‘Stop behaving like a child.’  Or even, ‘Act your age.’

This isn’t merely rude - though it might be  that too. In contact with given challenges,  

we revert back to an earlier stage in our  development. We leave behind our adult faculties,  

the ones associated with reason, logic, calm,  strength, forbearance and perspective, and slip  

very quickly into a child-like spectrum marked  by panic, rage, despair, terror and appeasement.

The specific occasions that shift us from adult to  child are an individual guide to our own traumas.

The reason why we behave like a child is that  traumas selectively arrest development. A part  

of us will remain fixed at whatever age we become  traumatised at; so though we may be 28 or 72,  

we will to all intents - in contact with a certain  inflammatory situation - resemble the frightened,  

bewildered and ashamed 3 or 5 year old we  once were - though we’ll be unlikely to  

notice this. No bell goes off in the mind  to signal, ‘You’re now shifting from being  

32 to being 2.’ The transition happens in a  flash, and it’s the work of years of therapy  

and self-exploration to be able to notice the  shift and take measures to attenuate the damage.

To guess at our original traumas, we need only  to study triggering situations and generalise  

outwards from them. Let’s imagine that we get  very worked up about a difficulty at passport  

control with a stern officer or about a dispute  with a neighbour who is threatening legal action  

because a tree we planted is blocking their  view. When we erase away the local details,  

we may be able to see an elemental structure and  can then ask ourselves questions accordingly:  

a powerful man is adopting a bullying  manner towards us. Does this remind us of  

anything in the past? Or: we’re suddenly being  accused of having done something ‘bad’ that we  

had no idea about and the repercussions feel  severe. Does this sound in any way familiar?

Memories tend to emerge. That stern  passport officer might map with eerie  

precision onto an extremely frightening  father. Or a legal dispute might in its  

psychological fundamentals hint at at some  awful bullying one suffered at school.

When there is a certain kind of crisis,  we should notice how fast we fall through  

the floors of adulthood, ten or twenty or  forty years/storeys below the present to  

the child-like basement. A part of us needs to  hold the other steady, see the hole blown in our  

minds by a triggering event - then ensure that  we step carefully around the gap and take a seat  

somewhere very safe on the edge of the room,  while we wait for reason to repair the damage.

We’re so afraid of patronising ourselves, we  can find it hard to accept the bewildering  

way in which, in certain areas, we truly can be  slammed back into being a frightened, panicky,  

perspective-less young version of ourselves. The  floors in our minds may be prone to collapse at  

moments of stress; but knowing the hazard is more  than half-way to a solution - and greater calm.