Losing Our Villages

“Please, tell me what to do.” I’m hearing more and more of this from clients of many ages and generations. The first time I heard this, I didn’t think much of being asked this. By the time I’d heard it multiple times, I had to stop, and I had to ask myself why. Why was this coming up for people?

As I think about this, a few things emerge.

Being Young with No Life Experience

Adolescence is a proving ground. In this phase of life, we need to test the waters, try new things, discover ourselves, and make the crazy mistakes that cause family members to smile, laugh, and say “Oh, that kid!” Then they hug us, and we know that we’re loved, and that we can learn from our mistakes. We get up and move forward in life.

Failing Is an Option

When we test the waters of youth, we come to understand that maybe we don’t know it all, and that we might be less capable than we thought we were. We start asking questions.

Some parenting styles also set a person up to be expected to know what they can’t possibly know. This happens in many abusive situations where the child is told to perform tasks that are age-inappropriate, or where a dysfunctional parent forces a child to make sense of something they are not mature enough to understand the entire picture of what is needed, and how the world works. This can, and often does, cause trauma and leave emotional scarring that bleeds into adult life. People become crippled by not understanding what to do in any given situation.

Another issue here is that parents set their kids up to “succeed” at the cost of not allowing failure. If you never learn to get up after a bad fall, how are you going to know you can survive the survivable? The gift of being able to dust yourself off and to learn from mistakes is HUGE.

More and more people are coming to therapy with struggles that are not really struggles but that turn into struggles because they never learned in childhood.

Being told to go get a job when you’ve never learned how to get the job creates genuine difficulties for both teens and younger adults. The job market has changed since the time when our great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents had to go out and get their first jobs.

At one point in time, the job was in a family-owned business, on a farm, or a formal apprenticeship process. Now, farms are large, and fast food isn’t a person’s first job; many teens do neither fast food nor retail. They want to create their own jobs and a company. The trades are not attracting as many people, and soft skills dominate hard skills. Yes, it’s messed up! It has changed.

Falling down is still needful; poor job reviews and the learning that comes because of failure is a good life skill to possess. You still learn to ride a bike by mastering balance, and by falling down and getting back on the bike. Those that master the basics master the art of success in a healthy way.

Covid

I realize now that Covid really altered how children and younger adults do things. The shutdown of school and other common social areas where life skills are learned shattered expectations.

When you are young, you plan it all out, and you believe that the dance will come, and your friends will all gather for the Friday and Saturday night fun. There is a belief that it can all be yours. And then a worldwide pandemic sweeps in and sends us all scurrying to our favorite messaging platform; Zoom expanded like it never had before. While we could communicate, we could not gather as we had, and social skills were lost. Our sense of knowing what to do—our how to deal with life situations—got stomped on. This pandemic affected everyone. Common sense was questioned.

Overnight, the waitlist for therapy rose to new heights as people attempted to cope. Therapists were needing to work it out for themselves, and at the same time help others. The world sank into a sink hole of “HELP ME! WHAT DO I DO?” People who once had healthy self-confidence now questioned the world and how to successfully cope with basic life choices. It was during this time that I started seeing clients again. Several years of a grief journey that sent me into reframing my life in new ways altered how I did life. I had to rethink and struggle before the pandemic hit, and I saw how it was affecting people.

When I think about this, and how we learn to get through the hard things, it boils down to learning in childhood that a crisis can be dealt with by having community support. This is why a healthy family system is so important, and the family blends into community. It really does take a village to raise a child, and we’re losing our villages.

It is time to recreate functional families and the villages around them that will turn into supportive communities. Lately, this is what I tell clients to do.

A village and a family are made up of all ages and identities. We need our village elders, and even the village dreamer. The elders have lived it, and the dreamer creates the unthinkable and challenges the norms. A healthy elder advises wisely, and a healthy dreamer challenges our norms yet has common sense. The elders push for homeostasis, and the dreamer pushes the limits. We learn from both sides.

I don’t want to see either the elder or the dreamer not be present in our learning process. 

There was a time when villages also had the religious, the spiritual, the skeptic, and the atheist, and everyone else in between. It seems that the village makeup is shifting, and I’m thinking we need it all. We need it all, and we need it to be healthy. We’re losing our balance and, with it, the ability to understand how to cope with basic life situations.

Elders and dreamers and everything in between teach us how to discover for ourselves what we need to do to get up and do it better the next time around. It is the circle of life.