Your One Wild and Precious Life
Dr Maureen Gaffney is a leading clinical psychologist, writer and broadcaster. She has had a distinguished academic career and continues to consult with companies around the world to build strong, emotionally intelligent leadership, and innovative and resilient work cultures.
She has served on numerous state and other boards and is a member of the Women’s Leadership Board of Harvard University’s Kennedy School. She is also a popular columnist, broadcaster and speaker.
Her number one bestselling book, Flourishing, about how to achieve a deeper sense of well-being, meaning and purpose, was the basis of a major RTÉ One documentary. Your One Wild and Precious Life was also a number one bestseller upon publication and the winner of the RTÉ Audience Choice Irish Book Award in 2021.
Maureen lives in Dublin.
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First published 2021 This edition published 2024 001
Copyright © Maureen Gaffney, 2021
Excerpt from ‘Little Gidding’ from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1942 by T. S. Eliot, renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and of HarperCollins Publishers in the US. All rights reserved.
‘may my heart always be open to little’. Copyright, 1938 © 1966, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
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To my husband John Harris and children
Elly and Jack Harris
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the fi rst time.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Introduction: Living your one wild and precious life
How often do you think about your life and yourself? If you’re like most people, you do it a lot. In fact, there is a special part of your brain devoted to doing just that.1 Most of the time, however, your brain is busy making plans, getting things done, thinking about what’s just happened and, most of all, imagining yourself in the future – so much so that psychologist Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University describes us as part-time residents of the future.2 But whenever the external demands of your life let up, and your brain goes into a resting state, it primes you to start thinking about yourself and how you are living your life.
You think about what kind of person you are, and how you are the same as or different from other people. You reflect on what motivates you, what makes you happy or miserable, and if you are living the way you want to live. You think about how you have changed, or will change, as you go through the different stages of your life – and what has stayed the same. This kind of self-reflection is usually brief, squeezed into whatever undisturbed time you can carve out for yourself, or maybe when you are on holiday.
But at certain times, and in certain circumstances, your interest in understanding your own psychology quickens and becomes more urgent. When your life has taken an unexpected turn. When you face an unexpected challenge or are trying to recover from a setback, like the break-up of an important relationship. When you reach a ‘Big O’ birthday. When you reach midlife and naturally perform a stocktake of your life to date with a view to choosing how you want to live your life’s second half. And most especially when you enter, or imagine entering, a new stage of your life.
These times are potential crucial turning points, opening up a new opportunity to review, reassess and renew who you are and how you are living your life. They can motivate you to rethink your life, to
make a new plan, or to change a situation that is holding you back from your full potential for happiness. And when you do that well, it will imbue your life with a new purpose and meaning.
This book will trace the arc of your psychological development as you proceed through the different life stages and describe the three basic and interconnected psychological drives that account for most of what you do in life – the drive for closeness, the drive for autonomy and the drive for competence. It will describe how, from the moment of birth, you are wired to seek close personal relationships; how your desire for autonomy finds expression in your attempts to be your true self, and to control the direction and organization of your life; and how your drive for competence is played out in your efforts to manage your life effectively, and on your own terms.
Over the past fifty years, there has been a revolution in our understanding of human motivation, and how autonomy, closeness and competence play out in every stage of human development and determine our happiness and success in life. We now have a deeper understanding of how these three innate needs are intricately linked, and a clearer view of the central role autonomy plays in all this. The nature and importance of psychological autonomy is rarely discussed, because autonomy is often misrepresented as cool selfsufficiency. In fact, autonomy is the innate, driving human need to govern yourself, to be an active agent of your life, and to shape your destiny as best you can.
Do you ever long to break free in some area of your life? Buck at someone trying to manipulate and control what you think and do? Feel too fearful to match what you say and do with what is actually going on inside you? Do you ever feel that you have paid too high a price for love, acceptance, security or even peace in a relationship? When you feel like that, that’s autonomy calling.
How often do you experience the surge of high energy, lift, forward movement that comes from knowing that you have taken your life in your hands? Or have that solid sense of being securely anchored in yourself when you face down fear and do what you know is hard but right? That’s autonomy in action. And who among us doesn’t want to experience that kind of autonomy more often in our personal, work or
public life – especially if we know that we struggle more in one particular area of our life than others.
But if you don’t identify those experiences as coming from losing or exercising autonomy, then you can’t grasp their inner dynamics, and may not look in the right place for solutions. You won’t be able to clearly identify what is carrying you forward in your life and development, or what is holding you back and blocking your momentum. In a completely new way, therefore, autonomy has become a premium competency.
