What’s Up With Exiling Our Inner Teen?
The pain is not the point
Are you a first-time reader?
These posts make the most sense when you start here.
I get it. I really do.
In our effort to become a whole person, who embraces life to the fullest, our contemporary culture has slowly, methodically added the art of healing our psyches, our inner sense of self, to our cultural obsession with the body—with pain in the driver’s seat.
As much as we go out of our way to avoid it, pain is our constant companion, relentlessly here with us in time and space.
We hurt and we want to stop hurting. Hurting diminishes our capacity to live life to the fullest. In this enlightened endeavor, pain is a gift, a precious message asking us to do something please.
So, being the creative humans we are, we construct model after model offering different methods on how to achieve emotional/physical wholeness.
Over the last two and a half decades, we’ve crowned one of these models a psychological superstar and bestowed her with permanent residence in the hallowed halls of our collective consciousness: the Inner Child.
For 25 Years The Golden Inner Child Reigns Supreme
This most successful of psychological models, the Inner Child, feels so familiar, so permanent a fixture of our self-awareness, that it’s hard to imagine she first appeared as recently as the late 1980s and early 1990s in a series of three books.
Charles L. Whitfield’s book Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families (1987), where he calls the inner child the “child within.”
Penny Park's Rescuing the Inner Child (1990), where she offers a process for both for contacting and “recovering” your inner child.
Art therapist Lucia Capacchione’s Recovery of Your Inner Child (1991) where she outlines a process using art therapy and journaling that includes a "nurturing parent" and "protective parent" within a framework of "inner family work."
Given how consequential our earliest years on the planet are, starting with The Inner Child makes perfect sense. All authorities agree: the formative history of our physical, emotional, and spiritual upbringing shapes how we navigate day-to-day realities—internally and externally—as an adult.
Did your father get drunk at the end of work Friday nights and rain havoc down on the family? Did your mother, shamed by her mother, shame you around your body? Did your older sister/brother bully you whenever the adults weren’t around? Were you an only child, reading into the dark until a single parent returned from work?
There is no question that the Inner Child has led the way in healing untold pain and trauma.
And yet, when you examine this popular paradigm, it’s striking how, for decades, the only two stages of human development, given both a name and a place in our psychological constructs, were the inner child as it underpins the formative adult.
It’s as if, as adults, we subconsciously blew up the middle stage of human development; we eradicated adolescence from our awareness.
But Why, Oh Why, Exile The Inner Teen?
And what irony! That the very sector of our internal health models, psychotherapy, also fell prey to the unconscious exiling of their Inner Teen.
And it’s not like the teen years are a sliver of your overall, human development.
Goodness, no. Your teen years are close to 50% or more your overall growth into adulthood, if you take year 12 as the beginning and year 24 as the end point of teen brain development—numbers that slide in either direction depending on the variables of individual development.
Let that sink in…
As soon as you took home the Ultimate Prize, adulthood, close to one-half of your life before that has been exiled to wander the unconscious underworld of your awareness. In my case, Windywild was wandering the shores of an Oregon beach before we reconnected.
But, wait a minute, let me back up.
I’m writing as if adults are a singular category of experience, when, in fact, each one of us comes with varying degrees of connection or disconnection from our Inner Teen.
When I was in the middle of my doctoral research, interviewing high school juniors over a period of months, I was struck by one, consistent observation: aliveness.
Individually, and in a group, these teens radiated a passionate, inexhaustible enthusiasm for life. And this aliveness remained unaffected by mood: angry, depressed, excited, curious, frustrated or elated.
These teens seemed inexorably wired for experiencing the thrill of each moment no matter its tone or color, no matter dark or light, no matter sunshine or overcast, and especially no matter adult approval.
It was as if aliveness flowed, unimpeded, from the core of their being.
Let’s note this as Inner Teen Gift #3: experiencing the thrill of aliveness.
It was after working with these teens that I began to notice which adults exuded that same aliveness, and which did not.
What fascinated me was how this adult aliveness, like the teen aliveness, didn’t seem affected by factors such as depression, anger, pain or trauma. It was as if aliveness lived at the core of their adult self, irrespective of personality or ego.
