What Does it Mean to be an Adult -- Daniel Mackler

what does it mean to be an adult I asked this question because when I became a physical adult when I became a legal adult after 18 into my 20s even into my 30s I would look inside myself often and say do I feel like an adult I look in the mirror and I see obviously I have certain characteristics of being an adult but deep inside myself and sometimes not so deep inside myself I didn't feel like an adult the funny thing was on the surface I was doing a lot of very adult things had my

own apartment had a lease sometimes had a girlfriend had a job made money paid taxes functioned as a civil member of society did my jury duty went on vacations had a passport did all sorts of things that adults were supposed to do was responsible yet on the inside still some part of me just felt like I don't really feel like I can say I'm an adult and what did I feel like I felt like a kid in a lot of ways and so I want to try to tease out what is an adult versus what

is a child really now the simplest way to look at it is just in the biological sense of the word and so that probably takes about ten seconds of my time to explain an adult is someone who is fully grown has gone through puberty I guess to one degree or other could reproduce and is someone who is considered grown up no longer physically a child and that's easy and I think a lot of people that's enough to have to call oneself an adult but to me that didn't really work then comes the second part being

an adult in the eyes of society and all those things I talked about working I think a lot of it's like having a partner it's considered very important for being an adult so having a partner having money having a home having all the things that people consider being success Smolin society those are all signifiers of being an adult being able to maintain responsibility being reliable showing up for when we're supposed to show up paying our taxes things like this practicing self-care physically going to a doctor going to the dentist etc etc these are all things

that society considers to be signs of adulthood however the problem is society is often very very screwed up so sometimes the people who can seem the most like adults often are not really emotionally much adults at all so right away if someone has a great job and it's making tons of money they're considered an adults in society a male person is considered a man if he can make lots of money and have a girlfriend and have a nice place to live but emotionally he can still be very much a child so to me society's idea

of what an adult is can be very very confused and screwed up and sometimes just plain wrong and I think that was something that was very hard for me to weigh when I was asking myself why do I not really feel like an adult in a lot of ways now to add one more piece of confusion is the part about children who sometimes are required in their childhood by their parents or their situations to be adults I've heard a lot of people say oh yeah I had to become an adult at 14 my parents died

or one of my parents died or I had to go to work I had to take care of myself I had to become a wage earner I had to labor I had to do I had to look after my parents who were ill I had to become the parent in this situation parentis eyed children and so what I think and this happened to me in some ways also on an emotional level because my parents were so immature because they took so little adult responsibility in certain areas of their relationship with me in their personalities i

emotionally had to behave like an adult in a way I sort of was an adult I had to take on a lot of adult emotional responsibility as a child as a teenager even before I was a teenager before it was appropriate before I was ready to take on those adult responsibilities and I see that a lot little children and sometimes their parents are very proud of them often society says wow that child is so mature for their age they're really an old soul they're they're 13 14 years old and they have such wisdom they have

such insight they're really hard like a little adult or they're really are a full-on adult and my question is because this is something I learned about myself my question is at what cost what is the cost of being an adult before you're really emotionally ready to be an adult for me the cost was I wasn't allowed to be the kid I really needed to be in order to grow I didn't have the freedom to play in the way that other kids could have played so easily I I had all sorts of adult burdens on my

shoulders things that I had to think about things that I had to weigh and when I made my decisions that forced me to be older than my age and what happened is that didn't allow me to heal the traumas that I had suffered before I couldn't just sit back and relax and let myself grow also I had to put aside all sorts of things that were more age appropriate I wasn't allowed to make certain mistakes that other teenagers were allowed to make that I needed to make I had to bypass all that mistake making process

and jump forward into being mature responsible I had to shut down a lot of my emotions in order to survive in my situation and in a lot of ways the world really were rewarded that and I see that with so many adults when adults lose their emotions when they're lose all sorts of feelings sadness joy anger frustration there basically become more and more emotionally dead a lot of times the world especially if the world can see that they're doing other adult things like working making money paying bills being responsible members of society even though they're

all emotion split-off the world really rewards that and says that is an adult and that's really really screwed up and something that goes right back to childhood that goes back to childhood stuff where children were not allowed to really be children and work through their stuff and grow and feel and make the mistakes that children need to make in order to learn certain things about right versus wrong learn how to hold the whole range of emotions that we have the spectrum of feelings that we have instead when whole reign parts of that range of feelings

get shut down well we lose things and we can look like an adult we can simulate being an adult on the surface but underneath it what you really have is a very shutdown and unconsciously confused wounded child and in many ways I think less than a lot of people but definitely still significant in my case that's what I was I was someone who looked like an adult in some ways but underneath it I had a lot of brewing unresolved traumas I had a lot of split off feelings and what I knew somehow unconsciously is that