At its most basic, the experience of autonomy is volition – knowing that what you are doing is initiated inside you, not forced on you by external circumstances. Your actions are endorsed by your whole self – heartfelt, fully owned by you, and you take responsibility for them. They come from the core of self, and you possess the inner freedom that allows you to act in a way that fits with that sense of self. There is a unity between how you think and feel inside, and what you say and do outside. That’s what being authentic, being ‘true to yourself’ actually means – what we used to call ‘character’. The opposite is the silencing of self that brings with it that deadening sense of hollowness and depression.
The opposite of autonomy is not dependence. It is feeling controlled. Feeling controlled runs counter to something deep in human nature. When you feel controlled by forces outside or within yourself, you are dissatisfied and unhappy, uneasy, anxious or resentful. Your functioning, your performance and your creativity in every domain of your life are undermined. If that sense of being controlled is chronic, you can become despairing of yourself and of your life.
You can, of course, feel just as pressured and controlled by forces inside you – by anxiety, guilt, perfectionism, harsh self-criticism, a desperate need for approval, or by compulsions or addictions of any kind. These inner pressures create an internal tyranny. Or they can be externalized into tyrannizing those around you. You try to control their behaviour as a way of managing your own pressurized inner state. The issue is not whether the rewards and pressures are external or internal – it’s how controlled you feel by them. When you feel like that, negative things happen.
Your three needs – for closeness, competence, autonomy – are always present, but ebb and flow in intensity and urgency at different times and stages of your life. There is a natural tension between closeness and autonomy, between being deeply engaged with other people and being alone and free to focus on yourself. The attempts to resolve these conflicts, to bring them into some kind of balance, account for much of the activity and drama of development right through life and for the unique colour and flavour of each life stage.
In this book, I will describe how these three drives find expression in a series of ten developmental tasks, each task presenting itself as you come to the end of one stage of life and get ready to enter the next; and how through resolving each task your sense of self and personal identity develops. If you tackle these developmental tasks successfully, you feel happier and more satisfied with the way your life is going. You feel that your life is in progress, that it is not suspended or stagnating. You see yourself as doing, in some general way, what you were put into this world to do.
The aim is to provide you with a psychological framework within which your own development as a person can be more deeply understood, a grid on which you can locate key events in your life that have an emotional resonance and linger in your memory. It will help you trace how you became the person you are as you negotiated each stage and turning point of your life and met its challenge.
In my last book, Flourishing, I set out the ten evidence-based strategies that increase happiness and well-being. It was, if you like, a way of examining your life in cross section – looking at how the brain works, how you think, how emotions play out, what gives meaning to your life – and how all these factors shape or undermine your happiness. This book is different. It is a developmental account of what shapes you as an individual, and how at each stage of life you set down patterns that will shape your capacity for happiness and success at the next stage.
This kind of developmental account takes full measure of your past, which is a rich resource – a way to understand and change the patterns of your unfolding life, and to predict how you are likely to react to the challenges and possibilities of the life stages ahead. You
Introduction: Living your one wild and precious life xv
can’t control all that life throws at you, but you can meet it on your own terms. Far from being a passive victim of your past, you are always the author, interpreting and reworking your lived experiences into an evolving narrative. So, at any point, you can also revise your interpretations, reassess the past, reframe the present, reimagine the future, and reset your development on a new course. There is always a new chance to heal old wounds and to deal with unfinished business – and to do it better this time.
Entering each new stage of life is a predictable life crisis, shared with your own generation, the cohort of people who were born around the same time as you, and who move through the life course with you. But some crises and turning points are silent and private. Cumulatively, this means that your life is always a mix of stability and change, a function of the experiences that have shaped you and the new circumstances in which you find yourself. But at every stage, and most acutely at points of transition, the opportunity opens up again to find a new balance, a better resolution of an old developmental task.
The key point is this. At any stage, you are never fully formed. The story is never over. The story is always of a life in progress.
part one This Is Your Life
1. Navigating the new life course
You have one wild and precious life – just one. One opportunity to live that life in your own way. One chance to live through each stage of your life, and with no chance to rehearse, so you want to make that life count. Understanding yourself is a critical starting point – how you came to be the person you are, and the basic psychological needs that drive your development over the course of your lifetime.
When we think about the course of a lifetime, most of us divide it up into di erent stages that start and end at particular times, each stage having its own agenda. Getting through these stages was once a relatively straightforward journey. You were expected to achieve the big milestones in your life at a particular stage and in a particular sequence – finish your education, find a job, marry, settle down, rear a family, retire. But the contours of the life course have changed radically in the last hundred years. You no long travel along a well-signposted road towards the expected three-score-and-ten. In the twenty-first century, you live your life on a high-speed motorway, with multiple lanes, intersections and exits, and with the destination a lot further away – and you have no updated psychological route map to help navigate your course.
Consider just two paradoxical changes.
