Do you ever wonder how people who are grown up seem to make childish or irresponsible choices?

 

This can happen to anyone including ourselves. Look at the Epstein files for instance, how did grown adults behave this way?

 

One of the ways I went looking for that answer was through reading—and one book in particular gave me language for how this happens.

 

It described three common ways people adapt to growing up without what they needed for their emotional growth.

 

The tough guy
The nice guy
The party guy

 

To make it simpler, I’ll use tough girl, nice guy, and party girl.

 

The tough girl learns to protect herself by not letting anyone in.

 

The nice guy learns to please, slowly erasing his own needs.

 

The party girl looks for relief through fun, pleasure, and distraction—until she loses herself in it.

 

These patterns aren’t moral failures.

 

They’re unconscious survival strategies.

 

When we don’t know another way, protection is what we choose.

 

The problem is that none of them allow us to live from the heart.

 

They don’t reveal who we are—they cover it up.

 

Once I became conscious of these patterns, I started seeing them everywhere—in myself and in the people around me.

 

That’s when something else began to stand out.

 

We use phrases like bad boy, nice guy, or party girl all the time, rarely questioning them.

 

I once heard a woman refer to a man she had an exclusively sexual relationship with as a “sex boy.”(I changed what she said slightly for the sake of the reader).

 

What struck me was this: all of these labels use boy or girl—not man or woman.

 

No one says tough man or party man.

 

And no one actually wants a bad man or a bad woman. Those people belong in prison.

 

A man or a woman is a grown-up—and grown-ups don’t live out the same immature, unhealthy behaviors we excuse in boys and girls.

 

The interesting thing is that in today's world it seems these dysfunctional ways of being are widely accepted.

 

Maybe we live in a culture that worships youth.

 

I once heard someone say, “Everyone wants a young person’s body, but no one wants their mind.”

 

There’s a reason we’re meant to outgrow certain behaviors.

 

Boys and girls experiment. Men and women integrate and evolve.

 

I once knew someone who was widely known as a “bad boy.” He broke up multiple marriages and seemed magnetic to women.

 

From the outside, it might have looked exciting.

 

Up close, it wasn’t.

 

I would drive past his house and see rocks thrown through the windows.

 

I heard he slept with a gun under his bed.

 

There is always a cost for how we live.

 

He had his own story.

 

Abandoned and psychologically abused by his parents.

 

You could see it clearly: hurt people hurt people when they don’t heal.

 

He used these women to replace the mother who left him and became, with his actions, the father who abused him.  He was a child in a man's body.

 

The women involved weren’t better off either.

 

They had their own dysfunction that drew them to him.

 

They were deeply insecure, immature and attention seeking looking to fill in what emotionally wasn’t given to them when they were younger and usually unaware of it. A girl in a woman's body.

 

They lived under enormous stress after breaking up their families.

 

I can’t imagine that years later they look back and feel it was a wise decision.

 

That’s what a “bad boy” really looks like and the aftermath.

 

And this is what happens when we don’t slow down and ask better questions.

 

There is a better way.

 

One of the problems we face is that we rarely talk about the benefits of adulthood.

 

We often make it sound like a burden.

 

I hear young people say they don’t want children because adulthood looks exhausting or restrictive.

 

But I would ask: what’s the alternative?

 

Staying a child forever?

 

Living only for indulgence?

 

That may sound appealing for a while, but it always gets old—and it always ends.

 

There is a deep beauty that comes from doing what we were born to do.

 

Not everyone should have children, and I believe that deeply.

 

But most of us will eventually be forgotten.

 

When love is poured into a child, something of us continues—whether our name is remembered or not.

 

There is a time to be a boy or a girl.

 

If that were the highest calling, I believe life—or God—would have kept us there.

 

But being a man or a woman carries an almost unlimited honor and privilege.

 

I don’t think we’ve even begun to unlock what that truly means.

 

Today's world may be filled with shallowness and sell quick fixes and dysfunction, but it will never replace true authenticity and meaning.

 

I believe that as we come to recognize and understand dysfunction: we can make healtheir choices and become the men and women we're capable of being.

 

Nothing less will satisfy our souls.

 

Wishing you all the best,

Bert