Loy Young

Have you forgotten how it felt to swoon over your high school sweetheart? The buckets you cried when she moved away? The agony of a math exam you didn’t study for? And the first time you rebelled against your parent’s control? It seems to me that many people today are so overwhelmed by problems and worries of our adult life that we forget how it felt to be young, and our kids are the ones who loose out. Hosting a radio show for teenagers in the early 90’s in Asheville, North Carolina, I noticed how bitter many young people had become.

The young people viewed most adults as either ignoring their problems entirely in the hope that they may go away by themselves or as offering ready-made solutions. Their parents could not stand to feel their children’s hurts, and wanted to fix their problems immediately.

One girl brought a friend of hers to the show one day with bandaged wrists after she attempted to kill herself. Janice’s boyfriend had dumped her as he was smitten with a new girl who just moved to town. Janice could not take the pain she felt and thought she would rather die than live without Thomas. It turned out that most of our regular teenage guests on the show had contemplated suicide at least once.

As we delved deeper into the circumstances that led to such a high number of suicide attempts, we found that most of these children came from overprotected homes in which the parents tried to shield their sons and daughters from all painful experiences that they themselves had gone through. Their intentions were good, but they deprived their children of much-needed learning experiences. As a consequence, their offspring were at a loss as to how to cope with any disaster that was bound to happen sooner or later.

Only one boy among our regular guests had never contemplated suicide. Jordon had a paper route through which he earned most of his own money. He was obviously much better equipped for dealing with rejection. Jordon told us that his father was killed when he was still very young. The boy had to learn at an early age to cope with the feelings of loss and abandonment and had found his own hero solution. The technique we acquire for dealing with upsets in our childhood often determines the chronic roles our emotional self chooses later in life.

1. The submissive victim

One beautiful woman from Costa Rica had found so much attention and approval for as a child that she never grew up. Her parents had been very domineering and only accepted her when she was quiet, sweet and demure. As she became older she stayed in this submissive role, still speaking with the squeaky voice of a little girl, and seeking out authoritarian people to receive love in the only way she knew how. She grew into a young woman only after learning to accept herself, which was quite a long journey. I could chart her emotional growth by her tone of voice that matured from her mousy whisper of age three, to six, to teenager, a young adult, and finally the confident soprano of a woman.

2. The accident-prone victim

Another chronic victim was the most accident-prone person I ever worked with. As soon as Helen recovered from one bout with a seemingly unfair fate, the next calamity would strike. Even she herself could no longer believe that such a series of catastrophes was a coincidence. She had become a menace to herself. Tracing the source for her behavior, we found that she had felt left out as a child. Both of her parents were partners in their own business and had worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day while Helen was young. They only made time for her when she bruised herself on a bicycle ride, fell from a tree, or had a water skiing accident. Then she was given all the attention in the world.

When Helen grew up, she endlessly recreated the same scenario. She dated men who had no time for her either, except, of course, when she lay in bed with a slipped disk or a broken leg. Only as she learned to give herself the attention she was craving from others did her accidents cease. That approach initially felt foreign to Helen. Didn’t victims scream for others to save them?

But once I inspired her that indeed she could be the star of Goodness Triumphs Over Adversity, which would lead to the heroine role, leaving behind the beginning victim role, she was ready to begin. After all, triumphing is just as juicy as heart-wrenching sorrows. Our emotional nature just wants to feel, express and be the star of our lives.