Question: Teenagers often show extreme patterns of behavior. They often seem to lose themselves completely, between childhood and adulthood. What happens to the four lower bodies of teenagers? Can we help them in their growing up years? And if so, how?
Answer: from the Ascended Master Mother Mary, through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during a 2024 Deep Healing Retreat Conference in Tallinn, Estonia.
Well, this is a very individual thing, what happens in the teenage years. We have explained, in a previous dispensation, that for most people, when they are born, there is a certain grace. That we, from the ascended level, withhold a person’s karma for the first 12 years. And then when they turn 12, the karma starts descending, and now they have to deal with it. And this is what often causes a dramatic shift in the minds of teenagers. They suddenly have to deal with, you might say, karma, but you might also say, the separate selves from past lives.
Now, this explanation that we gave is not wrong, but it is not the full explanation. Because a child not only has some external karma that is like a weight dropping upon it, but it also has the internal karma of the separate selves. A child comes into embodiment and certain separate selves are there at birth, or at least when the soul begins to integrate with the body, which can happen sometime after birth. That is why you can see that you have children who have a distinct personality almost from the moment they are born. And certainly, when they go through what is often called the terrible twos. And all throughout their childhood, even up to the 12th year, you can see that children have a distinct personality. And that is the subconscious selves that they carry with them. Now, some of these selves can be held back by us, so that they are not dealing with all of them at once. And then, they will have to do that, beginning at the 12th year. But even then, there can be a certain gradual release of this.
What happens to teenagers is that, if they had a normal childhood that was not an abusive childhood, they will have experienced life as fairly pleasant, fairly easy. And suddenly, at the teenage stage, they begin to realize that life was not nearly as easy as they thought during childhood. And this generally comes as a shock. And it is individual how people deal with it. Some people have to go through a period where they almost withdraw from life, because it is so difficult for them to accept that life is so different from what they expected or what they experienced during their childhood. They go into various forms of escapism, like, music, or computer games, where they can go into a controlled environment where they do not have to face this having to make choices that they thought they did not have to make as children. In other words, what really, ideally, happens in the teenage years, is that after this inner sense of childhood, the teenager becomes gradually more willing to take responsibility for itself and make its own decisions: “What do I want to do with my life?”
What happens is that as the separate selves are activated, suddenly the person begins to realize: “Oh, I have to make my own decisions based on my own psychology.” The grace period is over. And, depending on how complicated of a psychology the child carries with it from past lives, or perhaps what it has taken on in this lifetime through an abusive childhood, this is a shock. That is why some have to withdraw for a while, in order to, basically, have a reprieve, where they are subconsciously processing the necessity to make their own decisions.
Now, you will see that some people eventually emerge from this and begin to take a more active part in life. They engage in school, they get an education, they are willing to get a job, have a family. But you see also others that it is like they want to remain children even though they are no longer teenagers. They cannot actually get a go, make a go of life. They live with their parents until they are way into their 30s and so forth. And this is because they are not willing to take that responsibility and say: “Okay, what do I actually want to do with my life? Given my psychology, do I want to just be a victim of my psychology? Do I want to do something to change my psychology, or do I just want to withdraw from the responsibility?”
What can you do? Well, that is again very individual. And what often happens, of course, is that when the teenager’s psychology is activated, the parent’s psychology is activated also, and they clash.
If you want to help your teenager, you need to, as we always say, look at yourself, look at your reactions, even look back to your own teenage years. What did you go through that you might not have processed from your teenage years? And it would, of course, be wise to do this before your child reaches the teens. And then, if you can process it in yourself so you do not have a reaction to your teenager, whatever they do, then you can avoid making the problem worse for the teenager. But there are also, in some cases, where you have to realize that as a parent, you can only be who you are, given your psychology. If you are a spiritual person, you can of course strive to transcend your psychology. But nevertheless, you are who you are as your children are growing up and you have a right to do this. What you are doing is, you are giving your children an example of how life can be lived. And while they are children, your children might just accept this, they might not question it. But then when they become teenagers, their psychology from past lives is activated. And now they realize they do not want to live life the way you have lived your life. And that is why they often go through this rebellious phase of rebelling against parental authority or even authority from society. And if that happens to your teenager, the best you can do is just give them space. Do not try to control them, do not try to persuade them about anything. Just simply step back, look at your own reactions, work on your own psychology and let them work things out.
