Читать книгу Coming Apart - Daphne Rose Kingma - Страница 18

In our lifetimes, we are each trying to do a single thing: to create our selves. We are all trying to solve our basic psychological problem—which is to answer in depth and to our own satisfaction the question, “Who am I?”

What this means is that as we proceed through our lives, we are all trying to get a sense of our own identity. In order to do that, we create a series of life experiences that either help us discover who we really are or confirm who we have discovered ourselves to be. This process of self-definition or self-discovery occurs through what I call “developmental tasks,” and it is our relationships, more than anything else in our lives, that help us accomplish the developmental tasks through which we define ourselves. That's why we choose the people we do and that's why they choose us. That's also why relationships begin and end.

Developmental tasks are stepping stones in the developmental process. Learning to walk after learning to crawl is a developmental task for an infant, just as attending college after completing high school is an intellectual developmental task for a young adult. The completion of each of these tasks marks the putting into place of another piece of the personality, a further identification of the self, a further coming to terms with who one really is.

Whether we are consciously aware of this or not, we are all, at any given moment in our lives, engaged in this developmental process. We're all going about the business of becoming, or trying to become, ourselves. We're all trying to grow up and leave home: to get educated, to decide whether or not to have children, to survive financially, to solve our addictive problems, to pursue our artistic impulses, to integrate our sexuality, to enhance our self-esteem, to get recognition. All of these are developmental tasks, and we look for whatever assistance we can find to move through one particular developmental stage and into the next.

There are several kinds of developmental tasks. One set is very external and task-oriented. It has to do with what we are trying to accomplish, achieve, or cause to happen at any given moment in our lives; for example, learning to walk, learning to read, leaving home, going to college, starting a business, having a child, building a house.

Another kind of developmental task is a psychological developmental process, where the tasks have to do with our personal psychologies. In this process, the set of tasks has to do with solving some emotional problems, such as taking possession of our sexuality, our anger, our masculinity or femininity, our personal power, our creativity, or self-sufficiency, to name a few.

Since we are human beings, the most natural form of assistance for us is other human beings, and relationships are the most natural form of obtaining the assistance of other human beings. Love is the medium whereby we offer one another this assistance, and, by this definition, a good love is one in which a fairly equal amount of assistance is being given and received by both partners.

This doesn't seem like a very romantic view of love and may even be seen as selfish. But the truth is that the creation of our selves is what is really occurring under the charmed umbrella of our romantic relationships. Rather than being selfish, this is a definition of love that provides an opportunity for real appreciation of the special qualities of both participants. In this sense, it is the fullest view of love.

While relationships very often help us achieve our external developmental tasks—and we often have a very obvious awareness that this is happening (“He helped me finish college,” or, “She helped me start my business”)—what is of more interest, and perhaps of more importance, is that relationships help us accomplish our emotional developmental tasks. They do this because they are by their very nature emotional. We tend to overlook what we accomplish emotionally in relationships because in general we are not aware of the emotional processes in our lives. But the fact is that consciously or unconsciously we all are always in a state of emotional evolution, and nothing spurs our emotional development more than our intimate relationships.

Since external developmental tasks are pretty much self-evident, I am not going to spend much time talking about them here. What I do want to make clear is the nature of our psychological developmental tasks because they affect our personalities so profoundly.

Psychological developmental tasks in relationships fall basically into two categories: (1) making up for specific deficits from childhood and (2) discovering the emotional meanings of our childhood stories.

Most of us don't treat our personal pasts as being in any way important except perhaps as the foggy preface to the lives we're living now. We tend to think of childhood and adulthood as two distinctly different episodes of self, not as a single continuous lifetime with the threads of childhood woven deeply into the fabric of the present. As a result, we tend to give ourselves very simplistic reports about our childhood: “Of course I was happy; my parents did everything they could,” or, “It was awful, but so what—it's over now.”

No matter what we'd like to believe, we do carry our childhoods within us. In fact, they are the blueprints for all that follows, and, for the most part, we live our lives as adults based on emotional patterns we learned as children. Both consciously and unconsciously, with unerring accuracy, we make decisions in our adult lives that are our attempts both to understand and to heal what occurred in our early years. Our relationships, more than anything else, are the vehicles by which we try to understand the meanings of our childhoods. This is difficult for many people to accept, and, in general, we don't like to investigate our childhoods. We think it is a waste of time or we're afraid that if we do examine our childhoods, we will discover our parents’ flaws and end up stranded in a state of judging and criticizing them. Since intuitively we know that no parents can do the job perfectly, we don't know what to make of the failures we may uncover.

While it's true that no set of parents is perfect, our exploration is designed neither to give our parents an A for their work nor to level them with our judgments. Rather, it is an opportunity for us to evaluate their deep and abiding impact on us in order to have a more complete understanding of why we live our lives as we do and choose the partners we do. All information is good information because the more we know about ourselves, the more we become capable of being ourselves in the fullest and most holy sense.