:
Psychologist Margaret Paul writes,
[The inner child] is who we are when we were born, our core self, our natural personality, with all its talent, instinct, intuition and emotion.
Physician and therapist Charles Whitfield writes,
[The inner child is] that part of each of us which is ultimately alive, energetic, creative and fulfilled; it is our Real Self — who we truly are.
Coach and author Barbara Sher:
All the people we call ‘geniuses’ are men and women who somehow escaped having to put that curious, wondering child in themselves to sleep.
And musician and artist Stephen Nachmanovich:
The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
I also think of the Kid as the animal part, the part of us that has healthy instinctual reactions to what it experiences.
Occasionally when a client is trying to make a difficult decision, I’ll suggest they visualize each of the two alternatives they face. Then I ask “What does your stomach want?” That’s my way of checking in with the Kid.
Usually the stomach tenses when the person thinks of one alternative and relaxes when they think of the other.
That’s the Kid, voting.
The Kid is that part of us that knows what we really need and isn’t afraid to tell us.
Unfortunately, most of us have been trained not to listen.
We’ve been talking about the need to free ourselves from our families of origin in order to grow up emotionally.
We can’t do that without addressing our inner Kid.
Which means we need to acknowledge the Kid, accept it, figure out what it needs from us, and do our best to parent it.
Adults who never learn how to do those four things — especially the parenting part — end up feeling permanently kidlike inside.
So what’s the Inner Kid?
Occasionally someone asks me this question.
I usually answer, “It’s that part of you where you store unexpressed feelings, unmet needs, and unhealed wounds.”
Usually they nod.
Not one has ever said No, I don’t have one of those.
That might seem odd, given how we usually bury this most secret part of us.
Then again, maybe not.
Since we all know we’re damaged or wounded in some way.
And we’re all familiar with feeling like kids inside.
The idea of an inner Kid simply gives us a language for talking about it.
In my work I tend to encounter each client’s inner Kid in two forms: as the source of that person’s hidden authenticity, and as the storehouse of his or her hidden wounds.
In 1983 Janet Woititz published a book titled Adult Children of Alcoholics which contained what came to be known in recovery circles as “the laundry list.”
It’s a list of thirteen traits typical of adults who grew up in dysfunctional families.
A dysfunctional family is simply one in which the members cannot get their needs met.
And adult children are people still unconsciously bound to the Plan A they learned in their family.
If you’d like to be able to notice when you slip into Plan A – to say Oh, there I go again instead of reacting with rage, fear or confusion — the laundry list is a good place to start.
What follows is a revised version.*
If you’re an adult child,
1. You guess at what normal is, then try to imitate it.
2. You have trouble following projects through from beginning to end.
3. You lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.
4. You judge yourself without mercy.
5. You have trouble relaxing or having fun.
6. You take yourself very seriously.
7. You struggle with intimate relationships.
8. You over-react to changes beyond your control.
9. You constantly seek approval and affirmation.
10. You feel different from other people.
11. You’re either super responsible or super irresponsible.
12. You’re extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that your loyalty is undeserved.
13. You’re impulsive — i.e., tend to lock yourself into a course of action without thinking through alternatives or consequences. This creates confusion, self-loathing and loss of control over your environment. You also spend large amounts of time and energy cleaning up the mess.
So what does it mean if you identify with one or more of these symptoms?
Plan A is my label for everything we learn as children about life and how to live it.
We each have a Plan A.
And we each learn it in the same place and in the same way.
The place is our family, and the way is unconsciously.
Nobody sits us down at the kitchen table and says, “Listen up, kid, here’s how you do Life.” They just do Life themselves, and we watch and listen and soak it all up like little sponges.
Which explains why our Plan A tends to look so much like that of our family members.
And it works for a while.
Especially while we’re still living in the family.
We’re all following the same unwritten rule book.
But Plan A always breaks down.
This happens when we move beyond the family into the larger world, filled with new people and new challenges.
And we discover that what worked at home doesn’t always work out there.
At which point we have, at least in theory, a choice.
We can tell ourselves, “Oh, I guess I need a Plan B.”
Or we can tell ourselves, “I must be doing something wrong. I better work harder at Plan A.”
Guess which we choose?
Right. Plan A.
Always Plan A.
Two reasons for this. First, we may not even know there’s such a thing as Plan B. We think Plan A is just normal. Why would anyone do Life in any other way?
Second, even when we begin to suspect there are other options, change is scary.
So we cling to Plan A because it’s familiar. It may not work great, but it’s easy. We can do it in our sleep.
In fact Plan A is itself a kind of sleeping.
And we usually keep following it until symptoms wake us up.
Symptoms like anxiety, depression, loneliness, addictions, bad relationships ad problems with parenting.
Those symptoms are what drive us into therapy.
Seeking, whether we realize it not, a healthier Plan B.
So we tend to be oblivious to how our family has shaped us.
On the other hand, if we’re in recovery from anything – anxiety or depression or addiction or bad relationships or some other emotional problem — sooner or later we begin to suspect that maybe we need to reexamine our family.
