23 February 2022
This blog examines the trajectory of a human life in the contemporary West. The point is to see how the unfolding stages of a life wash up against the ideas elaborated in this series of blogs.
When the assumptions of my guesstimated approach to individual therapy were laid out, I had not yet heard of Dr. Mounir Samy, a Montreal psychiatrist. Dr. Samy delivered a lecture to our class on the history of diagnostic approaches over the past century or so. One of the many interesting assertions he made was that pre-WWII, people’s primary concern was “to be good” while post-WWII, the concern changed to “being happy.” This is a distinction made in earlier blogs (and many SMART Recovery meetings): happiness ≠ eudaimonia or well-spiritedness. This is important because the first premise of today’s argument is that we seek the good life: a prioritized but flexible set of healthful values, principles, and habits that we work to gain, maintain, and sometimes promote.
The individual subject, our exemplified person, is understood to be constituted thus: I = genotype + phenotype + X (discussed in earlier blogs, Assumptions III, 9.ii.22). Genotype is our genetic inheritance while phenotype is our environmental and volitional contribution leaving X as the set of known and unknown factors affecting an individual human soul. While X is probably (and dare I say hopefully) unmappable, we know a fair bit about other factors, some of which are phenotypical such as attachment, the bond formed between a child and adult (usually a mother) anytime from in utero to young childhood.
Following attachment, in terms of generic Western life stages, is pre-school and early grade school. These are much more significant years than I realized as a boy or even as a father. Stories both of our children have told me, about incidents that affected them, took place in that interval. I now believe we can be permanently marked by significant responses at any of the stages now being elaborated.
School years, including middle, high, and any post-secondary training form the next stage. Peer groups, me versus them (individuation), sexuality, intimate relationships, and identity (what a list!) are all in constant play at a time when we are least able to effectively negotiate these unfoldings. Yet there they are.
The reminiscence bump follows the school years and involves post-secondary training, apprenticeship, employment levels, career choices, social choices, first marriage, and family. The term, reminiscence bump comes from retrospective studies of memory. It was quickly observed that middle-aged and older people had more vivid recollections of that period than the periods since then. This is not surprising as more life-altering decisions are made in this stage than any other. I would characterize baby-boomer’s reminiscence bump as occurring between ages 18-25. Looking at my own children’s generation (born either side of 2000), I would estimate the reminiscence bump to have moved from 25-35 but that’s anecdotal, not empirical.
The next two life-stage factors are not chronological so much as experiential. The first is a rigorously honest examination of the grooves left in your patterns by what Kipling called “those two imposters”: success and failure.
Kipling’s line is philosophical. What he implies is that neither success nor failure are permanent realities but illusions. That view is consistent with Stoicism which implores us to examine all known assumptions about those things we perceive. For example, people with addictive behaviours live on the street. Not usually true. Coming from a prosperous family makes you happy. Not from what I’ve seen. Beautiful people have easier lives. Nope, not necessarily.
What can make a difference is unexamined repetition. If we experience consistent failure or consistent success, it can affect us. Unfortunately, my intuition is that for those who experience consistent failure, seeing success can become difficult. This is not the case for those used to uninterrupted success. Big, hard failures can be devastating if you have had a lifetime of steady success. But, failures can also be enormously profitable resources of self-understanding. So rich, that digging in and understanding can have people emerging from failure with quite different perspectives on both life and people.
And this brings us to our final category which is less a chronologically based stage than an untested and unresisted creeping pessimism and resentment, two sure-fire downward drivers. Divorce, bankruptcy, addiction, disease, career failures, or alienation from loved ones are black holes in the universe of a human life. Yet black holes can be viewed different ways.
When the pressure from the nuclear reactions collapses, gravity overwhelms and collapses the star’s core, and the star’s other layers are thrown off into space, and this process is also known as a supernova. The remainder of the core collapses, a spot overcome by density and without volume – a black hole (Lyons, 2015).
Now is that a rich metaphor, or what? Such events as divorce, bankruptcy...can leave us “overcome by [the] density [of the life event] feeling there is no way forward. The “other layers thrown off into space” are attributes of identity that our new implosion has us viewing as pointless and ineffective at the very moment when we need them most. For example, could one’s former attachment to music, reading, art, sports, or travel not be the very key, when keenly embraced in failure, which allow us to walk through that door and back into sunlight?
That is the point of this blog. All of the stages named:
1. Genetic inheritance: aptitudes, challenges;
2. Initial attachment & pre-school years;
3. School years;
4. Reminiscence bump;
5. Success/failure;
6. Black holes: career failure, bankruptcy, divorce, or family alienation
can be points at which the implosion absorbs the soul. But if the soul is still fighting, that implosion can also be a life lesson that changes the way we live the remainder of our days.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
References
Kipling, R. (c. 1895). If—. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---
Lyons, A. (2015, February 27). 10 Fun Facts About Black Holes—Versant Power Astronomy Center and Maynard Jordan Planetarium—University of Maine. Versant Power Astronomy Center and Maynard Jordan Planetarium. https://astro.umaine.edu/10-fun-facts-about-black-holes/
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