But you can only do this if you have overcome this dysfunctional projection that is being put on parents, that you are responsible for the behavior of your children. And that is why, when you are a spiritual student and you recognize reincarnation, you can realize that your children are not your children in the sense that they are a product of your genes and your upbringing. Your children are individual beings that probably were not related to you in past lifetimes. In some cases, you can have children you have been with in past lifetimes, but in many cases you do not. This is a complete stranger that suddenly flies into your life and grows in your womb, jumps out, and now acts like a complete stranger. Because, what else can they do? You have to realize that modern society has become more conscious of the need for parents to develop certain skills. There was a period, if you go back several decades, for many of you, it will be in your grandparents’ generation, where the whole idea of children’s psychology was not even a topic. All you had to do as a parent was give them a roof over their head, clothes on their bodies and food to eat. Then you had fulfilled your parental responsibility.
Today, in many of the more modern nations, there are much more demands on parents in terms of their responsibility for their children. But, because of the materialistic paradigm, or even the Christian paradigm, both of which deny reincarnation, an unrealistic and unfair sense of responsibility has been projected upon parents. Because your child is an old soul that came into this embodiment with a psychology that was created over many past lifetimes. And often, you had nothing to do with the creation of that psychology. And this child comes in with this psychology and you may be able to help the child, but in some cases you simply cannot. You cannot directly change your child’s psychology. And therefore, you need to have a certain discernment where you do what you can do, but you do not feel responsible for how your child turns out as a teenager or as an adult. You can give them an example, that you can work on your psychology and overcome your psychology, but it is not your responsibility to force them.
What often happens in the teenage years, is that because of this unbalanced responsibility put on parents, the parents feel: “My teenager’s behavior reflects badly on me as a parent, and therefore, I have to try and control and suppress the teenager’s behavior, so I do not feel bad about myself, or so that I do not get a negative reaction from other people in society.” And this is what you need to look at and come to a point where you are not trying to change your teenager in order to change your own state of mind or other people’s opinions of you. You are giving them the freedom to act out their psychology, and then you just give them an example that it is possible to transcend that psychology. There is, of course, much more that could be said, I realize. But these, at least, give you some pointers on how to get started dealing with this, that we all have to go through.
As I have said before, Jesus was not an easy child, and he was not an easy teenager. But as you see from the Bible, he went away during his teenage years. I was not confronted with him at that stage, which I consider a grace. And he will even admit it was a grace. You see that even a person with a level of consciousness, a fairly high level of consciousness, that Jesus had at birth, still had to go through a difficult teenage period, because he also had to deal with the fact that he had a potential. And how was he going to fulfill that potential? Or was he going to rebel against it and just withdraw and create his own little cave, and stay in that cave? And this was a much more difficult process for Jesus than we have actually explained so far, as it has been for many of you, to come to the point where you can at least begin to contemplate what your Divine plan may be in terms of doing something to raise the whole, bringing some kind of gift to other people or society. In a sense, you could say that if you really want to help your teenager, you need to come to this point, where you have dealt with this in yourself, this coming to make peace with your Divine plan and your highest potential. Then you can help your teenager see that perhaps he or she also has a potential. And it is necessary to overcome the psychology that creates the turbulence, in order to fulfill that potential.
But I will say also that in the future, in the golden age, as we have said before, there will actually be a widespread movement that children move away from their parents in their teens and move to other environments, like you see Jesus traveling around. But this, of course, was not an ideal situation. I was always worried that Jesus could die, and he could have died in all kinds of ways in the environment back then. But he did not. There can be in the future, there will be more safe ways for teenagers to experience a different situation. Like you have, for example, in Denmark, where when they finish elementary school, instead of going right on to a higher education, they take a year off and go to some preschool or prep school or whatever you want to call it, where they are just focusing on a certain activity like sports or music. But really, they are just interacting with other teenagers without being with their parents. And it gives them a different perspective. This will become much more common as we move further into the golden age.
Copyright © 2024 Kim Michaels