Luna Lovegood
@HolmesEurus
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As soon as I hear a “should” statement, I know that a client is suffering from an externally imposed expectation and is inevitably comparing her- or himself to a cultural ideal of “good” or “right” behavior, which then creates anxiety.
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If young people were taught early in life how to orient not toward happiness but instead toward meaning and fulfillment, a significant amount of their anxiety would be reduced. Instead of transmitting the message of happiness, we need to send a message of wholeness. This means that parents would receive the message from every source — pediatricians, teachers, clergy, friends, media — that there is so much more that is right with their children than wrong, and that the goal for their children is not necessarily happiness but a life of purpose, with a solid sense of self-trust leading the way.
The second prominent cultural message that leads to anxiety is the expectation of happiness and the denial of shadow. We live in a culture that chases the light and abhors the darkness; in fact, “the pursuit of happiness” is one of the guiding principles upon which American culture is predicated.
We worship the happy face and plaster on smiles when we venture into the world. Easygoing babies statistically receive more praise than fussy babies, and bubbly teens garner more positive attention than surly ones. In a culture that upholds the extrovert ideal as the pinnacle of personality types, we absorb the message early in life that if we’re prone to a more melancholic temperament, there must be something wrong with us. “Keep it light,” we learn. “Keep it peppy,” we hear. Sweep away the messy, unraveled, chaotic, loud parts of life and of yourself. Hide them in the dark.
Chasing the receding horizon of normal results in massive amounts of anxiety, for the implicit message is, once again, that you’re not okay as you are. The tragedy is that we spend our early years trying to cram ourselves into the “normal” box only to learn later in life that the people we revere most are those who dared to live outside the box. Then we’re left with the daunting task — in our late twenties at the earliest and most often at midlife — of excavating the buried parts of ourselves and relearning what it means to be fully alive and fully ourselves. Wouldn’t it have been so much easier if we had been encouraged to be ourselves from the beginning, recognizing that human beings come in all shapes, sizes, and variances, and that it’s these exact variances that create the colors that render us fully alive?
Wouldn’t it be so much healthier to eradicate the concept of “normal” completely from childhood expectations and allow children to be who they are without apology?