DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

“My life before the crisis was about conforming to the rules and what was expected of me
by my wife, children, parents, work colleagues, etc. There was little space for "me" to be
who I truly was.” (p.24)
And here he describes being motivated by money, success and power:
“Therefore I would say for a period of about fifteen, sixteen years…I was running a
career that was about being successful, it was about getting power and doing those
things… I was making more money, I had more position, more power, I was being
able to influence what was going on and to me that is how I had been programmed.”
(p.11)
Alongside an extrinsic orientation, a dysfunctional persona is a key feature of
Phase 1. Twelve of the sixteen participants in Study 1, and all of the cases in Study 2
and 3 showed evidence of having developed an artificial persona to adapt to the role
or roles that they inhabited. A persona is an identity that is constructed to conceal the
inappropriate parts of self and to fit in to a home role and/or work role. For example,
Mary, Lynne, Neil, Dan, Vern and Angela all developed corporate, working personas
that are oriented towards success and pleasing work colleagues. Gemma, Rachel and
Victoria created “nice girl” personas to fit into their position as passive wives and/or
daughters. George developed a party-guy persona that fitted in with the London party
gay scene.
The personas created prior to crisis become dysfunctional over time in the
three ways outlined in Chapter 8. The first of these dysfunctions is inner-outer
dissonance, in which the persona actively contradicts an inner sense of self. The
second is the over-homogenising dysfunction, in which individuality and idiosyncrasy
is compromised in favour of conformity and similarity. The third dysfunction is overidentification,
in which the persona becomes the whole self, rather than being used
sparingly by the self, leading to a superficial, false, role-based identity that is confined
to a conventional form and cannot grow into new forms over time.
Studies 2 and 3 suggest that these personas are formed to emphasise
stereotypically masculine traits in order to adapt to male-centric environments, but it
was not possible to establish this for Study 1 by retrospective analysis, because there
was no explicit questioning on gender, so the persona-gender relationship remains a
provisional and potential inclusion in the model that may be fully included after
further research is conducted.
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