#HealthyAdult by Lori Jean Glass

Author:Lori Jean Glass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-05-14T01:55:08+00:00

Sassy Scarlett and Your Inner Adolescent

I named my inner adolescent Scarlett. There are multiple reasons for this decision. Red has always been my favorite color. My star sign is Sagittarius, the archer. And that part of myself can go into situations guns a-blazin’.

Recently, some of my close friends bought a necklace for me that had this inscription: There’s a fire in her soul and grace in her heart.

How fitting, I thought. The fire in my soul is Scarlett, and the grace in my heart is Savannah, my inner child.

Scarlett felt like it was her against the world. My stepdad traveled, and all the other kids had left the house. With my mom’s alcoholism, our family system continued to lack nurturing or trust. As an adolescent, I wanted to have different experiences, but the untreated trauma kept me from repair. So if anybody wronged me, all I knew to do was to come at them with a fight, because no one else had my back.

At that point, I was not capable of understanding myself. I didn’t have that kind of maturity. I was trying to push down the pain of losing my father, the sexual abuse I had been through, the reality of my mother’s alcoholism, a severe learning disability that had gone untreated, and more. As a result of not knowing how to manage and tolerate the feelings that arose as a result of the trauma, I turned into an aggressive adolescent when I was upset, an attitude that was further fueled by alcohol. Behind all that aggression was the feeling of not being enough, and I worked really hard to look like I was enough.

It’s safe to say that I didn’t have a healthy process of individuation. As I was trying to create my identity, I felt a lot of guilt about my mom’s death. More specifically, I felt guilty about not being able to save her by suggesting she go to West Virginia to say goodbye to her dying father. Had I not suggested that, I told myself she would have been alive. I could only think of how the pills and drink would have never touched her lips, and how her heart would have been saved from the heart attack that we later learned she had. I carried that guilt in my suitcase for years and became dangerously codependent with others so I didn’t have to feel responsible for someone’s death ever again.

Today, I’m able to see that the way I responded as a teenager wasn’t my fault. I can see that the past had guided me there but certainly doesn’t define who I am today.

Now when I parent my inner adolescent and little girl as a healthy adult, I actually like myself. This might sound strange—for me to say that I like myself. However, this will make sense to you if you grew up with a core belief that you were broken in some way. You can learn to appreciate yourself again, accepting all the parts of yourself.

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