Knowing versus 'Knowing' 165revival of Pietism, with its emphasis on an emotional, personal relationship
with God.A
The Difficulty of Growing Up
Now that we know about the threshold of uncertainty, let us take
another look at the dilemma of the teenager. In a sense one could describe
the teenage years as the „First World War‟ of the mind. On the one hand,
the teenager is still imprisoned by his childhood, because his Mercy
strategy is integrated solidly around emotional experiences associated with
parents. Almost anything that
they do will trigger some
emotional memory within his
Mercy internal world, and
cause the undesired feelings
of childhood to well up. He
will probably fight these
emotions by „trying to act
cool‟ or by attempting to
prevent his parents from
generating experiences which trigger these memories: “You make me feel
really dumb when you act that way, Mom,” or “Grow up, Dad.”
Parents often respond to these comments by feeling old or past their
prime. However, I suggest that the real problem is not with them. Once the
teenager turns into a grown adult, he usually discovers that his mother
wasn‟t that dumb and his father wasn‟t so childish. Rather, the teenager is
trying to suppress his own dumb feelings and his own childish thoughts and
his parents are simply catching the flak.B
On the other side of the trenches is growing mental independence.
Perceiver thought in the teenager is finally waking up from the slumber of
childhood and beginning to question the 'facts' of elders and look for
logical explanations. Perceiver principles are no longer 'believed' simply
because they are stated by adults. Rather, the teenager wants to know why;
he wants to find a solid foundation for his beliefs.
This development of rational thought will inevitably be accompanied
by a questioning of authority: If Perceiver strategy in the teenager is to
wake up and to start searching for connections, it must break out of the
hypnotic trance imposed upon it by those who are in charge. In the same
A Is this struggle inevitable? I suggest not. It is possible for head and heart
to cooperate—if one is willing to pay the price.
B We will see later that people who follow emotional 'facts' naturally try to
control their thoughts by restricting their external world, just as the
teenager is doing here.