More years were added to the average life expectancy in the twentieth century than in all previous millennia combined. In the blink of an eye, says Laura Carstensen of the Stanford Center on Longevity, the length of time that we are living has doubled.1 You are now living in the era of the hundred-year life.2 Most babies born since the year 2000 in developed countries can expect to live to be a hundred or older. If you’ve already made it to adulthood, and are in reasonably good shape, there’s a good chance of living into your nineties. And whether you do or not, you must live and plan as if you will.
Yet, for all the extra time you have to live, you have become
time-poor. ‘How are things?’ you ask someone, and the answer is likely to be, ‘Busy, busy, busy.’ The period extending roughly from your late twenties to sometime in your early sixties has now become the ‘rush hour of life’3 – when you establish yourself in work, find a soulmate, settle down and raise a young family. No sooner have you done all that than you find yourself facing the onset of middle age – and all the questions, challenges and opportunities that life stage brings with it.
Now put these two realities together. The amount of time you have to live has doubled, yet a full third of your adulthood is now a ‘rush hour’. That’s just one of the many changes and challenges you face in the new life course.
The new life stages and their time frames
This stretching of the life course has created two new life stages and changed the timing of the rest.
The new life course
Life stage
Infancy
Early childhood
Middle childhood
Adolescence
Emerging adulthood
Young adulthood
Middle age
Late adulthood
Time frame
birth–two years of age
two–six
seven–eleven
puberty–late teens
late teens–early 30s
early 30s–late 40s
50–late 60s
late 60s–late 70s
Old age 80 and onwards
Reaching adulthood takes so long that you have to negotiate a new in-between life stage, emerging adulthood, which extends from the end of adolescence to the late twenties, or even early thirties. This new stage exerts an upward pressure on the timing of all the rest,
which now start and finish later. Young adulthood does not properly begin until your early thirties and extends well into your late forties, which in turn means that middle age does not begin until around the age of fifty and then lasts into your late sixties.
And then? Well, there’s a long way to go until old age, so there’s another new in-between stage. In the USA, nearly half of those aged sixty-five to sixty-nine and one-third of those in their early seventies consider themselves to be middle-aged – for want of a better term.4 I have called it late adulthood – the stage of your life when you know that you have definitely passed the midway mark but you certainly don’t feel ‘old’, and being called a pensioner is very much out of step with your lived experience because your desires, motivations and the way you want to live your life are subtly di erent from what they were in middle age, or what they will be in old age.
Old age does not begin now until near eighty, or at the onset of physical frailty or prolonged ill health. But while the onset of old age is later, it also lasts longer, and how independently you can live at that stage has become an urgent and pressing issue.
The factors that influence you at each stage
This new life course is quite di erent from what came before, presenting you with a di erent set of choices, decisions and challenges, so it requires a deeper understanding of yourself, and also of the internal and external factors that influence how you develop at each stage.
for a start, you are different
Compared to your parents and grandparents, you are healthier, more educated, with better cognitive functioning, and you outperform them on a range of intelligence measures. You are better travelled, more connected to the wider world, both real and virtual. You see fewer constraints in how you live your life and pursue your goals, and you have more freedom to mobilize the resources you need to do all that.5 So as you negotiate the big transitions in the life course, you are not marching in the same lockstep as they did.
you have more personal freedom and choice
This applies at each stage, so your life has become more fluid and individualized. The commitments you make at one stage are more reversible. You can change jobs more often. You can leave and reenter education multiple times. You can more easily divorce and remarry. If you are a woman, you have more control over your fertility and you no longer labour under the constraints that prevented your grandmother continuing her career after she married.
Decisions about how to share the role of provider and caretaker are made by you and your partner, although there are still strong expectations that women should be the main caretakers. Lone parenthood, while rarely easy, is more common and enjoys more social support. In some western countries, if you are gay or lesbian you can marry, have children, and live openly as a family, and those who identify as transgender, non-binary or gender-fluid are asserting their right to be recognized and treated equally.
But having more choices is not cost-free. You are also held more personally responsible for the choices you make. The success is all yours if your choices work out – as is the failure, if they don’t. You have to defend the choices you make, not least to yourself; for example, whether to stay at home to care for your children or go back to work. You can no longer hide behind the shield of tradition or social obligation.
In a consumer-saturated society, having so many choices risks creating a fetish of choice about everything. Having multiple options for every trivial decision creates cognitive overload, depletes your mental and physical energy, and uses up the intellectual resources you need to do anything that requires attention, concentration, focus and problemsolving – and that’s pretty much everything important in your life.6
the bar for what constitutes success is being raised notch by notch
This is true in every domain of your life; ‘getting it right’ is the new pressure. Once, just ‘being’ in a particular role – a wife, husband, a parent, a teacher, a leader – was enough to secure your self-esteem and garner the respect of others. Now it’s how you personally perform the role that matters. So you are under more pressure to do things ‘right’,
and there are more consequences if you don’t. The pressure comes from outside, but also from inside yourself. Your sense of personal worth is more closely tied to how well you do things.
