How to Adult

Now that I’m almost forty-six-years old I feel like I finally have some authority on what it means to be an adult and how to live a successful, grown-up life. Mostly, my entire book The Perfect Child is about this because many of our problems as an adult are rooted in our experiences as children in which we learned, by example, various control and coping mechanisms we then employ in adulthood which undermine our best interests and make life much harder than it needs to be.

The single hallmark of adulthood, however, is the ability to provide for our needs rather than being dependent on others to fulfill them for us. As children we are not capable of providing for our needs and require adults to help us obtain not only shelter, food, and safety but also learning experiences and guidance, emotional support, and opportunity for growth. Parents often mistake our role as parent as an authoritarian figure which must control and shape our children, but in reality we are only guide and guardian because our children are individuals with their own personalities, interests, and life path. Unfortunately many of our parents did not recognize this distinction while they were raising us and so did not do an effective job at parenting which then left us similarly unable to live effectively. Mostly our parents simply lacked effective life skills that would have made them a better parent, and if people had more effective skills they absolutely would be better at life, parenting, relationships, leadership, etc., but since our parents lacked those effective skills they could not pass them on to us. After all, we cannot give what we do not have.

But this still means that we too lack those skills and many of us enter adulthood no more independent than we were as children, yet while it is not our fault we lack skills or have unresolved trauma we are the only ones who can do anything about it. Most people will, however, erroneously think that providing for our own needs means doing things alone, but this is counterproductive to fulfilling our needs since for instance many of our needs such as companionship inherently requires other people. We also require employment, money, opportunity, and very often literal logistical help which similarly requires other human beings to achieve, as we cannot make money appear out of thin air or find a place to live or food to eat or babysitters for our children without other humans participating in the systems on which every one of us is dependent. We all intuitively recognize our interdependency on other humans for our survival, not because we are intelligent or observant but because this is literally programed into our biology as instinct, and we instinctually then also recognize the inherent risk of also losing those support systems and necessary resources which then triggers complimentary, instinctual control mechanisms we use to try to control and manipulate people into giving us what we need or want, but because other people resent being controlled and manipulated this results not only in conflict but also increases the likelihood of loss, and because we are only empowered with a limited set of control and coping mechanisms this results in much stress and poor rates of effectiveness to make life much harder and resources more scarce in opposition to what we are trying to achieve.

When we lack effective life skills we cope with the stress of that ineffectiveness with yet other coping mechanisms. For instance my parents entirely lack skills for establishing and maintaining friendships, because the Boomer generation was severely traumatized in their childhoods by the Cold War and parents who suffered in turn through the World Wars and their own abusive parents. Lacking skills such as the making and maintenance of friendships my parents then used the coping mechanism of isolation, so most of my childhood was spent only with my parents rather than other grown adults except the incidental association with other members of their religion or rare holiday gatherings with extended relatives. As a young man I was devastated by a lack of skills for many requisite life experiences, and would cope for instance with financial realities by trying to avoid dealing with finances which then led to predictable and destructive consequences, and it is because each control or coping mechanism we possess is rooted in the absence of a necessary life skill that none of them are actually effective.

As an example, one requisite skill required for the maintenance of friendships is not taking ourselves very seriously. Being overly serious is a perilous control mechanism in which we purposefully make a big deal out of things including those which really aren’t (‘making a mountain of a molehill’), to create a presupposition as excuse for conflict through which we aggressively assert ourselves over others. Many of us are familiar with drama queens and histrionic, emotionally unstable people (or may be one ourselves), and how unpleasant it is to actually be around them (us). While taking things very seriously may give us a sense of control and power the act of doing it demonstrates to others our unwillingness to let them get close to us. This can and does not only jeopardize our relationships, including friends and romance but also work and profession, but limits our pool of potential associations to only those willing to put up with such blatantly abusive behavior which in turn is only those who have complimentary trauma and control and coping mechanisms to our own. Others being more respectful and honoring our expressed wishes will do as asked and withdraw, and so we find ourselves alone and without the resources we require to live effectively as an adult.

As is the case for most people, my parents had no way to learn necessary skills required to effectively handle such life experiences (they were certainly not going to learn it from their religion, which actively undermines friendships in order to assert control and impose dependence), and while many of us can incidentally have life experiences which enlighten us to those realities such as when my life fell apart in 2015 it is very difficult to purposefully resolve those lack of skills, especially because of the function of the human ego which is an evolutionary survival adaptation which motivates desires for control, and purposeful effort must be applied to resolve the childhood trauma which motivates these control and coping mechanisms and replace them with new life skills which help us more effectively acquire and maintain resources required for adulthood.

The real problem with being a human animal is that many of these control and coping mechanisms are instinctual and driven by the function of our unconscious mind which, by definition, we cannot be conscious of. When coaching people they often rebuff my recommendation for the practice of inventory therapy as discussed in The Perfect Child with protestations that they are now ‘aware’ of the problems and will simply avoid them in the future. We cannot be aware of the unconscious mind, that is the entire fucking point of the concept of unconscious, and it is not possible to resolve our problems willfully without resolving their root cause, which is the unresolved trauma that motivates the control and coping mechanisms, and refusal to practice inventory is itself a control mechanism refusing to let go of control and coping mechanisms.

