Of all the red flags I’ve learned to detect, there’s one that really makes my “danger” radar go off, and that’s when a grown man or woman says they NEVER want to grow up. What does that mean? In the people I’ve known, it means they don’t have their shit together – and they’re pretending that there’s this FUN reason why. In this video, I teach the signs that childhood trauma has kept aspects of your life stuck -- allowing the child in you to control the adult in you -- and what to do to get your sh** together and live the life that makes you happy and strong.
Do you have CPTSD? Take the QUIZ: FREE PDF Download: https://bit.ly/3X9MZ7J
🟢 Order My New Book, RE-REGULATED: https://bit.ly/4dtGVze
Take my FREE Course or Quizzes: https://bit.ly/40M2YeW
Enroll in my Courses or Membership: https://bit.ly/3HP5qcf
Send your questions & comments to: hello@crappychildhoodfairy.com
NEED ONLINE THERAPY? *BetterHelp* can connect you with a licensed, online therapist: https://betterhelp.com/CCF
(upbeat music) Of all the red flags that I've learned to detect, there's one that really makes my danger radar go off. And that's when a grown man or woman says they never want to grow up. What does that even mean? Hey, it's Anna here. Just taking a little pause to talk about getting help when you're having a rough time. There are a lot of things you can try and one of them is online therapy through BetterHelp. BetterHelp's mission is to make therapy more affordable and more accessible. And those are very good things. Because finding a therapist can be really hard. BetterHelp makes it easy to sign up and get matched with a therapist who meets your criteria. And when you click the special link that I'm gonna give you, it not only helps this podcast, but it gets you 10% off your first month of therapy. So you can connect with a therapist, see what happens and if anything feels like it's not a fit, which is common in therapy, you can easily switch to a new therapist at no additional cost. No stress about insurance or who's in your network or anything like that. So if you're struggling and you need to talk to a human, try BetterHelp. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash CCF. CCF stands for Crappy Childhood Fairy. That's BetterHelp dot com slash CCF. There's also a link in the episode description if you need it. That might be easier. Thanks for sponsoring us BetterHelp. Now, back to the show. In the people I've known, it means they don't have their sh*t together. And they're pretending that there's this fun reason why. Now here's what I notice. When someone says they don't wanna grow up, it usually means that they have a need to avoid what grown up life requires. Things like taking responsibility and working when you're tired and paying the bills and controlling the impulse to betray other people. Saying that you don't wanna grow up, it's a little like, you know, I wanna follow my heart. There are nice meanings that it can mean, but it can also be a way to paint over and romanticize and rationalize actions that are really more like escape behaviors. Avoidance dressed up like freedom. What this really is, is a child's mindset. And I can tell you from experience, it doesn't work. Not in ourselves and not in the people we fall in love with and led into our lives, hoping that a quick whiff of their freedom that, you know, will give us a thrill of liberation in ourselves, but with a safety net. And that they'll be trustworthy and steadfast like we really want. That would be what adults can offer. People who have their shit together. Now, how you know that you've confused freedom with something much more selfish is you don't feel free. Instead, you feel ripped off, you feel abandoned, you feel ashamed or left behind. Now, people talk about having an inner child, which can be a helpful lens or metaphor for healing trauma. But even that methodology includes the important idea of re-parenting the inner child. There's an inner adult in there. Now, I should mention I'm not a therapist and what I'm gonna tell you doesn't take the place of professional help. But I've had to get my shit together in a big way, not just once, but level after level after level. And like a lot of people traumatized as children, I had a blind spot that caused me to attach to people who didn't have the emotional maturity to be counted upon. And I had a blind spot that caused me to doubt common sense and kind of be influenced by this rhetoric that growing up and having your shit together was somehow old school or bad or repressed. I had to learn the hard way and thank goodness I did, that accepting responsibility for life isn't the opposite of freedom. It's how freedom to be our strong and fully expressed and real selves opens up to us. There are a hundred ways that early trauma makes it hard to take responsibility for our lives, I know. And there are a hundred ways our culture tells us that all the problems that we have or someone else's fault. And it's true that people harmed us, but they aren't going to come along now and get our lives on track for us. It's not gonna happen. They're not gonna give us a second chance at childhood. They're not gonna repair the damage done. It's sad, but that ship has sailed. What we can do is still be happy and fulfilled. We can't be happy and fulfilled though when the child in us is in control of the adult in us. Now, I think I understand what people mean when they say they never wanna grow up. What they mean is they wanna feel carefree