I Feel Like a Child 愛、生活、人生系列

Do you sometimes feel as though you’re really a child inside? If our various child parts are not fully integrated into our adult self, we’re likely at times to feel like a child inside an adult’s body. We won’t be able to feel truly grown up because our basic sense of self hasn’t sufficiently evolved into the actual adult we’ve become. Our chronological age, our body, our mind may be all an adult, but our psyche, nonetheless, continues to be a child. To put it more concretely, when present-day circumstances tap into old, unresolved doubts or fears—that is, distressful feelings that may go all the way back to childhood—we’ll experience ourselves in the same way we did in the past.
In the past, caught up in the struggle to find ourselves and our place in the world, we may have had good reasons to doubt ourselves. It’s probably universal that former negative beliefs we had about our limitations can hinder us from seeing ourselves as the, more or less, competent, resourceful adults we’ve become. And although we may well have become more self-confident, as long as that insecure child still residing within us hasn’t been made privy to all the changes we’ve accomplished, stressful situations will continue to make us vulnerable to the same insecure feelings that afflicted us in growing up. On such occasions, we’ll internally harass ourselves by identifying with an image of self that is as uncertain and self-critical as it is out-of-date.
Experiencing ourselves at a core level as though we were still children is apt to render us indecisive, helpless, or it prematurely impels us to suspend our efforts on a task, pursuit, or even relationship. In the moment, confusing our present-day self with an earlier, less capable self, we may also, regressively, be driven to look for another person to rely on, or shy away from accepting a responsibility that now seems intimidating and makes us feel overwhelmed. In short, our brain has been hijacked, sabotaged by that earlier part of us who was never quite able to merge with the adult we eventually became.
However, do you remember when you were a kid, you had almost no worries, and it was all about making the most of each day? No one could control you and you didn’t take no for an answer. If you wanted something, you just did it even if it meant breaking the rules. You never let opinions stop you from taking action, and you tried new stuff all the time. Every day, you were learning crazy new things that you never knew before.
Then you got older. Society changed your priorities. You got rich. Or you bought a house. Or you got married. Or you had a family. Then, all of a sudden, you forgot how to take the best bits of being a kid and use them in your adult life. You stopped calling the shots as much, and your creativity flatted.
As a kid, you had no idea what the word “failure” meant. As far as you were concerned, you were going to try things no matter what to see if you liked them. There was only exploring and no dead ends. You laughed when you found out Santa Claus wasn’t real. You didn’t give up on life; you just moved onto the next thing. It’s time for you to get back to trying stuff again, and disconnect yourself from whether or not you’re deemed to be successful by someone else’s standards.
Children like to ask questions. Asking questions helps you to learn and connect with people. Questions build rapport. Questions are the key to effective communication. You can never ask too many questions as an adult. Therefore, adults should learn things from children. If you ask the question that everyone is thinking, but nobody has the courage to answer out of fear, you’ll become the people’s champion. There’s no such thing as being dumb. Even if something is really obvious but you may not have been exposed to it before, as an adult, it’s still fine for you to know about something new for the first time. Maybe the reason why you’re