Growing up entails the loss of childhood and a transition to responsibility for oneself. Loss – and perhaps grief – is a natural part of the developmental journey from child to adult: the loss of carefreeness and the relinquishing of an entitlement to being cared for. Adulthood demands a painful acceptance that one must fall back onto oneself, rather than others.
Grief for this loss may happen outside of one’s awareness. It may also make itself painfully known. For instance, in one’s late twenties, once the distraction and novelty of leaving home, education, and the building of an independent life all begin to fade. Or it might surface at any point in life, in a form of depression or anxiety.
Where childhood was somehow incomplete or took place in adversity, the task of growing up may have been interrupted. The child self, rather than being transformed through a reliable experience of parental care and the freedom to explore and play, remains preserved, defended, frozen in time. The person that emerges may feel as if they are always split between a performative outer self that manages the demands of life, covering for a vulnerable, impulsive, or “needy” child self who never experiences the conditions necessary for it to mature.
In therapy, and more importantly in life, there is enormous value in allowing grief to take place. This may be grieving a childhood that was never had – the carefreeness, protection, or belonging that was missing. It may also involve grieving the adult one feels one never became – because of premature responsibility, compliance, or anxiety. These losses cannot be reclaimed. Childhood cannot be re-lived. But without ever being grieved, these losses may continue to consciously or unconsciously influence you.
Childhood, whether happy or painful, must ultimately be left behind, transformed in memory into something symbolic, not something chronically affecting the present. Many people come to therapy because their childhood remains vividly present, shaping their inner life, outer behaviours, and their relationships. Grieving the loss of childhood is not indulging in the past, but necessary to free the adult self from its inherited sadness, anxiety, or incompleteness. And hopefully allowing something more present to come alive.
Image credit: Kevin Turcios