That we need to do what Freud originally defined as the goal of psychoanalysis: make the unconscious conscious.
So how do we do that?
How does the fish discover water?
We consciously turn our attention to what we have ignored, and we start asking higher level questions about it.
If you doubt the power of family to shape who we are and how we function, think of how we get defined by our family roles.
Family therapist James Framo writes,
The “family way” of seeing and doing things becomes automatic and unquestioned, like the air one breathes.
[For example,] It is very difficult for anyone, no matter how grown-up or mature, to avoid the family role assignment when he is in the presence of his family.
Whether his role is that of “the quiet one,” “the smart one,” “the slick one,” “the troublemaker,” “father’s protector,” or any one of countless assignments, he will find himself behaving accordingly despite himself.
Try a thought experiment.
Think of your family of origin.
Now ask yourself,
Who was the “strong” one?
Who was the “weak” one?
Who was the “emotional” one?
Who was the “unemotional” one?
Who was the “angry” one?
Who was the “funny” one?
Who was the “nervous” one?
Who was the “controlling” one?
Who got controlled?
Who was “the problem solver”?
Who was “the problem”?
Now ask yourself:
Which fish was I?
Did I have a role?
What was it?
Do I still slip back into it when I’m with my family?
How am I still playing this role in other parts of my life?
Was I aware of this before now?
For most of us, it takes a long time to discover how our family role has defined us.
That means not just unfamiliar, but uncomfortable.
Painful, even.
Your mind and emotions may well resist it.
It just won’t fit your normal ways of perceiving and feeling and acting.
You may find it confusing, even annoying.
If that happens, relax.
It’s normal.
That discomfort you’re feeling may even turn out to be a good thing.
Why?
Because if you’re able to feel it and push past it, it means you’re at a point in your recovery where you’re willing to tolerate some anxiety in order to expand your consciousness and take adult responsibility for your emotional life.
Actually they’re three facets of the same goal, which is to help you better understand how your childhood conditioning shaped your emotional life as an adult, and how you can move beyond that conditioning if you wish.
In the language of the three metaphors, that means discovering
what your Plan A is and where it came from,
how your Inner Kid functions and what he or she needs,
what triggers you into compulsive controlling and what you can do instead.
You will know you’re approaching these goals when the day comes that you encounter an emotional problem and — instead of getting scared, angry, confused, guilty or ashamed – you find yourself able to shrug and say,
Some of you may have wondered why earlier today you received two Monkeytraps for Adult Children chapters — Chapter 4: What’s a monkeytrap? and Chapter 7: The family ocean.
The second one was sent in error.
(I was undercaffeinated at the time.)
So you’ll see it again next Tuesday, in the proper sequence.
An old proverb tells us that fish will be the last creatures to discover water.
Makes sense, right?
Water is the only environment fish know. So, to fish, water is simply a given, something to be taken for granted and ignored.
Human beings are like that.
Except the water we take for granted is family.
By family I don’t mean just the group of people around us when we’re born and raised.
I mean an emotional environment, and a particular way of perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting.
We depend on family, not just for physical survival and emotional feeding, but for our sense of what the world is and how we’re supposed to function in it.
Family is the psychological sea in which we swim, the only reality kids know.
So kids have no choice but to adapt to it and absorb it, to carry it inside themselves wherever they go.
And even when what we absorbed causes problems – makes us unhappy or sick, for example – we usually don’t think to step back to question it.
Since it’s impossible for a child — and, sadly, most adults — to see family objectively.
This book, like my last*, is about control in general, and monkeytraps in particular.
So what’s a monkeytrap?
Wikipedia defines monkey trap as
A cage containing a banana with a hole
large enough for a monkey’s hand to fit
in, but not large enough for a monkey’s
fist (clutching a banana) to come out;
anecdotally used to catch monkeys that
lack the intellect to let go of the banana
and run away.
That’s a literal monkey trap.
This book is about the psychological version.
A psychological monkeytrap is any situation that temps us to hold on when we should let go — to control what either cannot or should not be controlled.
The world is filled with monkeytraps.
As is the emotional life of every human being.
And the emotional life of an adult child, as we’ll see, often feels like one damn monkeytrap after another.
*Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (New York: Lioncrest, 2015).
I’ve been trying to expand my own conscious part for fifty years now.
And the most important part of that work has involved looking at my family of origin.
My father was an alcoholic, and my mother was a depressed codependent.
Those two facts shaped my life more than anything.
They taught me how to see myself and other people.
They taught me how to handle feelings and relationships, cope with stress, and see the world.
They also left me with anxiety, anger, depression, low self-esteem, narcissistic tendencies, social anxiety, workaholism, an identification with underdogs, a tendency to self-medicate with smoke and sugar, and a recurring urge to solve other people’s problems.
I’ve spent the first third of my life living out what I learned as a child, and the remainder trying to unlearn it.
I’m still trying to understand how all that happened, to sort out the healthy lessons from the unhealthy ones.
