DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

As Mary’s crisis emerges in her late thirties, she feels more and more
constrained and stressed by the role of being a finance lawyer. She describes feeling
“suffocated” in the job, and describes how her identity was defined but constrained
and “held together” (p.11) by the role and the executive pride of the lifestyle.
Camilla was forging a successful career in the print industry, while partying
frequently with her friends. She moved within her company to help set up a new
business venture, but after a few months in this new role, she was demoted at work
and started an affair with her married boss. Her once easy-going life suddenly is now
full of concealment and deceit, and a crisis episode occurs age 26. After starting the
affair, Camilla’s work environment felt like a place in which she was trapped:
“So that was a real worry and I was caught up in feeling trapped because I was
working for him, even though he didn’t exert that much power over me at work
because I was in a different department. I was working for him, it was a big secret.”
(p.2)
Out of Control
All four members of this cluster felt out of control as their crises developed.
Control is experienced as from without – they feel pushed around by circumstance,
convention and constraint. Mary says that prior to the crisis she felt “very spaced out
and not in control” (p.4). She was “passive and bemused”, and felt that things were
“happening to me.” (p.4). She cites “circumstances” as the cause of her staying in the
job despite wanting out for so long.
Lynne also felt out of control at work in the run up to the crisis, as “the
workload was absolutely impossible.” (p.3). Her boss was a bully and used her as a
scapegoat if things went wrong. When the affair with the member of her work team
breaks down, she almost loses control completely, feeling totally at the mercy of what
was happening to her:
“Almost out of control, I kept not crying or weeping, but tears would just start
dribbling down, like leaking, they just all of a sudden, and I’m not crying, I’m not
sobbing, but it was a feeling of being out of control.” (p.10)
Angela’s work life is emotionally fraught because her boss starts “being
horrible and aggressive” (p.7). It is in this context that the highly emotional crisis
period starts. She said she had “no control over anything at all” (p.3), she felt that
“chaos was starting to take control” (p.7). Angela uses several metaphors to describe
her feeling of being controlled. She says she felt like “a fly to be swatted” (p.9), or
“this little puppet being in the middle of it.” (p.9). She also used an analogy of being
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