Daughter won’t grow up

QUESTION: Masters please help me understand my daughter who runs away from all situations she finds challenging. She cannot keep a job. She seems very emotionally fragile one moment, then very argumentative and defensive the next. She is easily depressed and cannot always focus. She has made many bad decisions and we have had to financially support her and pay off debts, as a result. She threatens self-harm and suicide if we don’t help her. She is now on the other side of the world and asking daily for assistance. I don’t understand the woman she has become. I am afraid what will happen if she is cut off because in my heart, I don’t feel this is a normal situation. ~Milly Claire, Canada

ANSWER: Your daughter is stuck emotionally at about ten years of age. Her adult body makes her think she knows what she is doing. She is in a constant state of fear – fear that she will be forced to take responsibility for things beyond her desire or that she will have to be on her own.

She has responded to these fears by finding that she is capable of manipulating her parents into doing everything she chooses not to do, and you have gone along with her program. You have been facilitating her dependence on you by always coming to her rescue. Her philosophy has become: “Why try to understand life when I can get someone else to take care of everything for me?”

Yes, she has used her parents’ greatest fear: that something will happen to their precious child if they don’t capitulate to her demands – the old “I’ll harm myself” threat. Your daughter has been using some variation on this theme for years. And you, not wanting her harmed, have copied the fraternity initiate’s paddling request of his brothers: “Please, sir, may I have another?”

She is still the carefree child allowed to go out and play with no regard to having first done her homework or her chores. She is not living the life she planned before coming to Earth because she refuses to learn anything about her life lessons. If she does not at least start on the lessons, she will have to do them all over again in another life.

She is really spinning out of control lately and it is time to apply the brakes. If you want to salvage this lifetime for her, set some firm guidelines on her behavior. She has to make the decision to change; you can’t just tell her to do so. Communication, where you get your full message across without stopping for her histrionics, is the answer.