Adults raised in a repressive environment experience this moment.
The cold, sudden realization that you are an adult.
That you can do whatever you want.
You have to make adjustments.
Learn new skills, develop habits and discipline, but that is it as far as the doing.
Mindset is another matter.
Unfortunately, by the time we realize that we make our own choices as adults, we have been adulting for quite some time.
And have been running a program for some time.
When your environment conspires to make you into a people pleaser as a child, your sense of self worth is so fragmented as an adult that the notion of pursuing a particular career or hobby in a serious way cannot reach that part of the mind where pleasure can link up with ideas and tactics to make pleasurable outcomes happen.
We’re adults, but we’re still waiting for the bell to give us permission to get up to move between classrooms, and leave the school when the day is over.
The high school bell.
Which works the same as junior high bell.
And the elementary school bell.
They all serve the same purpose.
They set up the program that compels you to wait for permission to do anything.
After a few years in that system we internalize the sound of that bell.
Then we leave as “adults” in physical appearance, and though the school bell is years behind us now, we are still looking for external factors to give us permission to go somewhere and do something.
From the supervisor at your job, who is only concerned with productivity.
From the boss, who is only concerned with the bottom line.
From the government official who is only concerned with making it to retirement.
All of whom are running on the same program as you.
It’s scary to think of how long that bell stays in our heads long after we left that building. And without awareness and the deliberate placement of behavioral interrupters in our lives, we can go our entire lives with the sound of that bell in our heads.
We will live as an alternate version of A Clockwork Orange.
Going through the motions of a counterfeit life while secret yearnings pass through our minds like pink clouds through a gray sky.
And when a sudden yearning for a different life strikes us, we’ll feel as if we’re not ready.
That maybe we’ll never be ready.
How do we begin to rewire our brain to KNOW that we’re adults, and we do what we WANT as adults?
TELL yourself you’re an adult.
Neville Goddard called this living in the feeling of the wish fulfilled.
We are most mentally susceptible just before going to bed.
Unfortunately this is the time when we’re most likely to be replaying arguments with our spouses, and unpleasant incidents with coworkers or fellow commuters.
You go to bed with these images replaying in your head and you will wake up expecting these incidents to repeat themselves through the day.
And they will.
But you can throw an interrupter on this pattern.
When you go to bed, get comfortable, and then:
Take three deep cleansing breaths.
Allow your body to relax.
And tell yourself you’re an adult.
The last part of the exercise is an affirmation that you tell yourself as you drift to sleep.
Auto-hypnosis.
A statement you say to yourself that affirms what you want to be in a positive way and with a sense of gratitude. One example might be something like:
“I am so happy and grateful now that I know I am adult, and I accept full responsibility for my decisions.”
If you cannot think of an affirmation for yourself go ahead and use the one I made up. It’s a way of telling yourself and the Universe in a joyful way how grateful you are for the power to choose that adulthood gives you.
Say it yourself slowly and gently five to ten times, do it every night for one week.
After a few days you’ll feel differently.
You won’t have the specific answers to what you should do with your life immediately. There are layers of programming that we have to debug one at a time.
But you will feel differently. In a good way.
You’ll feel inspired.
To take up acting again after you stopped doing it in high school.
Or you’ll suddenly feel entrepreneurial, with a desire to start a business of some kind.
You’ll see ways in which productivity could be increased in your workplace by making a few arrangements.
Or you’ll feel like leaving that job.
But you will feel inspired to take action.
In a future installment we’ll get more specific about what kind of action you want to take with the help of journaling.
For now start using your bedtime to silence that permission bell.
The Substack will undergo some small branding changes soon, but I’ll still be sending you the writing you enjoy, so don’t worry.
Thank you for reading 🙏🏾😁
It has been 10 years of unlearning, mindset shift and healing for me. And just now I have the feeling of expansion I didknow I was working toward.