by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
You Might’ve Been in ‘Trouble’ as a Child but You’re Not as an Adult – It’s Time To Let Go and Grow REAL
One of the weirdest things about growing up is that we often leave childhood without actually leaving childhood:
We get older, we get jobs, we dress up like ‘adults’, pay taxes, buy houses, become fathers and mothers, and still somehow find ourselves living according to rules that were written when we were eight years old (whether we know it consciously or not).
Saying that our childhoods shape the rest of our lives isn’t exactly a ground-breaking thing to say:
Most of us know that we develop patterns, scripts, coping mechanisms, and survival strategies that make perfect sense when we’re small and dependent but become completely unnecessary once we’re adults but the problem isn’t that we learned these strategies but that we forget to update them to align with the reality we find ourselves in as adults.
One of the biggest patterns I’ve seen plague people – both in my own life and in the lives of the people I coach – is the unconscious belief that we’re still going to get into some kind of ‘trouble‘.
Not legal trouble, not financial trouble, and not even relationship trouble – more the vague kind of stomach-tightening, nervous-system-freezing feeling that someone is about to tell us – or worse – that we’ve done something ‘wrong’ (imagine the horror of being ‘wrong’ – ugh!).
It’s a bit like walking around waiting to be called into the headmaster’s office except the headmaster only exists inside your own mind.
Perhaps the strangest thing, though, is that many of us have absolutely no idea that they’re doing it.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Trouble vs. Consequences: What We Cover in This Article
- You Might've Been in 'Trouble' as a Child but You're Not as an Adult – It's Time To Let Go and Grow REAL
- The Hidden Scripts We All Carry
- "Just Wait Until Your Dad Gets Home…"
- Waiting for Something That Never Comes
- Survival Skills Become Personality
- The Cost of Staying and Playing It 'Safe'
- What Getting Into Trouble Looks Like as an Adult
- The Shadow Self Isn't the Problem
- The 'Good' News
- Trouble vs Consequences
- The Path Forward into REALNESS
- The Final Word: The Past is DONE and Now You're Free
The Hidden Scripts We All Carry
Every child develops strategies for survival – that’s just part and parcel of being a human being:
If your childhood was ‘healthy’ enough, then the strategies you developed gradually dissolve because they’re no longer needed as you go through the different seasons of life and keep evolving with reality.
On the other hand, if your childhood involved emotional instability, then those strategies often become your personality.
This is one of the reasons I’m always talking about the Unholy Trinity:
These are the three forces that most commonly cause us to disconnect from our REALNES and to start sending very real ‘parts’ of ourselves into hiding as part of the Shadow Self.
Meanwhile, the version of ourselves we create to stay ‘safe’ and to be accepted in the eye of the word becomes the Ego (which is basically a kind of ‘mask’ we wear to survive but then forget that we put on in the first place).
This is what I call the Shadow Dance because the ego and the shadow are in a constant conflict where the ego spends its whole life trying to keep us ‘safe’ in an unreal way but the shadow spends its whole life waiting and encouraging us to come back home to reality.
In common language, we talk about the ego as though it’s just ‘arrogance’ or something like that but it usually isn’t – deep down it’s juts a frightened reaction to life and attempt to keep surviving the best way we once knew how (though it can definitely make us arrogant if that’s how we learned to feel ‘safe’).
“Just Wait Until Your Dad Gets Home…”
I know exactly where my own “in trouble” pattern came from because as a kid, I got into trouble pretty much every day:
Some of it was deserved and some of it absolutely wasn’t because – like many families – our family unit unconsciously developed roles and somewhere along the line I became the black sheep.
Once you’ve stepped into this role, it’s pretty amazing how easily other people’s emotions get projected onto you and somehow everything becomes your ‘fault’.
Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a sob story or anything and I’m not ‘blaming’ anybody because everybody was doing the best they could with what they had – the thing that affected me most wasn’t the punishment itself, though…it was the waiting:
I’d get home from school, something would happen, and then I’d hear those unforgettable words:
“Just wait until your Dad gets home“.
Those hours felt endless and my nervous system would completely lock up:
I couldn’t relax, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t enjoy anything…I all I could do was do what I did which was to simply wait knowing that something ‘bad’ was coming and that no amount of explaining would get me out of it.
The whole point of sharing this with you is that this ‘waiting for trouble’ feeling became wired into my body and so – long after childhood was over – my nervous system kept expecting the next ‘punishment’ to arrive:
Nobody was threatening me any more but my body hadn’t received the memo.
Waiting for Something That Never Comes
Looking back now, I can see how much of my early adult life was spent waiting for imaginary consequences because I was still just a boy in an adult body (an Adult Boy):
- I’d hesitate before making decisions (and then sometimes never act).