You expect more from your personal relationships – more intimacy, more equality, more support to keep growing and developing – and are correspondingly more dissatisfied when those expectations are dashed. It takes a lot more time and personal investment to rear happy, resilient and successful children, and it goes on for a lot longer than you thought it would. At a day-to-day level, all of these pressures are increasing the number of goals and micro-goals in your day-to-day agenda.
your attention is under siege in a new way
You are living your life in a digitally saturated world. We are just waking up to the alarming discovery that our attention is being hijacked by heavy use of smart phones and social media, designed to make it easier to respond addictively to the content they provide. Many of your ‘choices’ are controlled by powerful algorithms that know more about your preferences and habits than you may do yourself – a very modern threat to autonomy and control, because it doesn’t work by coercion but by seduction. The lure of technology is convenience, the new uber-value.7 Finding easier, faster ways to do anything is meant to free you, but often ends up making your decisions for you and overriding what you say you really value, such as face-to-face interaction or time to think.
In this open, digitally networked world, privacy, closeness and belonging are being radically redefined. Once, we defined ourselves in smaller, more bounded communities. Now, your ‘community’ is exponentially expanded by access to the internet and social media – but that very freedom can create an individual and collective sense of insecurity.
age is no longer the marker it once was
Outside of childhood and advanced old age, chronological age now predicts the least about someone and how they live their life. It’s more a proxy or shorthand for changes you observe in yourself and your lifestyle.8 For example, if you are now in your fifties, you may have
recently taken on a demanding new work role or have just taken early retirement. You may be securely anchored in a long-term marriage. You may be divorced, or embarking on a second relationship.
You may still be rearing teenagers, or already have grandchildren, or have just become a dad again, courtesy of a new, younger partner. You may have recovered from your first real health scare, be training to run a marathon, or both. Whatever your age or circumstances, you now have more power to set the agenda of your life than ever before in history.
you have more control over the timetable of your adult life
When you think about your life, says biologist John Medina, you automatically assume the presence of an internal clock. At birth, it’s set at zero, and then it ticks away incessantly for the rest of your life.9 You ‘clock’ yourself against an expected social timetable, when major events like getting married, settling into a career and having children are ‘meant’ to happen, and when they happen ‘too early’ or ‘too late’ it has an impact on your happiness and well-being.10 That timetable used to be largely set by your chronological age, and reinforced by strong social expectations. Indeed, your social class still has a bearing on these timings.
Social class is now largely defined by how long you spend in education. If you leave before completing secondary school, you are more likely to get married, have children and retire earlier than your middle-class counterparts. More significantly, you think of yourself as older. How old you think you are is not a trivial thing – it has significantly negative implications for your health and well-being, increasing your risk of heart disease and other illnesses. But whatever your class, you now have more power to set the timetable yourself, and being ‘too late’ for anything is now very generously defined.
Being as young – or as old – as you feel
How you think about time is important. Time and the passage of time shape us in important ways – how we think, how we feel, and
what we put most value on.11 Monitoring time is a basic part of being human. From the moment you are born, your biological clock starts ticking, setting an unconscious rhythm. Day to day it a ects your circadian rhythm and over a lifetime it sets the rough timetable for your aging and your development. So time, development and aging are intimately linked, and as we progress through each life stage, our relationship with time changes.
How you think about time matters – a lot. At one level, when you think about time and your own life, you see time as flowing in a constant, linear motion, the implication being that once it has passed, you can’t get that time back. This can lend itself to a kind of age determinism – feeling that your chronological age not just influences but determines your capacities and the possibilities in life. If you think and feel like that, it has a host of negative outcomes – poorer physical and psychological well-being and, not least, reduced longevity.12
Age determinism is not some abstract philosophical stance. It reveals itself in a day-to-day belief that chronological age determines your physical, psychological and cognitive capacities and so dictates what you can and cannot do. Older adults are at the sharp end of such stereotyping, not least the idea that aging is associated with inevitable physical and psychological decline. This kind of persistent stereotyping threatens the value you put on yourself. It undermines your motivation to be proactive about your health and your determination to stay open to life, to new opportunities, and to possibility. Serendipity does not stop when you reach sixty.
The opposite of age determinism is believing that age is just a number. There is usually a gap between chronological and subjective age – how young or old someone feels. By the end of their thirties, over 70 per cent of adults say that they feel significantly younger than their chronological age. This more dynamic view of age is not just some harmless vanity – it really matters. It is associated with higher self-esteem, less stress, more optimism, better physical health and cognitive functioning, higher levels of psychological well-being and increased longevity.13
When you feel younger than your chronological age, you are more hopeful and positive about your life and therefore more likely to
manage it in a more proactive way. You look after your health, rather than going into avoidance mode; when you encounter a health setback, you increase your e orts to get back on form as quickly as possible; and you are motivated to preserve your autonomy and strive to live as independently as possible for as long as you can. This has a knock-on positive e ect. Take just one study of people aged fifty and older: compared to those who held a negative view of aging, those with a more positive view of aging lived 7.5 years longer.14
In addition, feeling younger than your age is strongly linked to being more open-minded, more curious, more interested in new ideas and experiences, ready to approach new and unknown situations, and able to adapt flexibly to changing circumstances.15 You are also aware that not all time is equal – that there are ‘anchor periods’ in your life that hold outstanding meaning because they were the happiest or most di cult times of your life, and you use these as reference points to which all other periods of your life are compared.16 And contained within these anchor periods are bespoke lessons to be learned and applied to how you live your life now.