and authentic and not turn out bitter and burdened like maybe a negative parent figure in their life. But if you're having a hard time creating happy, stable relationships, and if you're spending a lot of time broke or angry or disappointed with other people or like you're unfairly rejected and overlooked, I wanna help you detect if it might be possible that childhood trauma has actually kept you stuck in some old childhood mindsets and kept you from getting your shit together and whether that might be blocking you from having functional and equal relationships with the people in your life. Now, like a lot of you, I had to grow up really fast in some respects. I was exposed to a lot of things that kids are not supposed to see. Growing up using drugs, hitting, sexual stuff, a kitchen with no food in it half the time. I had to help with childcare sometimes late at night because no adults were in the house. And long before I was even a teenager, if I wanted any money, I had to earn it myself, even for basic stuff sometimes like clothes and food and taking art classes at the community center. So I started a whole series of little kid businesses to pay for that. And there have been good sides of that that made me stronger. But the funny thing is what they call growing up fast is not really growing up. It's a toughness, but it's not maturity. And so that's why I sometimes call childhood PTSD a kind of developmental delay. Now that term usually refers to a long timeline for learning to talk and walk and read. But those of us with childhood PTSD, I've noticed we sometimes have a long timeline to develop emotional maturity. We can be hugely street smart, but still a little vague on how to take responsibility for the direction of our lives. And some of us stay in a never ending battle with our parents, kind of an extended adolescence where we're trying to get them to see how hurtful they were and make right what they did. Or we try to drag out of them the approval and love that they never gave while we were kids. Healing from that is part of maturation too, whether or not they give it. In many cases, they don't. You can still heal though. It's hard, but it doesn't have to take a lifetime. It starts by just opening your mind to the possibility that the hurt kid in you is compromising the adult you need to be today. So how would you know if this were happening? Well, there are a few markers of adulthood and we can start by asking questions about those. So the first question is, do you have an identity that is independent of your parents or of their influence? Now we might choose to live in a similar way to our parents, same values, same affiliations with churches or politics, and there's nothing wrong with that. But part of adulthood is we find what we really believe and how we really want to participate in the world, even if it's different. And it doesn't have to be done with anger or criticism of our parents. You might have criticisms, but now that you're an adult, you're free and they're free and everybody gets to be themselves. They might not like it, but you have a right. Now, some of us stay in a childlike state through dependence on parents, whether it's for money or a place to live or emotionally. We're very caught up from day to day and what they did, what they said, how they judged us or disapproved of us in the past or just last week even. Now, if you're holding on to that stuff and it's affecting whether you can be happy or not today, I'd say the child in you is blocking you from full adulthood. You can spend your whole life very focused on those hurts and they were real, they were hurts. But to start enjoying the freedoms of adulthood, it's important to start facing not just what happened to you but your own limitations that may be connected to that. That's the part you can change. You know, it's not our fault that we got hurt as kids, but today if we want to start having good, real, fulfilling connections to other people, we've got to climb up out of that identity of a person at war with the past. And yet a lot of us get stuck in the psychological bonds and beliefs that what happened in the past still dictates who we are now. And it can be this never-ending fantasy that it's the parents who have to do something so that we can get free. Even when we're 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, we think they must apologize or they have to acknowledge what they did or they have to help us get on our feet because the trauma was so debilitating. That's a war where whether you win or lose, you lose, there's a tiny chance your parents will change or give you the love that they didn't in the past. And if they do change, it will be through some shift in their own hearts and almost certainly not because of pressure from you. You know, fake apologies never hit the spot for me. Did they for you? The miracle that you're really looking for is the one in here where you're free of what happened and you start making the happy life you deserve. You start to experience it, it comes to being. Now for a few people, that means cutting ties with parents. But for many people, that's not what's chosen. It may not be necessary. When you have less fear and less resentment and in my courses, I teach you exactly how to achieve that. When you have that, you have more flexibility to enjoy people who used to piss you off and I'll be honest with you, everyone likes you better when you put down your sword. When you stop trying to make