developmental psychology

We Live Our Lives Among Humans

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

On Wednesday, while waiting for a red light at the intersection of John’s Hill and Ballytruckle on my way home from work, I, Gideon Yutzy, received a revelation.

And the Lord spake unto me and said…

You used to view everyone as less complicated.

Not only that, continued the epiphany, everyone viewed you as less complicated too. A little wistfully, I remembered a time when I experienced more intense chemistry in my relationships.

As my car sat poised to lurch off to four back-to-back parent-teacher meetings, I thought back to the general intoxication life brought me then. And small wonder: in those halcyon days of college dorms and Eurorail trips, my literal and metaphorical baggage could have fit neatly into the trunk of my Audi A4. Today it feels like I’m trying to keep it stuffed into an oversized Sprinter, an unwieldy testament to the life I’ve lived.

But returning to a more carefree time is not an option. Nostalgia and sentimentality alone will not sustain me until my journey’s end. While I miss the innocent bromances and romances of youth, the journey into adulthood is inescapable if we are to participate in all stages of human metamorphosis. It mirrors the struggle of giving birth—painful, inevitable and transformative.

One key component of the birthing process into adulthood is acquiring the ability to see goodness in people with egregious flaws; to tolerate them, to work with them, to celebrate them. If we are to recognize the image of God in the people around us, we will have to do it while they are still broken.

Otherwise, they will bury us with old bodies and juvenile souls. Then they will all trudge back to eat their potato salad and baked beans, quietly wondering who we might have become had we learnt to celebrate the broken but beautiful people around us.

(Ok, that was melodramatic.)

I realized then, as the light finally turned green, that somewhere along the line I had begun to intellectualize everything, to theorize the heck out of everything. And indeed, the theory behind becoming a more affirmative person is never-ending; do we focus first on affirming the goodness in others or in ourselves? Do we focus first on others or do we, as some therapists advocate, radically accept ourselves first so that we can truly acknowledge the good in others? Still another recent pop psychology book stresses the importance of being sincere in our affirmation. What if we cannot find a specific and authentic affirmation to give? What if our affirmation doesn’t resonate with them?

Though interesting and legitimate, the abstract theories are endlessly complex. Thankfully, the way affirmation works in practice is exceedingly simple. When you realize that someone in your life exhibits a praiseworthy quality, write it down in your notebook. Then when you see them, bless them with it (provided they are still demonstrating it when you see them, ha ha, tongue-in-cheek font).

“You have an exceptional ability to enter into other people’s experience.”

“You make your family your priority and day after day I see you giving them unconditional love.”

“I find it relaxing to work for someone as softspoken and friendly as you.”

I could–and I hope I will–say all of the above to real people in real time; with utmost authenticity despite any deep-seated flaws they may have. And regarding deep-seated flaws, let me just say this: to be human is to leave a complicated legacy. It is no accident that the pristine saint archetype has never taken hold in our imagination. Solzhenitsyn was right in saying that the line between good and evil runs not through political ideologies, nations, or labels, but right down the middle of every human heart. If we don’t celebrate broken people, then we don’t celebrate people. End of story.

In summary, giving half-baked or inauthentic affirmations may be a misdemeanor, but leaving affirmations unspoken is a high felony. This Christmas, let goodwill redound to all and let it be made manifest in abundant affirmations.

(I affirm you for reading to the end of this post.)

What It Feels Like to Turn 37

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

The developmental psychologist Erik Erikson identified eight major life stages, each of them marked by a tension between two different aspects of the human experience. For instance, he saw our 30s as a time when we bond or detach in our relationships; by age 40, Erikson believed, people have settled into a dominant relational mode that is rooted in either intimacy or isolation.

And today I’m turning 37, just three more years to 40. No pressure, kid!

Obviously with none of Erikson’s stages did he mean for them to be viewed as prescriptive but as general tendencies. Yet he is undeniably onto something and today I am here to send out a dispatch from the trenches of middle-aging: entering your upper 30s is a milestone. (FYI, in Erikson’s next bracket, age 40 to 65, the tension is between generativity and stagnation. It’s all ahead of me.)

In my experience, the only age transition even remotely analogous to my current phase was the teenage years. Erikson characterises this period as a search for identity over confusion, and again I confirm his theory. My teenage years felt as though I was living under water and simultaneously intoxicated. The big difference is that in your teen years people know you’re going through a transition, whereas no one is there to hold your hand when you’re crossing over into full-on, irrevocable adulthood. The things that were normal and even original and cute at age 18 are considered irresponsible at age 37.

If our teenage transition brings great changes in our identity, our late 30s are marked by dizzying adjustments in expectations and assumptions. There really is no certainty? All those sage middle-aged people were actually just winging it? How speedily life disabuses us of our basic assumptions. Who decreed for so much disillusion to happen in such a compacted chronological space? Yet as Parker Palmer rightly points out, dis-illusion in itself is positive. Taken literally, it simply means getting rid of our illusions and what could be better than that?

Disillusion, then, provides a sure path to enlightenment. Think of it as a syllogism. Getting older leads to disillusion; disillusion leads to enlightenment; therefore getting older leads to enlightenment. Or as Anna Halprin said, less pretentiously but probably more effectively, “Aging is enlightenment at gunpoint.”

I hate to be so dramatic but I suspect that the majority of the human race flounders in the test Erikson identified as isolation versus intimacy. And I’m not blaming us. I mean, Lord have mercy, it is so hard to stay connected, even for children with their parents and parents with their own blessed children. Gosh, I even heard a guy on the radio say the average person would have a different wedding guest list every ten years.

And yet, “For all this nature is never spent . . . because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods” (Hopkins). The challenge of living into the full human condition stands as pristine and glorious as ever, beckoning each newly disillusioned 37-year-old to walk through fire without getting consumed; to witness immeasurable betrayal, pettiness, meanness, dishonesty and tribalism and still not sell one’s soul.

In the language of Erikson, despite the almost ineluctable human tendency toward isolation, we are free at any moment to seek intimacy – with ourselves, our neighbours and our God. Let no one forbid us.