This view of time opens up the possibility of reworking our relationship with time and the opportunity to throw o the tyranny of believing that chronological age defines us, and instead to realize that at every stage of life, the trick is to feel young in the right way – full of curiosity, open to life and eager to learn. And to feel old in the right way – wise in your way, as someone who has a unique story to tell. Adopting that more dynamic mindset about time will not just make you feel happier and more fulfilled – it will imbue your life with an enlivening purpose. That mindset opens you to possibility, to a robust optimism about your life and a determination to make the very most of the time left to you.
As a result of these changes, the traditional paradigm of human development has changed. The old understanding was that life was neatly divided into three stages. In childhood and adolescence you developed. In adulthood you matured. In old age you declined. But a mounting body of research about human development throughout life has fundamentally changed that understanding, and the new paradigm is simple and dramatic. Aging and development are not opposites,
they are synonymous – you are aging and developing, from the moment you are born to the moment you die.17 How liberating an idea is that?
So whatever your stage in life, you are a generation in transition. This is making big calls on your psychological resources: on your capacity to keep changing and adapting; to form and maintain highquality relationships; to take responsibility for your own life and drive it forward; and to do all that at a high level of competence. All of this requires a much better understanding of yourself, and of the fundamental desires and needs that must be met so that you can keep growing and developing at every stage of life.
Identity: your life story
At each stage of life, your sense of self and personal identity finds expression in the story you tell about yourself and the story significant others tell about you. That continual and evolving self-narrative is a fundamental way to understand yourself; to bring together the di erent parts of yourself; and to organize your important experiences, past, present and expected, into a coherent story. Therefore, self-narrative and identity are tightly meshed.18
Your personal coherent story is your way of maintaining a sense of personal continuity as you change and as your life changes: this is who I am; this is what made me the person I am; this is what I expect from life; this is what gives meaning to my life now.
You ground that story not just in your biographical details but in experiences and turning points that were particularly important to you. In childhood, your identity is centred around specific events and experiences that are usually shared and co-remembered with a parent – that is why, as an adult, it is sometimes hard to separate out what you actually experienced from what you were told you experienced. In adolescence, and again at midlife, your identity deepens and widens, your story extending over a larger segment of time.
You engage with your story in a deeper way as you try to respond to a new imperative – you want to make your life amount to
something, to identify its purpose and its larger meaning.19 You begin to see recurring themes in your life, extending further back in time and into the future. You begin to see more clearly your place in your family and social group, and even in historical time – a process that emerges during young adulthood and becomes particularly pronounced at midlife. As you become conscious of time left, you interrogate your past to better understand where you are now, in order to cast some light on what is possible for the future.
The attempt to understand and engage with your own story opens a window into the complexity of yourself and your evolving life. It makes you knowable to yourself in a more compassionate way. But most of all, it reminds you that you are the author of that story, continually interpreting and reinterpreting what is happening inside and outside yourself – and that you can also reset your story and direct your development on to a new course.
As you do that, you free yourself from the common illusion that our lives proceed in an orderly, sequential way. Instead, you begin to see that your life, like every life, is not linear. Instead, it is characterized by advances and setbacks, lapses and gains, and that they are all part of the developmental process that made, and is still making, you the person that you are.
The life course may be changing but our fundamental drives remain constant
You don’t come into this world psychologically naked. You come ready equipped with three fundamental psychological drives:
• the need for close connection with other people
• the need for autonomy, and
• the need for competence.
A sense of autonomy, the right kind of closeness, and feeling e ective in your life – these three drivers are the big engines of personal development at every life stage and the non-negotiable requirements for a happy, fulfilled and successful life.20
• Closeness : The drive for closeness takes three forms. The first and most intense expression is your need to form an attachment to at least one person who will protect and support you, especially when you are vulnerable. The second is the drive to form close relationships that bind you to friends and allies, providing a sense of belonging. The third is the drive to care for o spring, for those you love, or for someone who is vulnerable or in need of help.
