Sometimes at moments of particular stress, one adult may turn to another and say, “Stop behaving like a child, or even act your age.” This isn’t merely rude, though it might be that too. It seems that in contact with given challenges, we can revert back quite quickly to an earlier stage in our development; we leave behind all of our adult faculties, the ones associated with reason, logic, calm, strength and perspective, and slip very quickly into a childlike spectrum marked by panic, rage, despair, terror and appeasement.
The specific occasions that shift us from adult to child are an individual guide to our traumas. The reason why we behave like a child is that traumas selectively arrest emotional development; a part of us is going to remain fixed at whatever age we become traumatized at, so though we may be 28 or 72, we will, to all intents, in contact with a certain kind of inflammatory situation, resemble the frightened, bewildered and ashamed three or five-year-olds we once were, though of course we are unlikely ever to notice this.
A bell goes off in the mind to signal you’re now shifting from being 32 to being two; the transition happens in a flash and it’s the work of years of therapy and self-exploration to be able to notice the shift and take measures to soften the damage. To guess at our original traumas, we need only to study triggering situations and then generalize outwards from them.
Let’s imagine that we get very worked up about a difficulty at passport control with a stern officer, or about a dispute with a neighbor who’s threatening legal action because a tree we planted is blocking their view. When we erase away the local details, we may be able to see an elemental structure and can then ask ourselves questions accordingly. A powerful man is adopting a bullying manner towards us; does this remind us of anything in the past? Or, we’re suddenly being accused of having done something bad that we had no idea about and the repercussions feel severe; does this sound in any way familiar?
Memories tend to emerge. That stern passport officer might map with eerie precision onto an extremely frightening father, or a legal dispute might, in its psychological fundamentals, hint at some awful bullying once suffered at school.
When there is a certain kind of crisis, we should notice how fast we can fall through the flaws of adulthood, 10 or 20 or 40 years slash stories below the present, to the childlike basement of the mind. A part of us needs to hold the other steady; see the hole blown in our minds by a triggering event and then ensure that we can step carefully around the gap and take a seat somewhere very safe on the edge of the room, while we wait for reason to repair the damage.
We’re so afraid of patronizing ourselves, we can find it very hard to accept the bewildering way in which, in certain areas, at times, we truly can be slammed back into being a frightened, panicky, perspectiveless younger version of ourselves. Flaws in our minds may be prone to collapse at moments of stress, but knowing the danger is more than halfway to a solution, and greater and deserved calm.