Infantilist's Support Network: What You Have Taught Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What I've Learned From This Site

The Infantilist Support Club Forum
(for Infantilists)

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(for the Significant Others of Infantilists)

The Email Exchange Chatroom

The Infantilist's Declaration of Independence From Ignorance

The Humble-Pie I Must Eat

Since I started this site in 97, I must confess, I feel that the kind and wonderful people who are (or have been) on the forum have taught me far more than I will ever be able to give back to them. Here are just a few of the things I have learned: The fight that I originally intended to wage with with the help of this site, turned out to be a completely different sort of battle than I had expected. For me, I feel that it has been a process of tearing down some certain walls that I had erected within my own self, rather than what I had first intended, walling off (and I suppose eventually destroying) a certain part of myself .
Considering myself in many respects to be a typical sort of "can-do" fellow, I initially regarded the infantilistic part of myself just like I generally have tended to regard most other major messes I have come across in my life. They are things that require a firm hand, self discipline, a clear idea of how to clean them up, and lots of energy, but eventually self determination always rules. Infantilism is different.
Unfortunately, (or fortunately, as the case may be) all of those characteristics of self determination that I just mentioned would seem to be the very root of the problem in the case of infantilism, not the means of its solution.
"Wow!" you say. "You just pulled the rug right out from under me!" you say. That's right. Infantilism, it would seem, is not your typical mess. The problems it would seem to create have more to do with certain problems in the way we see the world itself, than to do with how we need to mold the world into our own preferred image.
These "problems" that relate to infantilism are in fact, as the Chinese say, opportunities in disguise. (You have probably already heard about the fact that the Chinese pictogram for crises also includes the pictogram for the word opportunity.)
I believe that the human organism is essentially whole. The only problems we face are our failures to recognize this.
Accordingly, as an infantilist, when I feel irresistibly drawn into something which a different part of myself is repulsed by, in other words, when I feel inner conflict, I am merely somehow, at some level failing to recognize that part of myself which is forever whole.
The question then, when these feelings arise is not, "How can I strengthen and steel myself against this, so that I can mold it, just as I have molded so much else around me?" The question rather is, "How can I reconcile these inner factions so that I might be able to find that inner wholeness that this inner struggle has obviously separated me from?"