• Autonomy : The drive to be an active agent in your life, to govern yourself, and to shape the direction and organization of your life. You want to explore the world around you, and inside you, so you can keep growing and developing into the fullness of who you are. There are many givens in life that you can’t control: such as your innate temperament; the family and life circumstances in which you were reared; and random events (the lucky breaks and unpredictable setbacks). Yet, the nature of being human is to be an actor, and to exercise what control you can over your life. That sense of autonomy is what gives you the inner authority to claim your own choices and to own your own experiences. This is how you stake out the core of your individuality.
• Competence : The drive to master things, to be good at what you do, to manage the di erent domains of your life, and to rise to whatever challenges life throws at you.
How these fundamental needs are met is woven into your identity – the ongoing narrative that you construct about yourself, and which in turn shapes what you expect of life and how you choose to live it.21
The nature of autonomy
It’s easy to grasp why closeness is a fundamental human need, and the world leaves you in little doubt about the demand for competence, but autonomy is somewhat of an orphan need. The word tends to provoke a small frown, as if it carries a whi of selfishness about it. It is an essential component of character and growth, and yet it is often
misunderstood. It is important to understand what autonomy is – and is not. Here are three myths about autonomy.22
myth 1: autonomy is an extreme form of self- sufficiency
Being independent-minded, able to stand on your own two feet and be responsible for your own decisions are all part of being autonomous. But none of that implies that you hold yourself apart and separate. It does not mean that you refuse to depend on others for support or allow others to depend on you. In fact, truly autonomous people find it easier to depend on others, and experience much less psychological conflict about it.
myth 2: autonomy is the enemy of closeness
No, it is not. When you are autonomous, the relationships you form with your parents, friends, partner and work colleagues are happier and of a higher quality. You take care of others willingly, not because you have to, and the care you give is more e ective. It has a more positive impact on the person you are caring for, and on you.
myth 3: autonomy is an expression of a western brand of hyper- individualism and doesn’t hold the same sway in other cultures
In fact, in countries with more collectivist cultures and attitudes, which stress duty and dependence on each other, there’s an even stronger link between autonomy and well-being. The more autonomous people are, the happier, more satisfied and personally fulfilled they feel.
The function of closeness, autonomy and competence 23
Your innate need for closeness, autonomy and competence are the psychological equivalent of your biological needs for food, water, sleep and sex. They are essential, and you cannot thrive without them. But they work di erently from your biological needs.
In the case of your biological needs, the set point is satisfaction. When you are no longer hungry, thirsty or sexually aroused, you feel
satiated. But in the case of your psychological drives, the set point is not just satisfaction, it is growth and development. After each satisfactory experience of closeness, of autonomy, or of acting competently, you feel that you are more fully yourself. This motivates you to seek out more: you want a deeper engagement in a relationship; you want to set the direction of your life in a more active and confident way; you want to expand and develop your talents and abilities. That is why meeting all three needs is the main driver of development and happiness at every stage of your life.
The fundamental drives to meet your closeness, autonomy and competence needs are not just ‘feelings’. They influence the neural circuits in your brain, activating the hormonal and operating systems that influence motivation, behaviour and stress response.24 They are deeply rooted in your instinctive behavioural systems, and it is their instinctive nature that gives them their psychological power.*
* You are born with five instinctive brain-based behavioural systems, designed to help you survive and thrive in the world, and to interlock and intersect with each other. The Attachment System : the instinct to form a strong emotional tie first with one person, and later with others, to provide the protection, security, love and encouragement you need to grow and develop. The Exploration System : the instinct to venture out on your own, to explore, play, learn, create and master the world around you and inside you. The drive for autonomy helps you do that and, in combination with a Secure attachment, helps you do all that completely. The Social System : the instinct to form social bonds – banding together with others for companionship and help. You seek out friendships, one-to-one relationships with particular others, and a group that gives you a feeling of belonging. To maintain those bonds you have to become socially competent and develop a strong sense of personal identity that will help you find a unique and secure place in your friendships and in the group. The Sexual System : the instinct to find a mate who sexually and psychologically attracts you, and with whom you can potentially have children. But sexual attraction is not enough to keep a couple or parents together for the time it takes to rear a child to near adulthood. So after the initial attraction phase, you need to develop an attachment bond. The Caretaking System : the instinct to provide care, comfort and help to those who are dependent on you, or are temporarily in need. This is most strongly triggered by becoming a parent. From the moment of birth, babies have evolved desires, preferences and behaviours designed specifically to trigger this urge in parents, but also in others. Parents, for their part, have evolved a system of desires, preferences and reactions designed to synchronize with those of their babies. Just to be on the safe
This Is Your Life
In humans, the instinctive systems don’t operate in the rigid patterns evident in other species. They are more flexible, designed to function in very di erent personal, cultural and social contexts. But it is this very flexibility that makes them prone to going wrong. For example, if your needs for closeness and autonomy are frustrated, you can still become competent, but it will be at a higher cost to yourself and to your relationships. Your competence will have a driven quality about it – more anxious, draining and oppressive – and what you achieve is never quite enough.
