You are not crazy or broken.

"You are not crazy or broken. You are simply blocked, stuck in a pattern of feeling, thinking, and behaving that's not going to get you what you want."

Every new stage of life requires us to learn new skills, habits, and systems. But many of us have been blocked somewhere in our development. We got stuck, and now we need help to get moving again.

Maybe we are not stuck in every area of life, but we find ourselves unable to do something that we want. Some goals seem just out of reach, and no matter how hard we try, they keep escaping from us.

We have a global maturity crisis.

We live in the most under-fathered and under-mothered society in history. Too many parents aren't doing their job: delivering their children into competent adulthood, ready to develop their careers, marry, have children, or pursue whatever good things their hearts desire.

Many people have grown up with spoiled, adolescent-like parents rather than mature mothers and fathers. Their childhood was spent in a house with no adults, lacking the emotional support and practical training needed to become adults themselves.

This lack of structure and support leads to anxiety and even depression in children, which they learn to cope with using a variety of strategies. These strategies work in a limited way during childhood, but eventually they fail, which usually happens around the time they are expected to take on adult responsibilities.

This combination of the failure of old coping methods and taking on new responsibilities can push people to the breaking point, leading to their becoming stuck in unhealthy thinking and behavioural patterns.

These patterns get passed on from generation to generation. A kind of family curse.

Most of the men and women with whom I work carry the burden of being underdeveloped in one aspect of life or another, blocked from improving by ingrained childhood coping strategies.

Most adults can identify their unhealthy coping behaviors, but changing them on our own can be very hard. Change is uncomfortable and risky, especially if we can't be sure that we are changing for the better. So we resist, perhaps subconsciously.

"I know what I need to do to fix my life, but every time I try, I get distracted or too anxious to follow through." This is how one otherwise very successful man explained it to me.

"The problem-solving skills that work in my career are not working in my personal life, and that is very frustrating. I can usually solve any problem that I face, but intimate relationships are different. I keep making the same mistakes over and over again", explained a different client.

Their education and on-the-job experience have taught them the skills and habits that make them successful in their careers, but they still fall back on old childhood coping strategies when faced with personal challenges.

Below is a list of the most common childhood coping strategies that will ruin your life and relationships as an adult. Do any of them seem familiar?

• Dissociation: being easily distracted, daydreaming, listless, depressed, and disconnecting from reality in times of stress
• Self-medication: drugs, alcohol, cheap dopamine (video games, TV, music, porn, masterbation), junk food, thrill-seeking
• Self-harm: overeating, overdrinking, overworking, overexercising, excessive or unwarned self-criticism, anything done intentionally to hurt or punish ourselves
• Withdrawing: conflict avoidance, self-imposed isolation, being socially and emotionally detached from important relationships, difficulty bonding
• Avoidance or denial: a refusal to accept the facts or reality of the situation, often displayed through procrastination, rumination, and passive-aggressiveness
• Violence: lashing out at others verbally or physically, breaking things, or provoking violence against yourself

All of these childhood coping strategies must be unlearned and replaced with habits and methods that suit your needs as an adult. I say replaced because removing one unhealthy coping mechanism without replacing it with a better one creates a vacuum, and that tends to pull in other unhealthy coping mechanisms to fill the gap.

A Generation Raised by Children

1 in 4 children does not have a father in the home.

Many more children don't have an adult man as a father. Instead of a father, they have a weak man-child more resembling an older brother than a paternal figure.

Because of this, young boys have no one to introduce them to the world of men or demonstrate how to interact in a mature manner with other men or women. They lack a role model of masculine family leadership to imitate. They have no man to guide them in developing their own masculinity, which is just another word for male maturity, which in turn comes from shouldering a man's responsibilities.

They get stuck in permanent adolescence.

Under-fathered young girls never learn how to interact with mature men, set healthy boundaries, receive positive attention, or identify the differences between mature men and "males," or underdeveloped and immature men.

Under-fathered boys and girls never learn how to develop an internal locus of control; that is, they never learn to direct their own destiny. Instead, they remain at the mercy of external events and other people to regulate their emotions and thinking.

While the issue of being under-fathered is beginning to be addressed publicly as a serious social issue, many people still mistakenly believe that we have an overmothered society.

Just because someone has a biological mother doesn't mean they are being mothered.

Only a mature woman can mother a child. Yes, an immature woman or girl can care for a child like a big sister, but that's not mothering.

Mothering includes all the physical aspects of child care plus the teaching of emotional regulation, self-care skills, basic literacy, indoctrination into the father's religion and culture, respect for the father, and respect for masculinity and femininity.

She prepares her boys for the day they leave her to enter the world of men, and her daughters for the day they become wives and mothers of their own children. Proper mothering is very rare in today's world. It is almost as rare as proper fathering.

In short, men and women today are not being raised to be husbands, fathers, wives, and mothers. Many were not even raised to be adults.

This immaturity, which is really a lack of skills, only comes out when we take on a new responsibility like marriage.

Marriage is for adults, not big children. Couples that enter marriage immaturely and unprepared are afflicted with a whole host of mostly small problems. But even small things add up and can break apart a relationship.

Over the years, I have heard several variations of the following: "I don't know why we got divorced; it wasn't any one thing; it was a whole bunch of little things that kept undermining our love and respect for each other until I just couldn't stand it any more."

If you have these kinds of marriage problems, there is nothing wrong with you or your spouse. You're not crazy or broken. All you need to do is learn a few new life and relationship skills, manage your emotions better, and change your thought patterns and actions into more mature ones that get you the marriage that you want.

All you need to do to fix your marriage is finish the growing-up process.

This will also supercharge your career, strengthen your relationships with family and friends, and even improve your mental and emotional health.

How do I finish maturing?

To finish growing up, you have to "become your own parent" and provide for yourself what your mother and father could not. How do you provide it for yourself when you don't have it to begin with?

You need a simple, easy, and repeatable system that you can follow to move you incrementally towards full maturity by taking on and mastering new responsibilities.

Growing towards maturity is not a single act; it's a process we engage in over time. Back before we had children raising children, when we had not just intact families but intact communities, children went through this process organically with the support of their family and neighbors. You will have to use a substitute process.

This is the process of change I use for my clients:

Most of my clients start with a 12-week program to build agency, or the ability to control their instincts, emotions, thoughts, and actions in a way that gets them the outcomes they want.

The first lesson is that most of life's problems are the result of old, obsolete thought patterns that have existed since childhood.

"My father had not taught me how to be an adult man and had not initiated me into the world of men. Because of this, I retained many immature traits and coping strategies from my childhood." Explained one of my coaching clients.

"My old coping strategies worked when I was a kid, but now that I am an adult, they are destroying me and my relationships.

For instance, when I was a kid and faced with stressful situations I couldn't handle, I would dissociate by watching TV or playing video games. As a kid, gaming helped me manage my stress, but as an adult, it prevented me from solving my problems and made everything worse."

The solutions that worked in childhood are not suitable for adult challenges and responsibilities.