DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

1. Undergoing stressful experiences may lessen the distress caused by the expectation of
or the experience of future trauma. This may be due to both an increase in the
individual’s coping repertoire that results from dealing with a past stressful
experience and enhanced self-perceptions of personal strength and resilience.
2. Change in perspectives and values may result, with the new perspective that serious
trauma and stress brings. It may make everyday hassles no longer seem so important
and so reduce day-to-day worry and tension.
3. Collective stress bringing people closer together and so strengthening social ties and
relationships.
4. The development of self-understanding may result, as previously ignored aspects of
self are made apparent at times of life crisis, so that inaccurate self-conceptions and
life patterns may be given up and replaced with more adaptive and productive
schemas.
Some researchers on stress such as Taylor (1989) have suggested that stress-reduction
interventions that do not give consideration to development and growth may nullify
the potential for insight or growth and so be potentially detrimental in the long run.
Taylor writes that many of life’s most rewarding and challenging experiences involve
stress, and therefore stress should be not avoided, but should rather be transformed
into positive, growth-focused experiences.
The various psychologists who have concluded on the importance of crisis,
trauma and stress in human development are echoing what many secular and religious
philosophers have written across the centuries; that periodic suffering can facilitate
growth and development in a person by refining and strengthening character.
Christian philosophy has had at its heart the importance of suffering in this life, in
order to build strong character. Hence we find passages such as the following in the
bible:
“But we all boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and
endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint
us.” (Romans, 5:5)
In philosophy, Kierkegaard and Marcus Aurelius talked of the power of suffering
to improve the human character. Neitzsche was probably the most famous of the
philosophers to dispute we should be aiming for happiness. He wrote:
“You want if possible – and there is no madder ‘if possible’ – to abolish suffering;
and we? ...Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end!
A state which soon renders man ludicrous and contemptible – which makes it
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