sometimes at moments of particular stress one adult will turn to another and say stop behaving like a child or even act your age this isn't merely rude though it might be that too it seems that in contact with given challenges we can revert back quite quickly to an earlier stage in our development we leave behind all of our adult faculties the ones associated with reason logic calm strength and perspective and slip very quickly into a childlike Spectrum marked by Panic rage despair Terror and appeasement the specific occasions that shift us from adult to child are an individual guide to our traumas the reason why we behave like a child is that traumas selectively arrest emotional development a part of us is going to remain fixed at whatever age we become traumatized at so though we may be 28 or 72 we will to all intents in contact with a certain kind of inflammatory situation resemble the frightened bewildered and ashamed three or five-year-olds we once were though of course will be unlikely ever to notice this Nobel goes off in the mind to Signal you're now shifting from being 32 to being two the transition happens in a Flash and it's the work of years of therapy and self-exploration to be able to notice the shift and take measures to soften the damage to guess at our original traumas we need only to study triggering situations and then generalize outwards from them let's imagine that we get very worked up about a difficulty at passport control with a Stern officer or about a dispute with a neighbor who's threatening legal action because a tree we planted is blocking their View when we Erase Away the local details we may be able to see an elemental structure and can then ask ourselves questions accordingly a powerful man is adopting a bullying manner towards us this remind us of anything in the past or we're suddenly being accused of having done something bad that we had no idea about and the repercussions feel severe does this sound in any way familiar memories tend to emerge that Stern passport officer might map with Eerie Precision onto an extremely frightening father or a legal dispute might in its psychological fundamentals hint at some awful bullying once suffered at school when there is a certain kind of Crisis we should notice how fast we can fall through the flaws of adulthood 10 or 20 or 40 years slash stories below the present to the childlike basement of the Mind a part of us needs to hold the other steady see the hole blown in our minds by a triggering event and then ensure that we can step carefully around the Gap and take a seat somewhere very safe on the edge of the room while we wait for reason to repair the damage we're so afraid of patronizing ourselves we can find it very hard to accept the bewildering way in which in certain areas at times we truly can be slammed back into being a frightened panicky perspectiveless younger version of ourselves flaws in our minds may be prone to collapse at moments of stress but knowing the danger is more than halfway to a solution and greater and deserve it calm