Oh Mamma Can This Really be the End?*

This adulting thing is really hard!**

I see a lot of young adults in my practice. In the first half of their twenties the focus of their concerns are usually in some manner related to the dating-mating game. It’s a time when physical desires often feed a kind of chaos that interferes with consistency in their interpersonal relationships. It is a time of heart breaks and breaking of hearts.

After twenty-five, a shift begins to take place in thinking and behavior. I’ve had countless young clients tell me that what they found fun and exciting in their early twenties is no longer attractive. They find themselves wanting something more out of life and their relationships but often can’t identify what that “more” is. They have a little clearer idea what they don’t want but there is often great confusion about what they do want in life.

For most of my clients, this is the first time they have encountered an existential challenge. This often manifests itself in great inner confusion. While the first half of their twenties was struggle with relationships with others, this is a time when the young adult encounters the questions around who they are and what life is supposed to be about. It is a time that forces a review of life up to that time and a previewing of what is to come.

I often use the analogy with them of animals that shed their skin. During the transition from previous skin to new skin, they are more vulnerable, more exposed to the world and its perceived and real dangers.

I will often explain to them that they are in a predictable life stage that entails a change from who they thought they were to who they will become. It is a transitional time. It is a time for review, reflection and renewal. Some of my clients take relief from hearing this and others look at me with an expression that says, “How long will this take and how can I stop keep feeling this way?”

My task, as their therapist, is to provide a safe container for my client to experience the emotions that arise as they struggle to accept responsibility for who they are, who they want to be at the end of their transition into and what they need to do to achieve this. Once my client begins to sense the safety that the container the consultation room offers, their transition accelerates. It can be difficult for therapist and client to adapt to the transformation taking place. It is as if a birth is happening and birth is never completely predictable except to know there is an eventual end to the process. It is exciting, sometimes scary and eventually over. I am not just my client’s therapist, I am their midwife.

This transitional, transformational work with clients has caused me to think that maybe nations collectively go through predictable stages of psychological development just as individuals do. I recall a young history professor I had in my undergraduate studies who had proposed to the Chair of the department a course on the future. This professor was newly hired and full of the zeal one takes into a first career. He believed that by studying the developmental path of previous nations and particularly empires, historians could predict and even possibly provide insight into the creation of more stable and durable democracies.

His proposal for a course on, “The History of the Future”, was promptly denied by the crusty old department chairman who felt it was ridiculous to study something that hadn’t already happened. To him, history was about the past not the future. The historian’s job was to record not predict. Ironically, the commencement speaker at my college graduation that year was Alvin Toffler, the author of, Future Shock, a book that utilized historical perspective to identify and predict the impact of change on society in the Post Modern Age.

Just as my clients in their late twenties wrestle with the consequences and lessons of their past, can a country come to a similar place in its development? I hope what the U.S. is currently experiencing in its collective civic and political life is like what my young clients go through as they enter full adulthood. There is resistance, anger, sadness, confusion, learning, consolidation, discovery, growth, relief. Essentially, they go through the stages of Kubler-Ross’s*** model of grief with some additional drama.

Can nations mature? Can they use their history to gain insight into who they want to be? Can nations evolve or do they reach a place in their collective life where they devolve into chaos before they can be reborn?

My clients, when they approach the end of their twenties, seem to reach this critical stage in their development. Do they use what they have learned about themselves and life and consolidate into a self that is more integrated and ready for the challenges ahead? If they don’t, they will continue to experience confusion about what they are supposed to do in life.

Eric Erickson****, the well-known developmental psychologist, believed that you can’t move into the next stage of life until you have completed the one you are in. The mistakes and confusion continue and can intensify until the individual has some form of severe psychological crisis from which they may not ever recover or they find a way to complete the tasks of the stage in which they have been stuck.

Can the same thing happen to nations? If a nation meets its developmental challenges, can it continue to mature and reach its potential for internal harmony and sense of purpose? If it doesn’t, is the nation consigned to perpetual crises or eventual collapse?

It seems to me the U.S., a relatively young nation, is approaching the end of its metaphorical twenties. It seems to be struggling with its identity as a democracy. The U.S. has just experienced an attempt by a sitting president to overturn an election by perpetuating lies about the integrity of the election. Through his lies, he fostered divisions in the nation that led to a violent attack on the nation’s capitol. In a sense, the nation lost itself under the influence of a charismatic demagogue. The question now is, can it find itself with a stronger sense of identity and purpose or will it, like individuals who don’t complete the necessary developmental tasks, collapse into endless crises and confusion?

This is why it is so important that the investigation, currently taking place in the nation’s capitol, develop a coherent narrative about how and why this attack on democracy came about and holds accountable those who perpetrated it. The Ericksonian task of one’s twenties is to find oneself by losing oneself in another. Can the United States eventually emerge from this challenge to its democracy, more whole, more united?

My many years of work with clients gives me hope. I have witnessed them transition, often after very painful struggles, into full adulthood with a sense of self that sets them on a positive course to meet the next set of developmental challenges. Hopefully, the consequences are just too obvious for the U.S. and democracies around the world to allow for failure to meet the developmental requirements to thrive and successfully govern themselves.

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Thank you for being one of my readers. I wrote this for you and for myself as well, to try to gain insight and some sense of hope about what I am seeing and hearing in the Congressional hearings on the January 6th insurrection. I have been trying to look at these hearings not as Democrat versus Republican but Truth versus Lies, Democracy versus Demagoguery

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The title of this essay comes from a line in a Bob Dylan song, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again”.

** The subtitle of this essay comes from a young

twenty-something client I saw several years ago.

***Elisabeth Kubler-Ross MD, 7/08/1926-8/24/2004

****Erik Erikson, 6/15/1902-5/12/1994