DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

Gemma
Interview 10
Case Summary
Gemma’s crisis episode is a three year long process to find a sense of authenticity and partial
autonomy away from a life under the oppressive influence of controlling parents and an illsuited
conventional husband, during her 20s. Having missed out on an adolescence in which
she could forge some autonomy, her life had developed according to a mould that was set for
her by others, particularly her parents, and so she was passive, malleable and accepting, and
hid her true fantasies and hopes. The parents, in control of their daughter, set her life
agenda, which Gemma unquestioningly followed. She says ‘my every action was controlled
by them.’ Her parents are characterised as oppressive and narrow minded in the narrative –
bigoted, controlling, neurotic, unhappy. The narrative has a Cinderella feel to it.
She has one baby and gets terrible post-natal depression, but the desire for change or
breaking free remains latent, and so while this is a period of unhappiness, it is not defined as
crisis. The crisis arrives after the second baby, and she starts to make changes – to build a
social life and go to assertiveness classes, and starts to see a counsellor. The counsellor
gives her permission to feel what she feels and be what she is. Gemma says to the
counsellor through tears ‘I don’t even know who I am’, suggesting an empty self – an identity
that has been so manipulated from without that she does not know her real character. This
is the moment when she releases her inner feelings and thoughts, and in the narrative a
sense is given of a pressure that had been building up for many years of hidden feelings,
fantasies and thoughts, that finally gets released. It was a catalyst for learning how to
explore identity and self to develop a connection with her feelings. She learns to trust her
feelings, rather than ‘run away from them’. This, she says, was the start of her liberation.
The process shows a fluid development of self – from labelling self as ‘selfish and horrible’ to
having a stronger self-esteem and opening to her weaknesses rather than shutting them out.
The development in self-concept suggests a metamorphosis in self-schematic content – a
stark shift in personhood, from one person to another person, separated by the period of
cognitive re-organisation during the crisis. Bruner talks of how in order to maintain
coherence within the self-concept, change in the self often happens in a landslide manner,
from one equilibrium state to another. Self-esteem is strengthened by effective interaction
with others and effective career progression.
The crisis shows a curious parallel manifestation of negative emotions and positive ones,
pretty well simultaneously. Guilt is a significant phenomenon, in feeling that she has
transgressed a moral imperative. One of the biggest stressors, interestingly, is not the
demands or exceeding ‘coping mechanisms’, it is her parents not being able to tell anybody
that she and Tony were divorcing. When the divorce does happen there is the co-occurrence
of relief and guilt. Gemma says that she doesn’t believe her transition would have been
possible without negative emotion, stress and a crisis. The crisis was of ‘paramount
importance’ to her development as a person. She feels that after there is a parallel sense of
both strength and vulnerability. And after exploring her self, then she finds her attention
drawn to finding meaning in life beyond the self – to develop a spiritual understanding. She
wanted to find out why life can feel like a ‘living curse’. Effects of the crisis involved a move
from stasis and acceptance to experimentation, trial and error, trying out subpersonalities,
opening to feelings and so on, she learns about the world and herself.
Bruner says that all narrative is portrayed in a dual landscape – inner world and outer world.
In Gemma’s narrative the inner world of desire, thought, fantasy, urge, emotion starts hidden
and radically detached from a cold, boring, unemotive world of imposed marriage and
stringent parental control – the inner world is ‘hidden’, ‘concealed’, while the outer person is
passive and malleable, for there is no outward expression of personally held intentions and
goals, and therefore little opportunity for personal agency or volitionally chosen direction.
The paradox is that this juxtaposition of internal and external leads Gemma to feel ‘isolated’
despite being outwardly welded carefully and conventionally into society, for she thinks she is
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