The Journey From Boy Psychology to King Psychology

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette have written about how our era has been impacted by people who cannot step into their own power as sovereign in their own kingdom. One client with whom I worked for a time on his emotional maturity, wrote this text and specifically asked me to publish it online in case it benefited others. So,  read on…

I grew up in a family with two infantile parents. Psychologically they were children all their lives. Indeed, the nearer they got to death, the more they retreated into a childlike place and wanted to be cared for.

But it was a dynamic that I remember as far back as I can go. Even as a child I knew I was somehow expected to make decisions and “do the thinking” for my family.

I guess every family has its own unique dynamic, but ours was very peculiar. Because half the time I was applauded for what I thought, and half the time I was ridiculed.

And there’s a difficulty for every child in this situation: to be an adult, to be a sovereign for the rest of the family when you only have a child’s view and understanding of the world, is an impossible situation to be in.

Well, at least that’s how I felt and experienced it. The impossibility of ever being good enough. The responsibility of looking after my own parents. How perverse! What a way to develop a sense of infantile grandiosity.

It made me grow up quickly – but perhaps not in a very functional way. Taking responsibility as a child for the people who should have been sovereigns in my world was never going to work for anyone, least of all me.

The sense of being on my own in every decision I took, a sense that no one would help me, and perhaps even that sense of infantile grandiosity – these were the things that accompanied me into my adult life.

Mind you, one bonus was that I developed a bloody good magician whose capacity for solving problems and coming up with creative ideas has really helped me in life!

And I’ve seen that in others too: where a child has to constantly prove how good he or she is, there tends to develop a striving for achievement.  That certainly happened for me: it was a way of proving to myself and to the world that in fact I was good enough, despite my family’s best efforts to exploit me and convince me I wasn’t good enough at the same time.

And in adulthood, of course, comes another challenge. To undo the isolation, to undo the wound of “not being good enough”, and to find my own path to true sovereignty.

As Rumi said: “It’s your road, and yours alone, others may walk it with you but no one can walk it for you.”