These three psychological needs are not separate items to be checked o ; one is embedded in the other, and if one is chronically thwarted, it will exact a heavy toll on your happiness, well-being and success in life.25
From the very beginning of your life, your drive for autonomy is shaped and nurtured within your close relationships. It is achieved not at the expense of closeness, but with the assurance and confidence that stem from closeness. The more secure your close relationships, the less compromised your capacity for autonomy. When both these needs are met, your drive for competence is strong, energizing and liberating.
To use a simple analogy – the comfort and support of your close relationships is the vehicle that carries you safely through each stage of your life. Autonomy is the fuel that propels it. And competency is the route map or navigation system that will get you e ciently to your desired destination.*
These three psychological needs are present at every stage of life,
side, the caretaking system also triggers a general desire on the part of parents and non-parents alike to leave something worthwhile behind them, to make the world a better place for the next generation.
* The kind of balance between closeness and autonomy that is most satisfying to you is influenced by your inherited temperament. Some of you came into the world as ‘yes babies’, on the extraverted side of the continuum, drawing your energy from engaging with others, tolerant of being passed around to friends and relatives to be hugged and kissed, wide open to novelty, ready to give everything a go, and adapting easily to change. Some of you are ‘no babies’, on the introverted side, with a strong sense of your own boundaries, overstimulated by too much interaction, cautious about novelty, and choosy about what to expend e ort on.
although expressed di erently at di erent times. They are like internal tides, currents tugging you one way and then another. But they can get out of balance. If the closeness you experience is too overwhelming, you begin to drown. Striving too hard for autonomy will isolate you, and you drift too far from shore. Too great a need to show how competent you are, and you exhaust your strength. Too little e ort, and you never learn to swim at all, just stay paddling in the shallows.
Your life, then, is a series of transitions that you must negotiate in order to grow and develop. Through every stage, you are driven by your needs for close relationships and love, for the ability to actively direct your own life course, and for the knowledge and skills that come with investing in and succeeding at the various roles in your life.
2. The drama of development
Each life stage has its own psychological agenda, what psychologist Erik Erikson described as ‘developmental tasks’, forming a series of ‘crises’ or specific challenges that must be addressed.1 The developmental tasks encapsulate the way you need to meet your basic drives for closeness, autonomy and competence at that particular stage. How you try to resolve their inherent tensions accounts for much of the activity and drama of development.
The developmental tasks identified by Erikson in 1951 are still resonant, but they need to be expanded and updated in light of the changes in the life course and the significant advances in knowledge about human development since then. This is my updated version.
The ten developmental tasks of the new life course
Life stage Time frame Developmental task
Infancy birth–two years of age trust or mistrust?
Early childhood two–six autonomy or self-doubt?
Middle childhood seven–eleven belonging or isolation?
Adolescence puberty–late teens identity or confusion?
Emerging adulthood late teens–early 30s self-responsibility or dependence?
Young adulthood early 30s–late 40s intimacy or loneliness? initiative or passivity?
Middle age 50–late 60s generating or stagnating?
Late adulthood late 60s–late 70s purpose or decline?
Old age 80 and onwards integrity or despair?
Each developmental task is triggered by di erent cues: by changes in your physical, cognitive, emotional and social functioning; by your
own changing desires; by social cues from family, friends, peers and the world in general about what you are expected to do at particular points in the life course, so that you keep maturing and find a satisfying and viable place in the society in which you live.
At both extremes of the life course – early childhood and advanced old age – physical changes are the important triggers, while at most other stages psychological and social factors are more salient. Whatever their source, the message from these triggers is unmistakable: this is what you need to do now, this is the developmental task that confronts you and that must be resolved.
Once a particular developmental task is activated, it a ects what preoccupies you. It influences how you think, how you feel, how you behave and what you remember. For example, if you are asked to recall memories from each decade of your life, apart from very big or unexpected events, what stands out are memories that relate to the major developmental task of that stage. When you recall your twenties, memories of falling in love, or your early experiences of sex, or the break-up of a big romance tend to be most vivid, while becoming a parent or a high point in your work may predominate in your memories of your thirties or forties.2
Each life stage begins when a particular developmental task is triggered and ends when that task is resolved. The ‘old’ task loses its prime position in your thoughts and feelings and goes into the background as a new task emerges that will define the next stage of development. The old task is not less important, it’s just not written in bold any more, it’s greyed-out. This happens quite naturally. For example, the strong desire for autonomy is the prime task in your second and third year of life; it goes into the background during middle childhood, then resurfaces with renewed force in adolescence as you try to establish your own identity. It emerges again as a key concern at midlife, and again in old age.
For every developmental task, there is a polarity, a dynamic tension between the two opposite poles. For example, the desire for trust is rooted in the fear of being abandoned or rejected, the urge to make friends is rooted in the misery of isolation. The spectre of stagnation motivates you to make your life count for something.
