Be A Rebel

20.06.25

Today, I want to explore how rebelling can be positive when it comes to overcoming the mother and father complex, disrupting destructive patterns, and becoming the author of your life.

Parental Scripts

Someone under the influence of the parental complex is usually identified with the Puer and Puella Aeternus archetype. In other words, they have a childish view of the world and relationships, and this is the main factor behind their struggles in life.

I already have a whole series about so I won’t go into detail here. The basic thing you have to understand about the mother-and-father complex is that it generates fixed scripts in our minds.

These scripts are like a map to navigate the world. They contain rules about what’s acceptable or not regarding a career, studies, relationships, emotional expressions, hobbies, and even a global idea of God.

The less unconscious you are about these hidden rules, the more they shape your life. That’s why some people immediately assume that these scripts are bad but when we’re kids, they’re necessary for us to make sense of the world and learn how to behave.

But as we grow up, these scripts often start to become a hindrance because they usually come with fears, limitations, and values that have nothing to do with our authentic personalities.

Consequently, we don’t get to develop our talents to their fullest extent and lead a childish existence under the parental shadow, constantly repeating their patterns and mistakes.

Moreover, while we’re operating through these assumptions about the world, we also can’t find our true character as we didn’t author these values and beliefs.

Becoming The Author of Your Life

So how can we finally grow up and become the author of our lives?

The solution is to challenge the parental scripts and create new narratives but to do so, we must take responsibility for our actions and decisions, and have our own experiences. We must gather experiential evidence that favors a new narrative.

But becoming the creator doesn’t mean simply throwing everything away. Because if you follow this path, you’re still blindly living your life in reaction to the parental complex, it’s not a conscious decision.

In reality, you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. But even good values won’t feel like they are yours if you don’t devote time to understanding why they’re particularly important to you.

Now, a lot of people get stuck because they’re expecting growing up to be a one-time thing and that they need to have everything figured out before taking the first step. But this is completely backward because maturing is a process and it requires real-life experience.

In other words, to experience the birth of a new personality we have to get used to making our own decisions and enduring the consequences, for good or for worse. We must gather evidence along the way, by following the career we desire, creating what we think is important, and building the relationships we desire.

It’s crazy, but a lot of people prefer remaining in a known shitty situation instead of opening themselves to something new. Indeed, the unknown can be scary but it’s also the realm of new possibilities.

Yes, we must sacrifice the constant search for comfort and get our hands dirty, as maturing comes from living life and not daydreaming about it.

We usually hang on to a childish view of the world precisely because we’re afraid of this unknown and bearing the responsibility of creating our own lives.

But we must stop expecting to see a clear path and start carving it.

Overcoming The Provisional Life

Now, I know that many people reading this might be thinking: “Well, I tried living my life but I still feel stuck and lost”.

Perhaps you didn’t realize the unconscious influence of the parental complex and how the Puer mentality might have affected your decisions until now.

In other words, you’re probably leading what Carl Jung calls a provisional life. Despite having a career or even a family, many people still secretly feel like a child trapped in an adult’s body.

They’re still living in the confines of the parental shadow and engaging with the world with narratives that were created when they were children, which affects all of their choices and behaviors.

When you’re enmeshed with the Puer mentality, there’s a part of you still waiting for permission and either looking for parental approval or trying to get back at them.

Consequently, you never fully commit to your life tasks. You tend to play small and even if you go big, you usually find a way to self-sabotage. You’re afraid of making mistakes and don’t have the courage to be who you truly are.

In the end, people feel lost because they’re afraid of responsibility. They’re afraid of truly owning their lives because when you do it, you lose the ability to play the victim card and you can’t blame anybody else.

Be A Rebel

We all learn by mimicking but eventually, we have to develop our own style. For instance, everyone learns music by first playing famous songs. We learn basic chords and melodies and practice them to be able to play ready-made songs.

However, most people stop once they dominate the basics. They’re satisfied only playing other people’s songs. Sadly, that’s also how many people lead their lives, there’s no originality, no craftmanship, and no authoring.

But to carve our own paths, we must pay the price to develop our own styles.

When I was younger, my parents constantly pushed me to become a civil servant and I even worked with them for a while, and I was miserable. The truth is that I always had an entrepreneurial mindset but I was afraid to follow it.

Even after enrolling in a course I wanted – music, I still tried to follow what they expected by trying to become a teacher instead of doing my own thing. Again, I felt miserable.

It was only years later when I moved to Dublin that I gave myself permission to experiment. I took a number of jobs like waiter, cook, selling ice cream, and even a garbage collector at some point (It was tough).

But all of these experiences also made me want to take my life more seriously and study something I was passionate about, Psychology. This was one of my options when I was younger but I didn’t go for it because of skewed religious views.

Also, my parents had a business for several years before they became civil servants and struggled a lot. Today, I understand all of their concerns because it wasn’t easy for me to become an independent therapist, but I’m finally living the life I wanted.

I’ll be honest and say that for some time I blamed my parents for my struggles in life but this only made matters worse and I constantly felt impotent. It was only when I decided to take responsibility and create my own narratives that things started to change.

Earlier I mentioned that rebelling just for the sake of rebelling is childish and shallow. However, part of this instinct is necessary, you just have to channel it correctly to effectively break the rules of the script and stop wanting their approval.

Healthy rebellion is about facing your fears and daring to be who you truly are, creating your values, and shaping your life according to your soul.

Funny enough, presenting yourself as an adult is also the only way of building healthy relationships with the parents.

That’s why I say, be a rebel.

• Read Next – I cover everything you need to know about conquering the Puer and Puella Aeternus and overcoming the mother and father complex in this series.

Rafael Krüger – Live an Audacious Life

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