Transformation From Childhood To Adulthood Quotes

A favorite concept of mine comes from Henri Nouwen’s book The Wounded Healer. The premise of the book is that as we travel life’s journey from childhood to adulthood we acquire wounds along the way. A wound can be any unresolved social, emotional, relational issue that still impacts our lives. These wounds can be inflicted by negative cultural messages or experiences with parents, peers, or adults with power and authority over us. Unresolved, these wounds can leave us with a sense of deficiency or inferiority. We can let unhealed wounds drive us and risk hurting our players through endless self-serving transactions, or we can heal ourselves and then help heal our players. Nouwen says we have two choices: Either we deny, repress, or dissociate from the wounding and therefore wound others with our unhealed injuries, or we bring healing to our wounds and offer our healed wounds to others to heal and transform their lives. I am a wounded healer and this is the story of my wounds, their healing, and the transformation in coaching that ensued because I chose to process and grieve over my pain instead of hiding it and acting it out.

But every parent will know that it makes perfect sense. After his birth, the logic is different. Instantly it became clear that the life of the child has infinite dignity. Of course it is worth the grief, even if the candle is only lit for such a short time. Once a kid is born you’ve been seized by a commitment, the strength of which you couldn’t even have imagined beforehand. It brings you to the doorstep of disciplined service. When a parent falls in love with a child, the love arouses amazing energy levels; we lose sleep caring for the infant. The love impels us to make vows to the thing we love; parents vow to always be there for their kid. Fulfilling those vows requires us to perform specific self-sacrificial practices; we push the baby in a stroller when maybe we’d rather go out alone for a run. Over time those practices become habits, and those habits engrave a certain disposition; by the time the kid is three, the habit of putting the child’s needs first has become second nature to most parents. Slowly, slowly, by steady dedication, you’ve transformed a central part of yourself into something a little more giving, more in harmony with others and more in harmony with what is good than it was before. Gradually the big loves overshadow the little ones: Why would I spend my weekends playing golf when I could spend my weekends playing ball with my children? In my experience, people repress bad desires only when they are able to turn their attention to a better desire. When you’re deep in a commitment, the distinction between altruism and selfishness begins to fade away. When you serve your child it feels like you are serving a piece of yourself. That disposition to do good is what having good character is all about. In this way, moral formation is not individual; it is relational. Character is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong and about your own willpower. Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments—temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood. Commitments are the school for moral formation.

Responsibility is the dividing line between childhood and adulthood. When you’re a child, you blame your problems on your parents, on what they did or didn’t do. But when you become an adult, as the Bible says, you “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). When you become an adult, you step across that line, and you say, “I am an adult. I am responsible for what happens to me from now on.” From then on, your life will be different.