And I began to suspect that, on the inside, these adults had a very alive and active Inner Teen, in spite of any, and all, external or internal events; in spite of s/he/their conscious connection, or disconnection, from their Inner Teen.
A Slice of Orange, A Pinch of Sky is my coming out of the Inner Teen closet as much as it is a passionate plea to right a glaring wrong in our shared human consciousness: the vital aliveness of teenagers in general and of the Inner Teen inside every adult.
So, for the first time since my dissertation, I’m not just writing about this, I’m also talking.
It was in such a conversation when two of my friends told me, in no uncertain terms, how their teen years held so much trauma, loss, and pain that the idea of “going back there” was a red line in the sand.
In fact, the pain of those years had slammed shut the door to their Inner Teens with glaring “DO NOT ENTER” signs festooned with a collage of pics, a faded corsage, and a faded middle finger at the far edge.
I’m sure my friends are not alone. Enter 19 online articles offering, right now, to “Heal Your Inner Teenager.” The collective door has cracked open.
And, once again, pain is the driver. Awareness of our Inner Teen, like our Inner Child, begins because we 1) hurt and 2) wish to be whole.
And lucky for us, our contemporary culture offers multiple pathways for healing the hurt.
I respect that. I applaud that.
And I encourage anyone reading this series, if they feel called, to find a healing-the-inner-teenager counselor they trust and feel safe with. Go ahead, Google it. The collective consciousness is finally inviting us into the inner sanctum of the Inner Teenager.
But, and this is a billboard-sized “but,” I also encourage anyone relishing wholeness—especially any creative who relishes wholeness—to consider that healing is not the same as becoming whole. That healing gives us a better chance at wholeness, but it is not the whole of wholeness.
Wholeness arrives when we are open to possibilities. Wholeness comes with the dance and the drama, with the morning and the night, with a fresh croissant or a wake-up call from a friend watching us take a dark turn.
Wholeness, by its very definition, is inclusive, i.e., you cannot be whole when the gifts of your teenage years are forever buried under the tarp of the traumatic.
Consider this…
The very fact that you are a functioning adult…
who has formed a core identity, a Self that is recognizable to yourself and others,
who has formed relationships,
who can entertain possibilities for any given circumstance,
who can think about thinking,
who has the potential for creative behavior,
who can combine disparate elements so these become something new,
who can understand and feel what could be over what is,
who can self-reflect,
who can imagine something (anything) for the future,
who has an awareness of self-worth (or not),
who can image or understand a process and subsequent outcome…
All of these abilities, which you not only take for granted as an adult, but actually believe it is the the adult you who is responsible for them…
… all 11 of these gifts manifested for …
The. Very. First. Time. Ever. When you were a teenager.
So, I ask you, with this basic truth of teenage development finally at your disposal, what could change in your adult life if you embraced and loved, not just the hurt teen, but the whole teen who still lives in the fabric of your being whether you acknowledge her/him/them or not?
What’s Next?
Great… You just read the 3rd post in this series.
These posts will make the most sense if you read them in order, like chapters in a book.
You can read the 4th installment/post here: Why Adults Fall Into the Swamp of the Troubled Teen
Where we’ll continue this discussion about why, as a culture, we’ve exiled our Inner Teen.
I have a theory, and I’ll clue you in next time.
Your support inspires me to reach higher, breathe easier. Your free subscription is splendid. A Paid Subscription helps support my independent writing so I can offer you more!
Meanwhile, please …
Add a comment to this post because I really, really need to know what’s intriguing you, if there’s anything else you want to know/hear, or if you have a question or a thought. Controversy welcomed!
Tap the heart icon if you’re finding this thought-provoking or just because it lights up my day to know you’re out there and care
3. Discover why Inspiration changed from a what to a Who. Come Meet The Goddess of Inspiration and expand your creativity: an original, guided meditation for any time you hit a roadblock or doubts are taking over.
P.S. To continue this series, scroll down and hit “next.”
To reacquaint yourself with My Premise / My Promise, click here.