Navigating Life Cycles to Enhance Personal Development
BY Arlene Harder, MA, MFT
Learn how life moves from one developmental stage to another as we grow as individuals and families.
I still remember the day I walked to the plane and didn't wave good-bye to my parents. I'd just graduated from college and was flying from Dayton to Los Angeles for a job. It wasn't that I didn't want to affirm their presence in sending me off. It was just that I was focused too much on the future to think of the past.
While I didn't think in family life cycle terms back then, I was clearly in the beginning of stage one — leaving home. My parents were in stage five — launching children and moving on. So we both had a few emotional bumps and bruises along the way. For example, I later discovered that my mother was bothered by my lack of "courtesy" to wave. When it came to decisions I made about my life outside the family, she never said I was "wrong," but she sometimes implied, not too subtly, that perhaps I wasn't quite doing things the way she would have.
These transitional passages from one stage of family life to another are built into the fabric of every family, although different cultures will put their particular twist on what happens and when it happens. Nevertheless, as we move from one stage to another, we must negotiate key emotional principles and be willing to make changes if we are to proceed developmentally without too much difficulty. |