I really fundamentally at a deep emotional level was not really an adult yet not fully and what was I I was someone who was hurt and the reason that I'm so glad that I was able to admit to myself but I really wasn't an adult is that meant to me that I still had some self reflective capacity and that self reflective self reflective capacity allowed me to keep healing and to keep growing and to keep looking at myself because also I think it wasn't something when I looked in the mirror inside myself and said I

don't really feel like an adult I feel kind of like not exactly like a child but kind of like a child that wasn't an answer that I liked to hear it didn't make me feel good about myself I don't want to go off and tell the world oh I don't really feel like an adult it's like no it wasn't something I was proud of but it was true and it was something that I needed in order to grow because I needed to have that in order to open the door inside myself to look deeper and

say to myself in what ways am I not an adult and what can I do about it I was able to look at my traumas I was able to look at the sides of myself that were stunted that had been stunted long long long ago in my childhood often in my early childhood areas and myself which I was still unresolved and I was stuck in the ages of two or three or four or five or six and all those emotions were still confused and still hadn't really moved past those early early ages I've heard it

said and now I really see it as true is that when people get traumatized in childhood at different places different ages in their childhood they often really get stuck at those ages they don't really grow much beyond it until they grieve the loss they grieve the trauma they heal that trauma that is what allows departs of themselves that are stunted and childlike childish when their actual physical biological adults that's what allows those parts to catch up after a long long time it's healing those traumas now I got a big clue about this right when I

became a therapist I became a therapist when I was 27 years old in New York City and my first job it was an internship where I got to see I don't know what it was 1012 clients a week was at a place called the Manhattan Vet Center it was a Counseling Center for combat veterans most of whom had been in Vietnam and so my first clients when I was a therapist this was back in 1999 when I was 27 my first clients were Vietnam combat veterans and it was really intense I had all these guys

who were in their 50s most of them were in their 50s late 50s some of them were into their 60s even and I was sitting down with them I was their therapist they were 2530 years older than me most of them and I remember feeling like this feels awkward this feels like an imbalance like wait a second when I look inside of my self and I'm getting the answer I'm not fully an adult I feel like a kid and I look in the mirror and I actually was only 27 and I looked younger and then

I'm looking across from me at these clients who to me looked much more like adults I thought why would they want to sit with me and tell me about their most painful experiences about their post-traumatic stress about their shame about the horrible things they've done in their lives the horrible things that had been done to them their pain their insecurities why would they want to tell some guy who was at least 20 20 30 years younger than them it really brought up a lot of my insecurities and one thing I learned as a therapist which

was a tool as a therapist it's an a wonderful tool that I started using all the time which was oh I have an insecurity there's ways that I can frame it and bring it up right in the session so I would ask my clients sometimes just because it would burst out of me I'd say are you okay with actually sitting with someone who's so much younger than you is it awkward for you and or sometimes they even brought it up first but they would say oh I didn't expect to have a therapist who looked so

young or is so young so I'd want to talk about it with them how does it feel do you want to have a better therapist a different therapist do you want to switch to someone else so I asked this to a lot of my clients and I got a surprising response they said I was in Vietnam when I was 18 years old I was in Vietnam when I was 19 years old and I suffered horrible traumas horrible things happen to me I witnessed horrible things I killed people I saw people get killed I saw my

friends get killed I saw horrible violations as human beings I lost my faith in humanity I may be lost in my mind I was traumatized at 18 I was traumatized at 19 and I was traumatized profoundly and as the result of that trauma and this is what they told me again and again and again they said I didn't grow after that and I think a lot of these veterans had met Menten groups what I found is they would talk about this with each other and they had figured it out with them probably not with therapists

at all and what they said was they got stunted at a certain level by their trauma their emotional psychological development and whole areas of their personality didn't grow up past the age of 18 and 19 so what they told me is they said I'm 53 years old I'm 54 years old I'm 58 years old and emotionally that insole areas of my personality I'm still 18 and 19 and what they said to me is they said Daniel you may look young you may be young you may be 27 years old or whatever you are but actually

I look at you as more of an adult than I am because you didn't get stuck in the way that I got stuck so I feel like I'm an 18 year old talking to someone who is in their late 20s and I feel like because of that you have a lot of insight that can help me and I actually like it that you're younger than some of these guys that are 50 and 60 because I feel even more ashamed when I'm people with people who are in their 50s and 60s I feel like there's even

more of a gap between me and them I feel like you're closer in age to me so you can help me better you know what it's like to be 18 and 19 because you were that they're pretty recently and I remember thinking maybe they're right this is this is actually something that's very hopeful I didn't have any of those guys quit on me and actually what I found in that year of working with them is that they were pretty much right a lot of them had dilemmas a lot of the conflicts and the dilemmas that

they'd had repeated in their lives for the last 30 years since they were 18 and 19 years old word dilemmas of the variety of people who were late teenagers they were really stuck replaying teenage patterns over and over and over again drug use relationships that didn't last violations that they were doing on other people ways that they didn't have boundaries ways that they couldn't survive in the workplace all sorts of inappropriate anger confusion about their role and relationships with others confusion on their jobs yeah substance abuse problems like I said a lot only kind of

