DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

“That’s a realisation looking back, I was Guy Broadhurst, I was network director of X
Bank, I was responsible for in excess of 700 people, I had a budget of £120 million.
That’s what defined me before all this happened, when I finally cracked, all of that
didn’t add up to a row of beans.” (Interview 2, p.2)
In living up to the expectations of his family, his company, his religion and to a
materially-focused society, Guy finds himself losing his individuality, and becoming
more and more akin to some vague concept of normality, while correspondingly
dismissive of those who didn’t conform:
“I think for me when I was in it, I was just normal, this is what you do, this is the way
that life is led, this is what we are told is being successful. I was a good, upright
citizen. I paid my taxes, I tried to save, I was thinking about my kid’s education and
trying to do the best that I possibly could for them. In fact I saw anybody else who
was slightly off-kilter and thought they were really, really strange.” (Interview 2, p.6)
When his wife asks for a divorce and he is demoted at work, Guy experiences
a sense of being in an “amorphous state” (Interview 2, p.8), because he had little
concept of who he was other than his role-defined professional persona. He finds
himself experiencing a “total annihilation” of his sense of self:
“I defined myself by what I did and what I did really didn’t matter. When I realised
that it didn’t matter, I effectively didn’t exist. I didn’t have a model of myself by
which I could define myself. So I had effectively annihilated myself as I knew
myself, and I had nothing that replaced it.” (Interview 2, p.7)
Over the course of losing his job and his wife, Guy becomes depressed and
withdrawn. After this period, he embarks on a period of exploration of new activities
and behaviours. These involve interests from Guy’s past, such as science, reading and
spirituality, and entirely new endeavours such as expressive dance and poetry. Guy
describes this phase as an “uncorking”, and as an “unpeeling” (Interview 2, p.12),
suggesting the experience of bringing something that was inside to the outside, which
further suggests the gradual loss of a persona. The exploratory period involved
immersion in new exploratory activities while simultaneously searching back into
aspects of his less conformist younger self:
“They [the three new activities – dance, science and spirituality] were the ingredients
that went into the pot that allowed the new me to emerge, and it was very much an
emergent process. It also included going back, it had the rebellion phase where I
grew my hair, the only senior executive in X Bank with hair down half way to their
backside.” (Interview 2, p.8)
These new areas of dance, science and spirituality connect Guy with his own interests
again, and provide a focus for new elements of self and life structure:
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