Let The adult inside you on stage...

It’s natural to think of ourselves as a single person.

We have – after all – only one body and one name. But inside our minds, we are in truth far more like an assemblage of voices or – as we might put it at its starkest – of ‘people.’

“Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms,” says Peter Kramer at the University of Padua and our knowledge of the human “superorganism” is still in its infancy, so many of the consequences are purely theoretical at the moment.

We could picture our minds like a theatre, much of it sunk in darkness, with a brightly illuminated lectern and microphone at the center of the stage.

At different moments of our days and nights, contrasting characters will seek to step up to speak and interpret the world unfolding before our eyes.

Sometimes, it will be the panicker, a prominent figure alarmed by everything, someone who has always known it will all go wrong and quickly resorts to weeping and wailing in the face of even minor difficulties.

Sometimes it will be the self-flagellator, the one who speaks very sternly, insists that everything is our fault and berates us that we don’t, ultimately, deserve to exist.

Sometimes it is the depressive, who knows that existence is an appalling error, that hope cannot survive and that our direction is towards doom and catastrophe.

What unites these characters is that they are, in their diverse ways, very keen to speak and very very unhelpful.

But we need to keep a surprising idea in mind, that we all also have an adult inside us. – though we are not quite aware of this fact and therefore rarely do anything to encourage them to come forward –

The adult inside us may be lingering in the wings, they may be in a seat at the very back of the theatre or in some dark winding corridor backstage. But they are there.

We all – over the course of our lives –had just enough experience of other kindly, impressive adults, for this character to have taken shape and developed a capacity to interpret life, even if only in somewhat tentative form.

When we invite him on stage, the adult inside us brings some key virtues to the microphone in our minds. They are, above anything else, resourceful. In the face of trouble, he look for solutions. He knows there can be some way through. He doesn’t despair at the first hurdle. It might be hard right now, but things will work themselves out eventually; they always do.

What’s more, the adult is kind: he extends compassion to us for our difficulties: he knows our troubled histories and how easy it would have been for anyone to slip up in our position.

He can bring perspective to bear on questions: in the wider scheme, something may be of only miniscule importance; the adult applies distance to problems. He has a sense of how long life can be and how much time there is for us to recover. He is practical too: at moments, he will simply but authoritatively tell us to go to bed, not to think about it till morning and to make sure we are eating properly.

With a little practice, come to see that we invariably have a choice about who speaks inside us on our stage.

Of course the panicker, the depressive and the self-hater will always be offering their services to make lengthy speeches to us about our failings and our dark prospects. But we have an option to request someone else to take to the stage. We may need to search for them a bit more assiduously, we may need to do a certain amount of persuasion and training to help them find their way up the steps in the semi-darkness in good time. We might have to implore them to come up right now. But it can be done. At any moment of difficulty, we can simply say: What would the adult me do here and say in this or that situation?

And miraculously, there will always be an answer in our minds, because however difficult our past or present might have been, we’ll have banked enough experience of adulthood to put this character together.

Now the challenge is to regularly check ensure that the adult inside us has as much of our airtime as possible. It’s entirely within our remits to shape the running order of who speaks to us and when.

The adult is already inside us, now we need to give him the stage – and ensure we listen to the wisdom he, and therefore we, already well know about how to lead the rest of our lives.