Older Than the Body? Part 2

by Allegra

If an "older-than-the-biological-body" part is created, that older part will be a projected sense of what an older person acts like...?
-- someone on PsyychForums

In our opinion, yes, since the child has no first-hand experience of being older. The child can base ideas on observing older people from the outside world and/or imagining what a helpful older person would be like.

In our own case, we have had lifelong conflict between what we imagine/expect and the reality around us. We spent many years basing our understanding of nearly all members of our system on ideals rather than the realities of each member's life experience. We could only go by what we thought that we understood about ourselves.

But the more we came to know, the more we came to realize how much we really didn't know. Even to this day, we spend a lot of time and energy berating ourselves for not knowing the truth about our system, the truth of the individuals within, and really the truth about anything, from the very beginning.

Getting back to the issue of older people specifically....One thing that we did know from our earliest days was that we were very conflicted in our feelings about older authority figures. We craved their approval and validation, but we saw them consistently fail to meet our expectations, and we resented them for both.

And even though all of the adults in our system are considerably younger than the body, we have unreasonably high expectations of all of them. Our expectations of our own adults mirror the expectations that we had of adult authority figures. But we never conceived of anyone in our system being older than the body.