Have you noticed how the Syriza government is being called childish?

The head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, said that there was an urgent need for dialogue ““with adults in the room”.

The FT calls them a “problem child” and “student politicians”. The Telegraph says it has
“A childish reluctance to confront reality”

This judgement comes after long descriptions of the abject misery that so many poorer Greeks have been suffering for years. Hunger and chronic illness seem particularly real, at least to those poorer Greeks.

The people who are putting enormous pressure on individual Greeks consider themselves to be mature and sensible, aware of the deaths and hunger, misery, cold and fear but understand that these things are a very sad but necessary price to pay for a strong economy. 

Home ownership is considered something that grownups do, and social housing tenants are childish. Perhaps that's why so many social tenants bought their council house and either sold it to someone who is making a killing from buy-to-let or became homeless when they couldn't afford to replace the boiler. What we are saying is that the rich and powerful are mature and the poor and vulnerable are children. It's widely agreed that these children - the homeless, social tenants, people on benefits - are an obstruction to a strong economy.

I suppose it depends on your definition of a strong economy: certainly, if all our own unproductive pensioners and disabled people and people with learning difficulties were to quietly disappear then our economy would indeed become very much stronger. 

Germany has a strong economy and Angela Merkel is a very respected, mature leader. Here she is, telling a child that ‘politics is tough.’ Germany is currently reaching the limit of what its people can stand in terms of immigration; they’ve taken in and are supporting a lot of refugees. So many that some refugee camps have been attacked by arsonists who would prefer that these people were eliminated.

This intimately affects everyone. If we take the clever-clever grown up path of sneering at the poor because, “The Economy” then we follow the very well worn route that leads to murder by neglect. Yes, very much in the UK. If we take every refugee and homeless person into our home we instantly fail.

Managing our pain when observing other peoples suffering is an art. Managing it without becoming a scornful poverty-porn consumer seems to be particularly difficult. Knowing our personal boundaries around what we can and can’t give is essential. But we need to work at it. When we don’t, when we dismiss vulnerable people as immature, a drain on our economy, then the impact it has on us as individuals can be ultimately devastating. 

Ask any mature German.

Working with parts of our younger selves is powerful therapeutic work. Thinking about ways in which we learned to adapt to our earliest environments is not only informative but also useful in terms of being in the here and now as an integrated adult, a person who’s aware of some of the major influences on their personality and largely in control of them. That awareness and practice is a complete piece of work in itself and many people are properly content when they’ve gained mastery over these previously unknown aspects of themselves.  

The implication of this kind of work is that our parents were not perfect. To the thinking, reasoning parts of us that is obvious. No one is perfect, we are not perfect, our parents could not ever be perfect, but to our child selves this is radical information.

Remember this work is not about blame, it is about understanding.

In order to grow we need to experience challenge and learn that the world does not revolve around us. It’s painful. To an infant it can feel like an existential threat when their mother doesn’t immediately respond to their hunger or need for physical contact, it seems reasonable to believe that they feel abandoned and that their life is at risk. But as the mother returns within a short period of time the infant learns that her life isn’t at risk and that her mother will care for and love her. She learns, in a healthy manner, to tolerate those much-reduced feelings of fear and loss.

If we’re told not to cry when we fall over we learn that crying when we experience fright and pain is not acceptable. Goodness knows, if we cried every single time we hurt ourselves there would be times when we did nothing but weep, but sometimes it’s useful to submit to the complex feelings of physical hurt and shed a tear.

Michael* just couldn’t do that, he’d been told that showing his feelings when he was hurt in any way, physically or emotionally, was inappropriate. In therapy he had discovered that it was not the end of the world to feel what he was feeling and that some expression of it could be very healthy indeed.

He realised that what he’d learned at home about what was appropriate and inappropriate had been harmful to him. He remembered how devastated he was when he hurt himself and his father dismissed it and told him to dismiss it too, even though it hurt so much. More remembrance compounding feelings of anger, blame, sadness and sorrow came up and we worked through those coming to a more balanced understanding of the complexities of family relationships and situations.

At the bottom of all this work, of listening to and caring for his younger selves, was a deep sadness that Michael’s parents were never going to care for him in the way he needed at critical points in his life. There was no way in which they could because that time had passed, and his parents could not know that these were critical moments. Michael would not be the first client to really, profoundly yearn for a different past: “I want my dad to realise how shocked I was and pick me up. I want him to tell me it’s OK and let me catch my breath. He’s never going to do that.”

That profound sadness had always been there and Michael became aware that this emotion seemed to be one of his fundamental ways of being. The knowledge compounded his sadness.

Then Michael grew. He understood that he was a person who felt a lot of sadness and now he knew why. He knew that there was no way in which he could go back in time and make his father behave differently. And he knew that he didn’t want to remain a person immersed in sadness for the rest of his life. That knowledge – both of his underlying sadness and that he didn’t want to have sadness infecting every part of his life – impelled Michael to determine to change things.

And he did. Michael didn’t throw in his job and run off to India to become a monk but he did move his life in a different direction. Nothing massive, just a few degrees of difference but those few degrees meant that over a few months Michael changed his job, altered his intimate relationship for the better, gained more respect from his friends. He spoke with his father, carefully, with love and stability, only to discover that as he aged his father regretted being so tough throughout Michael’s childhood.