Adulthood is a Myth

By Steve Elfrink

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Overview: Is growing up really what we think it is? In this thought-provoking essay, trauma specialist Steve Elfrink from OmTerra dismantles the myth of adulthood as a rigid, rational state and reveals how our most essential human qualities—creativity, play, emotion, and vulnerability—are rooted in the child within. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology, and personal insight, Elfrink invites us to reimagine maturity not as the exile of our younger selves, but as their integration. If you’ve ever felt like you were just pretending to be an adult, you’re not alone—and you’re not wrong.

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Adulthood, as it is commonly defined, is a cultural myth—a socially constructed identity layered over a more primal truth: that we are, and have always been, playful, imaginative, emotionally tender beings, far more childlike than our society dares to admit. While the concept of adulthood serves practical purposes—legal responsibility, workforce participation, and the management of social order—it often disguises, represses, or pathologizes the core qualities that make us most human. Beneath the surface of mortgages and meetings, resumes and responsibilities, the child within us remains vibrantly alive—curious, intuitive, spontaneous, and yearning for connection and play.

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The Invention of “Grown-Ups”

The idea of adulthood is relatively recent in historical and anthropological terms. In many indigenous cultures, the passage into adulthood was not defined by taxes or tenure but by communal rites of passage—ceremonial transformations that honored the complexity of human growth without severing the individual from their inner child. These rituals marked the integration of responsibility with soulfulness, not the abandonment of play, emotion, or wonder.

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In contrast, modern Western societies have created an artificial binary between childhood and adulthood. We are taught that to “grow up” is to become serious, rational, productive, and emotionally self-contained. Our economic systems reinforce this ideal, valuing efficiency and discipline over creativity and emotional expression. The inner world of the child—so alive with imagination, sensitivity, and delight—is seen as something to outgrow, or worse, suppress.

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But this division is neither natural nor healthy. In truth, it creates a split in the psyche—a form of internal exile where the child self is hidden away, even as it continues to shape our emotional responses, our dreams, our fears, and our capacity for joy.

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The Neuroscience of Play and the Persistence of the Inner Child

From a developmental and neurobiological standpoint, we now understand that the “inner child” is not merely metaphorical. Brain structures involved in play, attachment, emotional regulation, and imagination remain active throughout life. Jaak Panksepp, a pioneer in affective neuroscience, identified play as one of the primary emotional systems wired into the mammalian brain—a system as fundamental as fear or hunger. The fact that this circuitry never disappears suggests that play is not something we grow out of, but something we are designed to carry with us.

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Similarly, our attachment patterns—shaped in early life through caregiving and relational safety—continue to operate in adulthood, often beneath conscious awareness. When we cry during a movie, yearn for a hug during hardship, or feel delight in being seen, we are not being “immature”—we are being human. These impulses arise not from childishness, but from the enduring architecture of our emotional being.

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Cultural Consequences of the Adulthood Illusion

The myth of adulthood has real consequences. It pressures us to mask vulnerability, leading to isolation and internalized shame. It rewards stoicism and penalizes sensitivity. It leaves little room for grief, wonder, or magic—those vital energies that animate life. In men especially, this pressure can be devastating, cutting them off from the emotional range they possessed as boys. In women, it often manifests as the exhausting demand to be both competent and emotionally regulated at all times.

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Ironically, the most admired qualities in adults—creativity, empathy, humor, and resilience—are precisely those that spring from our inner child. Artists, healers, and visionaries often report that their breakthroughs come not from linear thinking, but from surrendering to the dreamlike, nonlinear, playful state of mind we associate with childhood.

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To be “adult” in the truest sense, then, may not be to bury the child, but to protect and re-integrate them—to honor their wisdom and give them safe expression within a mature container. This is what Carl Jung called individuation: not a shedding of earlier selves, but a reunion.

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The Return to Wholeness

Healing, both individually and culturally, may require the unlearning of adulthood as we know it. We must question the belief that growing up means growing away from ourselves. Instead, we can imagine a world where responsibility and play coexist, where grief is not a private shame but a communal process, and where the spontaneity of the child is invited, not punished.

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Therapeutic approaches like Internal Family Systems (IFS) already recognize that healing involves returning to our inner children, listening to them, and re-parenting the parts of ourselves that were exiled in the rush to become “mature.” Psychedelic therapy often evokes this process spontaneously, dissolving egoic defenses and revealing tender, childlike parts of the psyche that long for love and recognition.

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This is not regression. It is reconnection.

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Conclusion

Adulthood, as popularly imagined, is a myth—useful in some contexts, harmful in others. At our core, we are not rigid, rational automatons, but dynamic, feeling, playful beings whose child-selves never left. If anything, true maturity may lie in reclaiming what we were taught to disown: the vulnerable, expressive, imaginative essence that is still alive beneath our adult façades.

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To embrace this truth is not to reject responsibility, but to redefine it. Perhaps the most sacred responsibility we carry is not to abandon the child within—but to protect them, listen to them, and let them guide us home.

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