Dare to Grow Up - Introduction

he birth of the idea for Dare to Grow Up was germi- nated by a conclusion I came to after thirty years of private practice as a psychological healer: nearly all of my clients are significantly confused about living with effective boundar- ies. This boundary disorientation transcends socio-economic class and levels of education. It appears that the issue of good boundaries is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a result of any early family experience.

I then asked the question: so what’s the big deal about knowing how to live with effective boundaries? The answer came quickly. Boundaries support safety, personal identity and the ability to create meaningful relationships. Without them, the flow of our uniqueness easily gets lost in the ocean of de- mands and expectations that surround us. We end up neither knowing who we are nor our place in the human community.

It gradually became clear that knowing how to create safe- ty, support personal identity and build significant relationships reflected a deepening of maturity. I decided that the struggles I was witnessing in these three areas reflected a profound truth: human maturation is not natural.

It appears that human maturity, or growing up, is similar to the cultivation of crops; some seed can simply be tossed about and regardless of light, water and nutrients, this seed will prevail and come of age. The rest of us resemble the seed in need of stewardship, where attention needs to be paid to weed-ing, watering and enriching the ground that holds us.

The culture endorses the spurious belief that maturity au- tomatically accompanies the accumulation of years. However, when we don’t get the help we need to identify the proper time for learning life lessons, we run the risk of remaining in an ad- olescent holding pattern well into our later years. In order to attend to the soul’s need for deepening, we will need to seek support for our evolving development.

So most of us don’t just arrive into adulthood. We do best when welcomed by a community of adults and when the weed- ing, watering and enriching described in this book takes place. When the welcome is authentic, we are taught that life’s mas-teries are dependent upon a willingness to remain a student of life’s mysteries. I remain deeply thankful for the welcomes I have received along the way and committed to pass on what I’ve learned about those welcomes in the following pages of Dare to Grow Up. As you start this journey, let me now welcome you...