You are an adult now. Perhaps you have your own home, your own income, your own family. You make decisions every day that affect other people. And yet there is a moment, often a small one, when your mother makes a comment about your work or your father raises an eyebrow at a choice you have made, and you feel something in you collapse. A part of you that you thought had grown up goes quiet and small and aches for them to simply say, well done. I am proud of you. You did the right thing.
If this is you, I want you to know that you are not immature, and you are not weak, and there is nothing wrong with your sense of self. What you are experiencing is one of the most deeply wired patterns in the human nervous system, and understanding it can change your relationship to it entirely.
To make sense of this, we have to go back to the beginning…
It is worth pausing on why achievement so often becomes the chosen route…
So what do we do with this?
The first thing is to stop fighting it…
The deeper work is learning to give that younger part of you what it has been waiting for…
There is also a relational practice worth mentioning…
It is also worth tending to whatever grief arises as you do this work…
Your parents may never become the people who can offer you what you needed. That is one of the quiet griefs of growing up, and we will not pretend otherwise. But you are no longer that dependent child with no other options. You can become, for yourself, the steady presence you have been looking for in them. And from that ground, their approval becomes something you can enjoy when it comes and survive when it does not.
You were wired to need them. That was never the problem. The invitation now is to grow that need a home inside yourself, where it can finally, gently, be met.
