Human Growth and Development
Concepts of Human Growth and Development
We have noted that Tracey is in the process of transition from one stage of life to another (HGD: 150). With the support of Mary and Ken and her social worker she successfully negotiated the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, but the transition to the next stage of adulthood presents fresh challenges, and is also bringing up old conflicts. It is a common pattern with transitions throughout the course of life that they bring up unresolved ‘baggage’ from earlier stages of life (see HGD: 48, 195). In terms of Erikson’s model of stages of psychosocial development (HGD: 47ff) the task for middle adulthood is generativity; this is to be understood in the broadest sense of creativity and development, and making a contribution to society, and is not just about producing children.
For Tracey, the choice of routes to generativity is presenting as a stark either-or; does she accept that Rob doesn’t want another child, and leave him and find someone who wants to have children with her, or can she find enough creativity in her relationship and her work to satisfy this developmental need? Or if she really talks it through with her partner, is there any possibility of compromise? She seems to have been quick to assume that because Rob didn’t immediately welcome the idea of their having a baby together it won’t be possible, and is also assuming that it is too risky to talk about it with him in case he abandons her. This is rather an extreme reaction, more like that of an adolescent than an adult, and this could be an indication that the losses of childhood and adolescence are being reactivated for her by the more recent loss of Ken, and by uncertainty about the future. She needs to face this issue, and risks Erikson’s unfavourable outcome, stagnation, if she just avoids it and lets things drift on as they are. Eventually, she is likely to become unhappy both in her relationship and with her work, which will continue to throw up situations like the Dudley/Harris family‘s which will constantly highlight the issues she is trying to avoid.
In our discussion of family systems (Chapter 10, HGD: 221) we looked at the family life cycle and the concept of vertical and horizontal stressors. Tracey’s situation is a good example of how vertical stressors (influences from the past) and horizontal stressors (events in the present) can interact to produce ‘a quantum leap in anxiety’ (McGoldrick et al. 2016a: 21, quoted in HGD: 230); this could be what is happening to Tracey at the moment. It is likely that in her family the struggle to parent adequately goes back several generations. Rob will have his own vertical and horizontal stressors of his own, one of which we know is his anxiety about letting his sons down, and there may well be others. His reluctance to embark on parenthood again with Tracey suggests that he may have some anxieties about his ability to cope with the potentially challenging parenting tasks in the more complex family that would be created by the birth of another child. This may be grounded in his own family experience, both personal and intergenerational.
There will be unconscious processes involved here. For instance, Rob and Tracey may have been attracted to each other at an unconscious level by some shared issues in their family histories, which is by no means uncommon. Both may have underlying anxieties about their ability to parent a larger family with stepchildren, but at the moment it is Rob who is feeling and expressing all the anxiety about this, while Tracey is urgently wanting to press ahead. This sort of splitting and projection (HGD: 37, 46) often takes place between couples, and also in families and groups. The mixed feelings have become polarised between the two of them, with Rob expressing the anxiety for both of them, and Tracey the optimism. This could potentially drive them apart and set them against each other; a couple therapist may be able to help them to understand this process so that each can own their ambivalent feelings and find a way forward for their relationship that is less overshadowed by their past.
Tracey’s transition to middle adulthood is also complicated by the fact that within her family system her most reliable attachment figure, Mary, is also going through her own transition – to late adulthood, in terms of Erikson’s stages - as she comes to terms with bereavement, and that she has lost Ken, her other main attachment figure. As we point out in our discussion of the family life cycle (HGD, 228) it is a common feature of family life for different generations to be simultaneously passing through transitions, and each transition will feed into the other. We look at Mary’s situation in its own right in Case Study D, but from Tracey’s point of view the loss of her previous foster carers as parental figures and a secure base is hugely significant, all the more so because this secure attachment was hard won. In Chapter 3, we consider the important role of early attachment patterns in a child’s development, and how their influence persists strongly into later life, affecting adult relationships and mental health (HGD, 57). For the first eight years of her life, Tracey’s attachments were disrupted; she was able to make some attachment to her mother, but her most secure attachment was to her grandmother. When her mother’s new partner came onto the scene this was threatened as her mother’s new partner’s negative influence took over and her grandmother’s support was no longer available. At this point, Tracy lost what would seem to have been her most secure attachment, and as the pattern of violence and alcohol abuse became established, the attachment pattern would almost certainly have become disorganised (HGD, 72ff), which was the point at which social care services intervened. Tracey’s placement back with her grandmother would have begun to repair this period of disruption, but only two years later she had to move again because of her grandmother’s illness. It would have taken a long time for her to trust Ken and Mary and believe that she was secure with them, and, as we have seen, her insecurities surfaced again in adolescence, intensified by her grandmother’s death. Now she is again facing a period of transition coinciding with the loss of an attachment figure.
Tracey has always thought of herself as resilient, and her history bears this out. But, as we point out in Chapter 6 (HGD, 170ff), it is misleading to think of resilience simply as a character trait without also considering the combination of stress factors that an individual may have to contend with and overcome. We also note that resilience is particularly important in coping with change and transition. It may be especially difficult for someone like Tracey who regards themselves as resilient when they find themselves in a situation that they struggle to cope with, but we all have our limits, and the feeling that we should be able to cope then becomes yet another pressure on us. It will help Tracey at this moment if she can establish a trusting relationship with this counsellor, which will enable her to take a broader view of her life and express her feelings about the different stress factors from the past and in the present and begin to understand how they are interacting with each other. These kinds of emotion-focused strategies were probably not available to her in early adolescence, when she acted out her distress in self-harming behaviour; they tend to develop with age (Compas, 1995, quoted in HGD: 170). Secure attachment is strongly connected with resilience, and research shows that there is a link between the presence of a consistent and reliable adult’ and the development of resilience (Coleman, 2011, cited in HGD: 172).