It’s very likely that at some point your childish mind explored the strange world of Peter Pan and Neverland. The original play, written by J. M. Barrie, was staged in 1904 under the name “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” and the Neverland was referred to as “the Never Never Land”. The story seems a perfect childlike logic of a place where there is no growing up and facing adulthood, where you’re exploring the island to which you always arrive at dawn and the original directions on how to get there, presuming you’ve been sprinkled by fairy dust which allows you to fly or hitched a ride with someone i the possession of the precious powder is “second to the right, and straight on till morning” which later became “second star to the right, and straight on till morning”. Everything in this place is peculiar, from the discordant passage of time which is the enemy and can be calculated by the ticking clocks of man eating crocodiles, to the demonization of grownups as fun killing pirates. Flying is possible with happy thoughts and mythical creatures as fairies (which here is a sort of erotic phantasy since Peter or Barrie were unable to have a healthy relationship with a real woman) are full-fledged part of a posy in this cloud nestled island of adventure.

Lovely story isn’t it. But there is a dark sinister psychopathology by which it came to be, a sort of a literary depiction of a desire to never grow up built on early childhood trauma. Trauma can stunt growth and cause dwarfism induced strictly by psychological aspects in the absence of genetic glitch or mutation. If you’re constantly on high alert from trauma, investing in growth seems like waste of resources so the body shuts it down. As an eight year old Mr. Barrie saw his only brother killed in an accident. His mother took to her bed for the next decade and father was emotionally non-existent, leaving the boy to take care of her while all the while she spoke only about her favourite deceased son David, deeming Barrie as “oh it’s only you”. The only topic she ever spoke of was a phantasy she decided to cling to – how David’s death made him her perfect little boy, who will never grow up, not need his mother and leave her. David remaining this infantile projection all her life became a mantra, and the stress of this double whammy of losing a brother and taking care of a mother who idolized him, while not caring about young Barrie, became a sufficient shock to start the onset of this secondary stress dwarfism. Barrie lived to 60 with 4.10. As a writer and had a recurring theme of boys not growing up, or dying, returning as ghosts and marrying their mothers, and wrote private diaries with S&M phantasies.

This is only one of infinite cases of traumas impacting growth, where not even adding growth hormones to the blood stream is effective, since the issue is psychosomatic. For example, extremely brutal initiation ceremonies in young children result in them being two inches shorter as adults. Children who have no disorder or disease, are not malnourished or plagued by parasites but are only emotionally isolated and neglected stop growing… Psychologically love, attention, belonging, feeling supported and loved are as important for growth as your physical nourishments. These things are not separate. They all tie together and make up the wholeness of your wellbeing. Physical is not all there is, psychological manifest its own realities and the body responds. It was not Peter Pan who was lost or orphaned, it was Barrie.