It has always been a horrendous balancing act between our created social identity and what we are.
Most parents when we come to experience this for the first time in life just emphasize the need to develop the outer role, our gender, social class, vocation, nationality, race or some religion, and thus completely ignore the meaning of the social game that hits us like a tidal wave. We are called to relate to this psychological content here and now. And their ignoring of this naturally only makes us even more hostile. And as a kind of a compromise, we build ourselves a social personality out of pure self-preservation. Defiant as a hell. Usually it has very little to do with what the parents are, because this is about a strong defense against external influences. It is about what they in this way choose to represent. Our young people are involved in a heroic inner struggle, and it is not obvious to them how they could bring with them the absolute authenticity they sense into an adult social life. And for some of us it is just what we have to do. But it comes with a price, and parents routinely usually choose the part of being a single minded one sided outer personality. And since they themselves have abandoned their inner voice once, they abandon their children’s too, because they are experiencing the same horror as they once felt all over again. So instead of attending their kids’ point of view and agree on how terribly superficial, inauthentic and fictitious everything is. While at the same time claim that there is a price to be paid attached to maintaining this authenticity. And to embrace it all in. Our parents, and the so called grown up world regularly become vicious about it in all their well meaning acts of goodness.
This experience is, of course, individually deeply valuable to our personality from a human point of view, but it has a flip side. We cannot be, or sustain what someone else wants us to be. And we have to stand up to this.
Right here, is where initiations entered into traditional cultures of all time before our civilisation as we know it. They have learned about its importance from experience.
Over time it taught them that for most people it is enough to play along and just be what is expected of them in different contexts and adapt. But for many others, this is not enough at all. Not to say that you have to be an opportunist as an alternative for the rest of your life.
This uncomfortable situation in life have something very important to convey to us all. And this is what Christianity as a collective have made us forget.
What this is really about is how we are to become humans. And it is not like picking flowers at the roadside.