Trying to Fit Into a Toddler Suit That I’ve Outgrown
What happens when I attempt to back-pedal on the personal growth journey
This story is for anyone who has ever tried to travel backwards on the path of personal growth — reverting to old behaviours that no longer serve. Over thirty years ago a poem came through me, where I described it as ‘trying to fit back into a toddler suit that I’ve outgrown.’
The other day I scheduled one of my weekly Favourite Friday quotes on my Instagram and Facebook pages. I used Liz Porter’s wonderful description of herself as
“a personal growth fanatic who’s stopped shrinking into places I’ve outgrown”
Have you had this sensation?
It’s when you have a deep shift, start doing or saying things differently, then there can be an ‘invitation’ to go back and do that ‘old thing’ again.
But shrinking back into that old pattern seems LUDICROUS and TOTALLY unavailable to the new version of me.
Here’s what I mean:
I used to have a tendency to gather others in to collectively moan and bitch about something that had triggered me; not seeking empowered solutions, mind you, just bitching and moaning in a disempowered way. It was like a comforting ‘pity party’ or even an ‘anger-orgy.’
It’s definitely helpful to debrief to others instead of keeping things to myself, but somehow I ended up seeing that ‘gathering of a posse’ reaction for what it was — a temporary surface venting of the emotion, an assembling of willing allies to my cause, a collective placing of the problem ‘out there’, a way to avoid having a courageous conversation with the person or people involved and a result that my personal growth had grown precisely NOWHERE! Once this tendency was duly noted, it had to be given up.
Having let go of that habitual reaction to a triggering situation, I’d more often pause and wonder, “What’s in this for my growth? If it wasn’t triggering me, there’d be nothing to look at.” I would then seek help if I couldn’t process this stuck place myself. After uncovering the repressed charge inside of me, a lightness of spirit and the potential to speak up or ask for change would become available.
Here comes the test
This would be followed months later by a more intense trigger which had me reaching for the phone, seeking again a posse of outraged supporters on my side!
Hang on, wait! If I could manage to spot it, I could take the pause, take a breath and see that that old reaction is SO ludicrous and NOT aligned with where I’m at now. I simply CAN’T shrink back into that limited place of simply venting and not having a courageous conversation with the person involved.
In the moment of writing these lines in a poem over thirty years ago, I resonated deeply with that place Liz Porter describes as “shrinking into places I’ve outgrown”.
“It’s just a toddler suit that I’ve outgrown. It’s no use wondering how to fit back in there. I’ve grown too much for that.”
Barbara Cook is an Australian author and Awareness Facilitator, whose various modalities help people turn their “stuck” places into opportunities for growth.
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