Before blaming the parents...

If you keep an eye on the social media of working adults, you’ll undoubtably find many an article that relates to how parents are letting their kids down by not preparing them enough for the real world. These articles might be about the decline in quality of academic institutions as students are treated more like fragile puppies than adults or the article might be about how parents are attending their children’s job interviews, but these articles are all pointing to the same general issue. The issue is parents are giving their kids Peter Pan Syndrome and thus the parents are failing both their children as well as society. So we are to point the finger of shame at them and reprimand them for their selfish failure. But we never stop to ask if there is a good reason for why they’re doing this.

There are some hard truths here that seems to be either lost in translation or simply overlooked. But after spending time with these parents who are deemed social failures and responsible for so many future societal woes, I’d like to offer some tea and sympathy. Here’s what I mean:

Parents are not doing this because they’re disconnected from the real world; parents are doing this because they’ve seen their son/daughter taken advantage of.

Parents have seen their child overlooked, beat up, picked on, treated less than, or hurt and justice was not served. Parents have seen their children miss out on opportunities because of things like cronyism or systemic disadvantage - problems no fault of their child. The parent knows the feeling of powerlessness and unfairness that both they and their children have faced. If they have the power to make things right or to call out unprompted favoritism, why shouldn’t they do what is in their power to help?

Parents know that the pressure for their child to succeed has never been so heavy.

This idea is nothing new but the degree and strength of it is socially unfamiliar. The expectations on a human being to have their personal, academic, relational, financial, social, occupational, romantic, and psychological life on point is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. And let us not forget that not only do these have to be achieved but we also must maintain all these things constantly. The level of difficulty is so absurdly challenging that it should leave us as a society speechless. No mere human being could be expected to hold all this - only a machine could do that.

Parents know that adulthood turns people into powerplants

Most people remember their childhood fondly. It was filled with a mysterious beauty and adoration that becomes difficult to find once in adulthood. Childhood is the hot bed of beautiful memories and joy at the simplest things. Adulthood is often filled with business, busyness, hustle, bustle, anguish, frustration, powerlessness, depression, and slow decay. Adulthood is smothering and our socio-political system has reinforced that adulthood is little more than a production-assembly line. For many adults it feels like their worth/value is tied directly to their production and this should be viewed with a great sadness and despair.

There is little room for enjoyment for adults; there is only room for productivity. We work, we fight, we work, we fight, we work, we fight we work…… And what parent would want their child to have to face this sooner than they have to? What parent would want their child to lose their love of life so swiftly and cruelly?

I can cast no stones at these parents who seem to over-protect. They want their child to live a life of joy and happiness and security because they know that adulthood values so little of this for them.

Fighting Anxiety Starts with Knowing Who We Are

There is a lot of things that people tell you when you tell them that you suffer from anxiety. They will offer tips to manage anxiety or maybe if you are lucky they will give you an “I’m sorry” response. But it seems like no one ever talks about the legitimacy of anxiety. This is to say: to be human is be anxious - at least about some things some of the time.

There is something good in us that pronounces anxiety to be felt emotionally. It is typically there to connect us to the moment and to help us feel alive (sometimes a sign that what we are doing is worth doing). Anxiety lets us know that our work and actions have significance and value. Anxiety reminds us that we are meaningful and important, even if we feel otherwise. When anxiety is felt without this existential backdrop, this is when deeper problems with anxiety occur. So I want to offer a few quick starting points for understanding you and your own anxiety.

- When anxiety is not present or at least not strong, spend some time doing some self-reflection. How do you feel about yourself when you are not being mischaracterized by anxiety? Are you a more lovable person when you are not anxious? Do your feelings matter less or more when anxiety is not present? Ask yourself: what if I actually am just as lovable and valuable with anxiety as I am without anxiety.

- What do you reach out to when anxiety strikes? What core beliefs about yourself do you cling to when you are having an anxiety attack?

- What thoughts tend to be present exclusively when you are fighting anxiety? Are these thoughts true or just conditionally true?

- What do those that are close to you think about your anxiety and the messages it tells you? Do they see a truth that is different? Could their viewpoint actually be correct?

Understanding and fighting our anxiety begins with how we see ourselves. To fight anxiety is to fight a negatively-bent, jaded perspective. If you fight this alone, this perspective wins out and the only way to move forward is to let others in and to believe their words.

When reason isn’t enough (part 2)

In part one we looked at our dignity and how it is our initial shield from pessimism, serving as a protective case for our powerful yet vulnerable insides. In part two, I want to discuss the figurative anti-virus software we need when we find ourselves encoded with the virus us self-hatred.

Our outsides are so much easier to protect and fortify. Our insides are so fragile. So utterly breakable and tender. Caring for the external is truly easier than the internal. So as we embrace our dignity during trying times – reminding ourselves that our worth is not a result of our misfortunes or missteps – we must then also look at who we think we truly are.

This is to say that if I believe that my base identity is one of incompetence, laziness, or some type of inadequacy; then no amount of external work will ever fix the problem. Knowing this it is easy to see how we become revisionists about our own histories to fit this failure narrative.  All of a sudden I cannot see all of the past, where I have actually succeeded and made progress, because my take on the past is skewed by the perception that I am nothing but my own shortcomings.

This is where changing our core concept becomes not an individual goal, but a collective endeavor. Your view of yourself is wrong or at least missing some pretty important stuff. You must bring in people who you know and trust and hear their perspective (particularly their perspective about your failures). Strengths, weaknesses and everything in between must be laid out. And actively accept what they have to say with as little judgement as possible. To put this another way: their collective knowledge about you and what they enjoy about you is worth more than your own knowledge of you, because your knowledge is stained in self-contempt. If you don’t feel like they know the real you then let them in to know the real you. These are people you should be able to trust.

There is more to this than I can write here but a fantastic start to change is embracing your dignity, accepting that your perspective of yourself is flawed, allowing others you know well to help rewrite your script, and choosing to believe the words of friends over the words of yourself. You are not powerless and you can change.

When reason is not enough (Part 1)

We are almost two hundred years past the Age of Reason yet its effects can be found in all aspects of our thinking. When we have a problem we use reason and logic to solve it. However while this is a great method for dealing with a whole host of problems, it is not effective when it comes to dealing with psychological problems.

Hating yourself? Feeling miserable all the time? Frustrated at your actions at a recent party? Reason has little to offer you but blame. Leaving your self-judgment to reason is to hang yourself out on a line or perhaps to become a bullseye to your own character flaw sniping. Reason cannot [really] help you when it comes to changing how you tactically pick yourself to pieces.

Instead we have to remember that we are not simply products of logic and reason and that even these tools can be corrupted to be our enemies. I can rationalize why I am the scum of the earth and deserve the worst punishments. I can use logic to jump me through loops to come to the conclusion that God wasted these molecules on a worthless human being.

So when we start with a new assumption – that we have innate value and worth and goodness at our core – we find that then logic and reason can have a more functional basis. This dignity serves as the console tower to our fragile and complex internal hardware. Without a solid tower, our parts are exposed to both the external dirt and dust as well as the horrors of internal malware.

Once protected and ventilated with a solid tower, we can look inward at the viruses and trojans that use our own brains against us….

(Stay tuned for part 2)