My 40 year-old client’s wise adult is 15

Dear Diane,

I have a question about the adult ego. I have a 40 year-old client that identifies her strong/wise adult with a child age, usually 15 year-old. When I used the script of assimilating a strong adult she said “I don’t know any.” She was able to identify the 15 year-old as able to ask for help, make decisions, able to be confident, but I was unsure if it was appropriate to use that in the adult strengthening given her history of being a parentified child. This patient in the past has also identified a wise adult aged in her 80’s, 90’s, or 100’s, but never an age that is reflective of her current age of 40. I am needing direction in this type of situation.

Thank you for not only this email, but truly, I am so grateful for my experience at Wellness and the path that it has opened me up to in my personal life.
 
Respectfully,
Jannette Eldred
Internship 40 

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Dear Janette,

Thank you for your kind words regarding your work with Wellness.

It is important for the client to eventually be able to experience a strong adult ego state. But for this and many clients, this is the essence of their work! 

Because she was the parentified child, it is understandable that she had no role model of a strong, successful, adequate adult in her life. She sounds like the adult child of alcoholics, who never were children because of needing to take care of the parents and then as adults, become like little children because their emotional growth has been stunted.

So even though we try to get an adult ego state at the beginning, we often have to do the work of the Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy first. Be patient and realize that as you do the inner child work, your client is learning to become the loving nurturing parent within. This nurturing parent within will continue to grow like a little flower at first, which later on will bloom tall, bright and strong.

So it would be good to start with the fifteen-year-old that has stepped forward. Rather than just working with her in the adult ego strengthening portion of the process, get your client to go back to the time when this 15 year-old had to be “the adult.” Doing the regular regression work with the “adult child” will help you understand why the words strong and wise don’t work for her. But it will also give the 15 year-old a chance to express herself, gain compassion for herself, and begin to “grow up.”  Then have an inner birthday party for her and have her become 16, then 18, etc.  Proceed that way until her wise adult is near the age of 40. This is a method for working with developmentally arrested ego parts and helping them to internally mature.

You can explain to her ahead of time that this is what you will be working on together as part of her therapy goals. She may have dreams about this and may experience this young girl actually maturing within her. Again, there is no rush and it may take a year depending on how much abuse, neglect, and shock she experienced as a child.

Let me know how this works and any other questions you have. I will be putting your question and my answer in my Blog as I think other people would be interested in this as well.

 Sincerely,

Diane Zimberoff, LMFT

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