anyone apologize or compensate or validate you in any way, asking them to change, that is uncomfortable for other people. They are who they are and we are who we are and we can make requests, but we can't force change. And that's a core meaning of what it is to be an adult. We work on ourselves. We set boundaries. We don't have to put up with everybody. We don't have to have relationships with them. But we release people from that intense energy of like, you have to change. So adults have freedom to change or not change and to create their own identity distinct from their parents and that's a very powerful freedom. It's very essential to getting your sh*t together. There are the simple freedoms of doing what you like, behaving how you like. You don't have to be polite or cooperative even as long as you follow the law. It's true. You can wear t-shirts that say the F word on them. You control people on the internet. You can eat junk food all day if that's what you want. And if people in our lives don't like it, we have the right to push them away. That's a certain kind of freedom that comes with adulthood that I call casual freedom. But it's not the kind that I'm suggesting you stretch out out of your comfort zone to obtain. That's not the actual kind of freedom that we're trying to grow right now. What I'm really talking about is the kind of freedom that comes with a cost that always entails responsibility. And this includes adult privileges like having sex, earning money, creating a home, forming a partnership or even a family, serving your community. If you long for those things, but you can't seem to have them, then it could be that the child in you is controlling the adult in you. And it may be time to take a step up into the responsibilities and freedom that comes with setting the past behind you and blossoming as your full, autonomous, grown-up, present-time self. And that's my nice way of saying, this is how to get your shit together. And I think consciously we all want that. But what can happen with childhood PTSD is we're not doing what it would take to get there. It feels like too much. The responsibility is exhausting just to think about sometimes. And what if you try, but you totally fail? And what if you succeed, but then make some mistakes and all of those eyes are on you and you have to keep going? What if your childhood PTSD symptoms overwhelm you, but you've taken some big job and you don't have the option anymore to stay in bed all morning or get in your car and drive all night to just get away from everything you know, to flat out avoid whatever was too painful to face? Everybody feels this way sometimes, especially people who were traumatized as kids. But the quest is to avoid that triggered feeling that takes too much away from us. It takes too much away. There comes a time when what happened in the past doesn't explain all the problems anymore. Sure, we have obstacles. We can be socially awkward. We have money problems. A lot of us missed out on a full education. We've got health issues. We're depressed or we've got ADHD. We don't know the right people. We don't know how you're supposed to act in a job or on a date. That was me. And that's real. And it's not our fault. We grew up in that void. But you know what? We can learn. We can get our shit together. And every day we spend throwing up our hands in helplessness and blame is a day wasted. You wanna know how to do a job interview? Get on YouTube right now and search it. How do I do a job interview? Read a book on dating if you wanna learn dating. You could take my online course on dating and relationships for people with childhood PTSD. Don't just give up and say I never was taught this. I hear a lot of people say that. No, I wasn't either, but I learned. Your instinct for self protection has served you very well. But right now it might be keeping you from being your real self. You know, oh, I can't, I can't. So now we can protect ourselves in a new and better way by opening up those capacities and practicing and learning and reaching for those milestones of adulthood. Work, financial independence, learning and social participation, expressing ourselves, listening, doing that gracefully, having an intimate relationship or even having a family, if that's your heart's desire. There's no guarantee that you'll achieve all of these things in your life or that you'll handle the responsibility without a few bumps in the road. But don't let your good self collapse into bitterness and helplessness. You can reach for your own freedom. You were made to grow and take your place among the strong people who lift up other people's lives all over the world. Thank you so much for listening. If you love my content, think about joining my membership program. You can find out more information about that and all my courses and coaching programs in the episode description below or on my website, crappychildhoodfairy.com. If you're going through a hard time and you need online therapy, I encourage you to check out BetterHelp. They're easy and affordable and they can connect you with someone you choose within a few days. And if you use this special URL, you not only help this channel, but you get 10% off your first month of therapy. So go to betterhelphelp.com/ccf as in crappychildhoodfairy. That's betterhelp.com/ccf. And remember, healing is possible. People with childhood PTSD can have a wonderful life. Sometimes we just need a few workarounds. I'll see you next time. You
