Homecoming

Problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience, not merely corrective experience but through a reliving of early fear (sadness, anger).
—ALICE MILLER

Adult children have a great need to figure things out because their parents were unpredictable adult children themselves.

Grief work, which has been called original pain work, demands that we reexperience what we could not experience when we lost our parents, our childhood, and, most of all, our sense of I AMness.

The way we handle new beginnings depends on how well we were handled in our first beginning.

Adding to the difficulty is that during adolescence, the parents are in the “middle-age crazies.” This is not a pretty picture.

The accompanying charts show the various stages of human development with its transitions and recycling

Each stage builds on the preceding one. The foundation for it all is childhood.

Pam Levin has suggested that the basic childhood needs get recycled every thirteen years.

According to therapist Pam Levin, when these ego strengths are present, four basic powers are available to us—the power of being, the power of doing, the power of identity, and the power of having basic survival skills.

posits four basic ego strengths as the necessary components of a healthy childhood. They are hope, willpower, purpose, and competence.