like teenage stuff they were stuck there now to bring it back to the bigger subject of what it is to be an adult something that I learned from that experience was the value in having humility and they really helped me that was something that was totally unexpected in being a therapist and having people come and sit in my office wherever my office happened to be and later when I was working with all sorts of people not just veterans women men younger people older people sometimes very old people people of different cultures if hearing people talk

about their life histories talk about the ways in which they were stuck the ways in which they were making repeated mistakes throughout their life sometimes for decades in a way it gave me the safety to have even more courage to have as much courage as I could to really look at myself and to say wait a second if these people have the humility to come in and do what they're doing open themselves up to me a virtual stranger and basically open themself up to their grief process to their trauma history to all this painful stuff

to look at their behavior for decades things that maybe you didn't look so good I can do this I can do this better and I should do this this is a responsibility I have not just to any client I have to be the best person the best therapist I can be but primarily a responsibility to myself to grow up and in a strange way in part I learned this even before I became a therapist and the main way I learned it is that when I took childlike split-off dissociated traumatized parts of myself frozen parts of

myself that were stuck at earlier ages stuck at age 5 7 10 whatever it was and I accessed them and I worked out the dynamics I worked out what had happened to me then I worked out why I responded the way I ways I did I worked out ways in which I've been traumatized before that that led me to be more traumatized by those experiences when I started to reclaim my feelings from being 5 or 7 or 10 and I grieved the losses but I change my behavior even and I was doing this process long

before I became a therapist what I saw is that it felt great it felt great to grow up it felt great to reclaim the split-off childlike parts of myself and to incorporate them into a more adult way in my personality to become more of an adult to become more of a whole adult and in a way every child already knows this children love the feeling of growing up they love the feeling of becoming more wise about the world more knowledgeable children love becoming more mature now there are examples I know some people who say I

hated growing up getting older only made my you know my life worse and there's certain areas of course in which this is true bad things can happen as people get older and they can lose idyllic parts of their childhood but fundamentally I think there's a natural spontaneous Drive in all of us to become adults to grow toward adulthood so for me having discovered that healing my traumas was the primary way once I was physically an adult to actually catch up emotionally and to become more of an actual adult I learned that that felt great and

that gave my life a deeper purpose a deeper meaning a deeper value I watched so many of my friends from college most of them in fact go off because what we were trained to do in college was to gain some sort of skills and to go forth and become productive members of society as adults get a relationship start a family going make a career make a lot of money bank accounts 401ks and that bop-bop and titles and letters after our name and important jobs and responsibilities and I've done some of that and sometimes I've done

it pretty well I did a little later than most but and I found that did feel good and that actually did help give me a vote of confidence in myself to become a working productive member of society that really did feel good but it felt much much and it felt much more important much more fundamentally valuable for me to do that healing on the inside not just to be a surface functioning adult member of society but on a real emotional level on a gut level on a psychological level in my relationship with myself in my

relationship with the world to become an adult to resolve these traumas and actually the funny thing is the more that I've done that resolved my traumas healed my traumas really integrated those old parts of myself that were split off and hurt and a lot and allowed them to actually become more mature so I could become more of a whole adult I found the more that I've done that the more actually I could function in society well and what I've also found is that functioning in society in so many ways is very difficult as a traumatized

person it was very hard it's very confusing often to function in this were weird dishonest world I sometimes think though people who are very very slow off and very traumatized they can do well because they can manipulate it's so much of a world of manipulation so much of the modern adult world especially making a lot of money is about manipulating others not being honest and things like that so sometimes very traumatized people who are very stunted children actually do well because I think society a lot of times is run by people who are just very

pathological emotional children however what I have found by being a more healthy healed emotional adult and by the way I'm not all the way there I still have unresolved traumas I still got parts of me that are stuck and stunted and I'm still working on it and I probably will for the rest of my life however being more mature being more healthy being more functional in a way emotionally having the full range of my feelings being connected with me much much more has allowed me a lot more options in functioning as an adult I get

along better at my jobs I do work that I like more I'm more attracted to work that I'm good at like it's productive that helps other people that helps the world and I find that very freeing so I find in a way being an emotional adult has helped me be a more actual adult in the world however a lot of these ideals of society have that formal job worked for years and years and years and button up my collar and put on a tie and be a man and you know get married and have kids

and have a car and have a house and have a mortgage and a and a 401k this to me is not being an adult to me being an adult especially in this very confused modern world that's heading in a very weird direction I think a very unpredictable direction nobody knows what it's going to be like in 50 years 70 years well for me the best way that I can be an adult in this world is to be that emotional adult that emotional adult that I wasn't allowed to fully grow toward as a child but that

I have begun for the last couple of decades to really reclaim that for me is something that feels really good in this world and hopefully by being more of an adult and being more open and humble about my process clumsy confusing messy process of healing my traumas and becoming more of an adult hopefully I can inspire other people to do the same thing you