- I’d second-guess myself (then second-guess my second guess).
- I’d overthink conversations (then say something stupid anyway).
- I’d worry I’d upset somebody (even when some people are just gonna be upset no matter what you do).
- I’d prepare explanations nobody had asked for (because I felt like I needed to justify my existence and explain myself all the time).
- I’d apologise for things that didn’t require an apology (tbh, that might’ve just been an ‘English’ thing as we love apologising a few thousand times day).
- Etc. etc. etc.
Underneath all of it was one simple belief that had embedded itself in my body and nervous system:
“I’m about to get into trouble”.
Of course, the irony here was that nothing was actually happening and there wasn’t some authority figure waiting around the corner or some invisible judge keeping score so they could ‘get’ me later – there was just an old nervous system replaying an ancient prediction.
In other words, my body remembered childhood but reality had moved on.
Survival Skills Become Personality
Here’s where it gets interesting (or, at least, that’s what I think):
These childhood adaptations don’t just create problems like anxiety – they also create strengths:
For me, the fear of getting into trouble made me exceptionally observant and so I became very good at reading people and could sense moods and things like that with a pretty high degree of accuracy (based on conversations with the ‘moody’ people in question).
I learned how to adjust my personality depending on who I was around and could fit into most social situations that I found myself in:
I became careful, responsible, predictable, disciplined, and controlled and all of these skills have genuinely helped me because they’ve proven to be useful in coaching, relationships, and life and business as a whole.
They also came with a cost, though:
If your entire personality is organised around avoiding ‘trouble’ then you eventually stop living and become more interested in preventing pain than creating meaning.
That’s not freedom – it’s an emotional prison and so many of us still need to break out of it even though we’re now ‘adults’.
The Cost of Staying and Playing It ‘Safe’
The ego isn’t trying to ruin your life or anything and so you don’t need to ‘kill’ it – it’s just a filter that you’ve placed between yourself and reality to try and stop your life from becoming (even more) painful.
Unfortunately, safety isn’t the same thing as realness and so when avoiding trouble becomes your highest priority, you always end up sacrificing something else.
This “something else” is almost always YOURSELF:
- The spontaneous ‘parts’ disappear.
- The playful ‘parts’ disappear.
- The expressive ‘parts’ disappear.
- The emotional ‘parts’ disappear.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Eventually, the ego becomes a highly sophisticated prison guard whose main job is making sure the shadow never escapes but the tragedy with this is that the shadow isn’t dangerous – it’s just REAL.
What Getting Into Trouble Looks Like as an Adult
Most men aren’t walking around consciously thinking something like “Oh boy, I hope I don’t get into trouble today” – instead, it shows up in disguise:
-Maybe you’re terrified of promoting your business because you were accused of “showing off” as a child and so now you’re not getting anywhere with it.
-Maybe every time you became excited as a child you were told to “calm down” so now you struggle to express enthusiasm and everybody thinks you’re a robot.
-Maybe every time you got angry, you were punished instead of understood and so you’ve grown into a forty year old who can’t say “no” and has weak boundaries and harbours resentment towards everybody.
–Maybe joy itself became dangerous because your parents found it irritating and now your emotional range has narrowed so much that people describe you as “quiet” when really you’ve just become disconnected.
The specific stories differ for all of us but the pattern stays the same:
Some external experience taught you that expressing your real self leads to trouble and so your nervous system made the decision to hide first and live later.
Unfortunately, “later” never arrives…
The Shadow Self Isn’t the Problem
One of the biggest misunderstandings in personal development is that people think they need to become a “better” version of themselves when, usually, what they actually need is to become is a less disconnected version of themselves:
There’s a popular misconception that the shadow self must be full of ‘evil’ or something but it isn’t – it’s full of life (even Carl Jung who came up with the idea said that the shadow is 90% pure gold):
It’s your confidence.
- Your humour.
- Your creativity.
- Your anger.
- Your ambition.
- Your sexuality.
- Your tenderness.
- Your weirdness.
- Your real voice.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The ‘parts’ that got hidden weren’t necessarily ‘bad’ – they were simply inconvenient for whatever reason in the emotional environment you grew up in.
Children don’t ask “Is this healthy?” – instead, they tend to ask “Will this help me belong?” and if the answer is “No” then they hide themselves so they can belong.
They way forward is to realise that you already belong because you can TAKE YOUR PLACE as a real, functional adult human being and the healthiest way to do this is to come out of hiding.
The ‘Good’ News
You’re not six years old any more which means that you’re (probably) not waiting in your bedroom for somebody to come home and give you a bollocking and you’re not dependent on emotionally immature adults for survival.