Another very common control and coping mechanism which directly imperils our ability to create and maintain relationships is the widespread, pernicious behavior of zoning out or not paying attention when people are talking. If you have ever found yourself engaged in conversation with a sibling, a romantic partner, or friend and your mind wanders off to thoughts of the news or chores you need to do or even what you want to say next in the conversation this is a very purposeful ‘fuck-you’ to the person speaking, in which we communicate subtly (sometimes not so subtly) that we do not care about them. We may in fact care very much for them but the purpose of the control mechanism of zoning out and not paying attention is to make them feel we do not so as to avoid risking the experience of rejection or letting others believe they have control over us lest they treat us the same way we are treating them. One of my family members used to only ever call and talk to me while they were in the car on their way home from work, because they were bored. What kind of message do you think is communicated when only calling a loved one when you are bored and have nothing better to do? To make it worse, they would also zone out during those conversations and not pay any attention to what we were even talking about, and as soon as they would arrive home would end the conversation even if it wasn’t finished, even in mid-sentence. To be clear, I also did this kind of thing myself, which is why I later recognized it as a control mechanism, and would grow impatient (especially on phone conversations) and think about all the other things I needed to get done and wanting the conversation to end. I was bored and impatient in conversations because I wasn’t actually listening or interested in what they had to say, because my similar control and coping mechanisms were meant to prevent emotional intimacy with others. Later, the effect was then an absence of emotionally intimate relationships, and I found myself at the age of thirty-five without any real friends or family because why would anyone want to hang out with me when I constantly made them feel like an inconvenience?

As someone with autism I found the making of friendships inherently difficult, while many of you in my readership and audience love listening to me talk about the human immune system or harmful dietary fads it is poor conversation indeed for parties or courtship (I mean, I just called it ‘courtship’ for God’s sake), especially with people who are not also on the spectrum, so when I was younger I would often not talk much and simply let people come to me which, because I was six-foot seven-inches tall and very handsome, was quite a lot. But this then lead to shallow and insecure relationships, mostly with other men who were attracted to me, and because of my youthful inexperience mistook these relationships as secure when they very much were not, as secure relationships have equal amounts of both give and take.

Hiding myself was motivated from a fear that nobody would like me if they knew who I really was, and while this is an understandable and even justifiable coping mechanism (of course there are people who don’t like me!), it had the unintended effect of also preventing discovery of those who would fucking like me for who I was, because how can others make that determination if I do not give them the opportunity? Rejection is a natural, rational, and required dynamic of human interpersonal relationships, friendships, and partnerships, so that we can find people with whom we truly get along, and the ability to effectively handle rejection and the threat of rejection is also a life skill that many of us have not learned, because our parents similarly did not have such skills to teach us (read more about rejection in How to Get Laid). Security in relationships never comes from control, but from the absence of it, so those whom attempt control of relationships ironically never get the desired security ostensibly at the root of such behavior.

During the process of putting my life back together I began to keep a list of all the failed attempts at making friendships because there was so many it started to become comical. One time a man I had tried to befriend but whom was clearly uninterested later texted me out of the blue with an invitation for coffee. I thought, ‘oh, maybe he realized he actually liked being around me,’ and I enthusiastically responded. After a few texts which started to sound confused he asked, “oh, is this the Nathan I met a few nights ago and got your number?” Apparently he had gotten someone’s number whose name was Nathan and had mistakenly texted me instead (because he was also such a shallow asshole he didn’t bother putting people’s last names in his phone). Because he was a codependent, shallow prick he also said after I corrected him, “well, let’s get coffee anyway!” I knew by then this kind of person would just not show up to coffee if I agreed, and I would be further the fool, and flatly said “No,” and never heard from him again (it was even so hard for my codependent self to just write “No,” and not, “No, thanks.” lol). It wasn’t until a few years after that experience and the practice of much inventory therapy that I realized my habit (coping mechanism) of looking for love and friendship from those whom are incapable of giving it such as traumatized and hateful family members or those in the recovery community with an abundance of unresolved trauma as motivates excessive drinking and drugging are poor friendship material to begin with. Trying to find friendships from those incapable of giving it (‘blood from a stone’) was motivated by my own poor conception of myself, because insecurity is a control and coping mechanism that presupposes the measure of our worth to avoid rejection by not exceeding that worth.

While each rejection initially reinforced my insecurity and self-pity I later recognized my gratitude at no longer having relationships with those who take more than they give. In the United States, a country founded on genocide and chattel slavery and waging war and murder for the literal entirety of its history there is not an abundance of people without substantial trauma, so it can often be difficult to find candidates for healthy relationships and friendships. But the whole point of adulthood is the cultivation of resources which benefit our best interests and this also includes the erection of healthy boundaries (not just boundaries) in order that we may be free to live effectively within the limitations of our environment. Having relationships with abusive, neglectful people who take more than they give, just for the sake of having relationships, is a liability and not a resource, and putting up with consistently harmful behavior and abusive individuals is the opposite of being an adult and being effective because it is still codependence on others to do for us what we should do ourselves (i.e. having the strength to let go of abusers and cultivating new relationships with those who are not), because the entire point is the absence of dependency, and providing for ourselves that which we often think only others can give, and each of us can be our own parent, our own best friend, and even our own lover when we do not have access to those resources, and learning to do this simply requires sufficient inventory that we begin to learn and like who we really are.

Adulting is therefore the ability to cultivate resources for ourselves without relying on others to do that for us, but those resources very often come in the form of other people, and being an effective adult means having the skills which help us to effectively cultivate and maintain healthy, balanced relationships, effective life skills, and other resources if they are available to us, where our instinctual desire to instead dominate and control relationships, people, and resources is the opposite of adulting and instead represents childish, immature, unrealistic coping mechanisms and unresolved experiences of trauma which imperil our effectiveness. As maintenance and not just acquisition is required for an effective adult life, the ability to make a proper amends is probably the most important and fundamental adult skill as discussed in the chapter Amending Relationships in The Perfect Child or my article Narcissism—Or, How to Make A Proper Apology. Other useful articles for adulting are Recrimination in Relationships and How to Salvage Them, Financial Trauma and Responsibility, Which Karpman Type are You?, and It’s Okay To Be Half A Person.