A Roadmap to an Extraordinary Adulthood
This story is adapted from Life Launch, by Jesse Giunta Rafeh.
How to Create the Life You Want
“The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”
— Viktor Frankl
I met Chloe when she was eighteen years old. Her mother had just kicked her out of the house, and she was spending most of her time drinking and partying. She had no desire to go to college. In fact, she didn’t have a clue about what she wanted to do with her life. Meanwhile, she was also struggling in the dating world; she went from casual sex that left her feeling empty to clinging to her romantic partners, who eventually pushed her away.
Chloe came to my office for therapy because she felt lost and wanted to find ways to cope with her emotions. Though her mom had kicked her out of the house, she was still on her parents’ health insurance plan, which covered our sessions together.
After a few sessions, it was clear that she wanted to learn how to take care of herself and find a sense of direction. She wanted to know how to connect with people and create healthy relationships, romantic and otherwise. The more we talked, the more Chloe realized that she wanted something more from her life. She knew she was capable of creating a better future for herself, but besides coming to therapy, she had no idea where to start.
Chloe had arrived at that critical transition point between childhood and adulthood. Like so many young adults in the twenty-first century, she was as disoriented as she was overwhelmed. Suddenly, after years of following a prescribed path, she was responsible for making all of the decisions about her life and her future.
It was a pivotal time for her, as it is for all young adults.
The Challenge of Adulthood
When you’re making the transition from childhood to adulthood, you’re setting the stage to create the life you want. But if, like Chloe, you’re confused, depressed, or anxious, the transition can feel more overwhelming than amazing. If you’re constantly feeling unhappy, how can you know what you really want? If you don’t love and accept yourself, how can you create healthy relationships with other people?
On one hand, this is an exciting time. After all, this is the moment when you have the power to decide whether you want to continue being the person you’ve been up until now. Your world is as close to a blank canvas as it will ever be.
Standing face to face with that blank canvas, however, can be terrifying.
As you begin your transition into adulthood — or even as you’re right in the middle of it — you might be wondering, “How do I go from feeling stuck to finding happiness? How do I figure out what I want? How do I create strong relationships?”
The truth is that we have to look backward before we can look to the future.
As a kid, everyone made your life decisions for you. You reacted to what happened, but it was your parents’/caregivers’ job to create an environment that helped you see the world as a secure, happy, exciting place. You learned to be happy, sad, angry, or scared based on what happened to you as you grew up.
When you transition into adulthood, you’re making your own decisions. More often than not, you start from the perspective you learned in childhood — from your parents/caregivers, your friends, and your culture. However, you have the power to adopt a different perspective.
This is one of the most exciting parts of becoming an adult: You can choose how you interpret the events in your life.
You Create Your Emotions
I wrote my book, Life Launch, to share everything I learned, and everything I wish I had known, as I was struggling through my transition into adulthood. I’m also going to share stories and lessons from the young adults I’ve worked with in the psychotherapy practice I started in 2005.
When we start working together, one of the first things I tell my clients is something a great teacher taught me: “What you resist will persist. And what you accept will transform.”
To be human, it’s important to let yourself feel the feelings that come up for you. If you don’t feel your feelings in their pure form, they build up over time, transforming into defensive emotions like anxiety, anger, depression, or loneliness.
Learning to let go of your defenses and let yourself experience your feelings is the first step to transforming them.
Besides allowing yourself to feel, another key to transforming your perspective is to understand is that you can actually influence your own happiness.
As kids, we learn to wait for certain things to happen in order to feel fulfilled. We prolong our happiness based on some external factor we can’t control, like taking a trip, staying up late to watch our favorite TV show, or having an ice cream.
As adults, we often adopt the same pattern we had as children. We connect our happiness to external things like having X amount of money, a prestigious job, and/or the perfect partner. “Once I get Y, I’ll be happy,” you tell yourself. Does that sound familiar?
The truth is, that pattern no longer serves us in adulthood. If we base our happiness on waiting for one specific thing to happen, we actually prevent ourselves from feeling fulfilled.
You can be successful in multiple areas of your life and still be unhappy. Why? It all comes down to how you interpret things. Your relationship to how you view things generates your emotion. In other words, emotions don’t happen to you. You create them.
Ultimately, you have the ability to change your relationship with your emotions. Sounds easy, right? It’s not. It goes against human instinct. It’s a decision you have to make over and over again. My book will give you the tools to understand that the way you feel about the world is up to you. Once you can grasp that idea, it’s much easier to get clear about and move toward what you want in your life.
I’ve seen it happen again and again with my clients, including Chloe. Things didn’t automatically get better for her once she realized she could create her own happiness, but they definitely started to shift. She went from drinking and partying to distract herself from her pain to eating vegan, working out regularly, and discovering her passion for product design. After landing a competitive job at a growing startup, she moved to Rome to go to college.
Once she felt better in her body and found a sense of direction, Chloe’s relationships started to improve. Little by little, instead of being subjected to the whims of selfish guys and flaky friends, she discovered she had the ability to choose people who met her needs. By taking baby steps, she moved closer to creating healthy relationships for the first time in her life.
I can relate strongly with this aspect of Chloe’s story, because I also had to learn to create my own happiness.
To learn more about creating your own happiness, you can find Life Launch on Amazon.
JESSE GIUNTA RAFEH is a psychotherapist and certified success coach who’s helped hundreds of young adults who feel lost find clarity and direction in their lives. As a teenager, she struggled with anxiety, depression, and chronic self-doubt. Through her own emotional journey, she developed the tools and methodology that have helped her empower her clients. Jesse’s primary motivation and deepest satisfaction lies in the transformation she sees her clients achieve — through their own dedication, self-discovery, and strength.
Jesse lives in California with her husband, Mark. To learn more about Jesse’s work, visit jesse-giunta-rafeh.com.