You’re not trapped, you’re not powerless, and – assuming you’re not breaking the law or deliberately harming other people – you’re not actually going to get into trouble.
This sounds almost laughably obvious but it’s something that you might need to actively remind yourself of until your nervous system catches up and that ‘trouble’ feeling leaves your body once and for all.
Your nervous system doesn’t respond to logic – it responds to experience which means reclaiming your life isn’t about convincing yourself that you’re safe by thinking your way into it but by repeatedly showing yourself that you are in experience:
Every honest conversation, every healthy boundary you set and maintain, every creative risk, every time you tell the truth instead of hold back, and every time you allow yourself to be ‘seen’, you teach your body something new which is that:
“Nothing bad happened and I’m not in trouble”.
Eventually the old prediction starts to weaken and you can start to be who you actually are right now in reality.
Trouble vs Consequences
A related and important point here is that one of the biggest shifts we need to make as adults is learning the difference between trouble and consequences.
Basically, it goes like this:
As children, we experience trouble – this usually means that there’s someone bigger, more powerful, and more emotionally significant than us who can decide whether we’ve done something ‘wrong and it carries the feeling that we’re being judged, rejected, punished, or made to feel ashamed.
When you’re a child, this makes sense because your survival genuinely depends on the people around you and so the threat of losing connection with your caregivers feels like a threat to your entire world.
The problem is that many of us carry this feeling of ‘trouble’ into adulthood which is why so many of us still feel like we’ve done something ‘wrong’, still expect someone to be disappointed with us, or sit agonising about the moment when somebody is going to tell us off, withdraw approval, or make us feel small.
Luckily, being an adulthood works differently:
Adults don’t generally get into ‘trouble’ in the same way children do but they do experience CONSEQUENCES:
Consequences are simply the natural results of our choices – sometimes, they’re uncomfortable and involve making mistakes, having people be upset with us or disagreeing with us, or just not having things work out in general.
The difference between ‘trouble’ and consequences, though, is that none of these things mean that we’re bad, unsafe, or about to be punished.
This is why a real functional adult human being can make a mistake and say “I need to learn from this“, whereas an adult child – a child in an adult’s body – will stat to panic because “I’m in trouble / Something terrible is about to happen“.
This distinction between trouble and consequences can help you to step into a more real frame of reality because when you stop seeing life through the lens of “getting into trouble”, you can start engaging with reality instead of constantly trying to avoid imagined punishment.
The goal isn’t to become reckless or ignore consequences, though – Realness isn’t about doing whatever you want without caring about other people but about no longer allowing an outdated fear of punishment to control your entire life.
You’re the adult who can handle what happens next.
If you’re a man who wants to go deeper into shadow work then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men could be exactly what you’re looking for.
The Path Forward into REALNESS
My coaching almost always back to the same three stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action – let’s use them here to keep you out of ‘trouble’ once and for all:
1. Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego)
You can’t change what you can’t see so the first-step is to start noticing where your life is organised around avoiding invisible ‘punishment’ and ‘trouble’.
Ask yourself some basic questions to raise Awareness:
- What am I afraid will happen if I fully express myself?
- Whose voice tells me I’ll get into trouble?
- Is that voice actually mine?
- How old do I feel when that fear appears?
Most fears lose much of their power once they’re seen clearly because they’re actually just F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).
2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow Self)
Instead of rejecting the ‘parts’ you’ve hidden then start to put strategies in place to welcome them back:
- If you’ve hidden your anger, learn how to express it in a real way.
- If you’ve hidden your confidence, practise taking up space.
- If you’ve hidden your creativity, then create something.
- If you’ve hidden your joy, let yourself belly-laugh without apologising for it or holding back.
Your shadow isn’t asking to take over – it’s just asking for you to return to yourself.
Wholeness isn’t achieved by becoming perfect but by allowing yourself to become integrated.
3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life)
Insight changes nothing unless behaviour changes too and so the final step is to pick one area where you’ve been holding back because of imagined consequences and to DO something about it:
- Have the conversation.
- Launch the project.
- Say no instead of yes.
- Say yes instead of no.
- Speak up.
- Stop explaining yourself.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Trust that your adult self can handle whatever happens next because it can (that’s kinda the whole point).
The Final Word: The Past is DONE and Now You’re Free
One of the most powerful and personal revolutions a man can experience is the moment he realises that the authority figure he’s been obeying for decades no longer exists:
The prison door has been open for years and the only thing keeping him inside is habit.
Realness begins when you stop asking yourself “Will I get into trouble?” and flip the script so you can start asking “What would the real me do?” – the answer doesn’t come from your ego but from the parts of you that have been waiting patiently in the shadows all along.
You’re safe enough now to stop pretending.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to get out of ‘trouble’ and to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to put yourself in the zone.
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