The nature of life is that you keep moving between the two poles, and the task is to find some way to balance and integrate them. When that resolution is satisfactory, you move towards the positive pole, and that becomes your steady state, readying you to move on to the next stage with confidence. When the resolution is not satisfying, you drift towards the negative pole, compromising your capacity for the next task. That is why each developmental task is a ‘crisis’ or turning point. It sets you on a particular trajectory, with significant consequences for your happiness, well-being and success.
You are never fully formed
There is a large overlap between one stage and another – a new stage is already beginning as the old stage is coming to an end. Life stages are not like a stack of boxes arranged in a determined order, but more like phases. It is in this more fluid and non-linear sense that the idea of ‘stage’ is used in this book.* Neither is psychological development a linear process, but rather a series of transitions, turning points and transformations.
On the basis of his research into adult life, Daniel Levinson, a former professor in Harvard and Yale universities, found that adulthood unfolds in a sequence of relatively stable life periods lasting between seven and ten years.3 During the stable period, you build a life structure that centres mainly around your close relationships with family and friends, your work and, for some, around a deep personal interest or commitment to something.† These are the elements of your life in which you invest most of your time and energy, which influence the
* Some researchers have abandoned the idea of life stages. This is largely in response to the failure to find fixed pre-determined patterns. But most people still think of their lives as unfolding in a sequence of stages or phases, and it is that more fluid definition of stages that is used here, a useful way to organize what we know about human development as it unfolds over the life course.
† A community of interest could include a professional or sporting association, a social movement, a political party, or a religious group that you are deeply committed to. For many people in Ireland, for example, the GAA becomes a way of life.
way you engage with the world for this period, and which define the character of your living.
At the beginning of each stage, you make choices. These choices allow you to give expression to certain parts of yourself, but they also require you to put aside other choices you could have made, and other sides of your personality, at least for now.
Each stage is book-ended by significant transition periods, lasting between three and five years, a large boundary zone in which you get ready to end one stage and enter another. That means you spend nearly 50 per cent of your life in transition, changing, or thinking about changing some aspect of your life, assessing whether the life structure you have created is still viable. Is it still satisfying, or does it need to be changed in the light of new needs inside yourself, or new demands from outside?4 As you will read in Chapter 18, the transition to middle age is particularly significant in this respect.
As you approach the end of one decade and the beginning of another, you think more deeply about where your life is going, about its meaning or purpose, or the lack of either. The link between how satisfied you are with your life and your physical and psychological well-being is stronger during these transitions than at other times.5 That’s why the beginning of each decade, turning any of the ‘Big O’ birthdays, has particular significance for many people.
These transition periods are key times for transformation and development, when you have the opportunity to loop back to repair earlier unfinished business. For example, you get three shots at getting autonomy right – in very early childhood, in adolescence, and again in midlife. If you are a parent, as you help your children to develop a basic trust, to become securely autonomous and competent, any wounds you have can be healed in the process. This is what early psychoanalysts refer to as the second edition of childhood. What over-arching principles can guide that process? This is something we will explore throughout the following chapters. Over the page, I set out the basic psychological principles for a life well lived. These principles are not limited to any one stage in life, nor are they separate injunctions. Rather, they are embedded one in the other. In later chapters we will carefully tease out how these principles of
living emerge at each life stage, relate to each other and, crucially, what you can learn about yourself now by thinking about them.
The principles of a life well lived
Life stage Time frame Developmental task Psychological principle
Infancy birth–two years of age trust or mistrust? Be trustworthy
Early childhood two–six autonomy or self-doubt? Be bold
Middle childhood seven–eleven belonging or isolation? Be generous
Adolescence puberty–late teens identity or confusion? Be authentic
Emerging adulthood late teens–early 30s self-responsibility or dependence?
Young adulthood early 30s–late 40s intimacy or loneliness? initiative or passivity?
Take the initiative
Invest and commit
Middle age 50–late 60s generating or stagnating? Create something of lasting value
Late adulthood late 60s–late 70s purpose or decline? Seize the day
Old age 80 and onwards integrity or despair? Be wise
When we think about our lives, we tend to loop backwards and forwards, trying to figure out how the past has influenced who and how we are now, and what we expect and hope for the future. This book is designed to help you interrogate your past in order to understand who you are now, why you made the choices you made, and how you may be, or want to be, in the future.
I have set out nine life stages, with ten corresponding developmental tasks that you must address in order to progress from stage to stage. This is the nature of the life course, and our work here is to survey our current life stage from the perspective of what has gone before and what is yet to come.
In this regard, middle age is particularly important. Halfway through any journey or project, there is a natural pause, a calculation as to what progress you have made and what is still to be done. So, too, as you approach midlife. You become acutely aware of the time you have left and feel a new and pressing urgency to make your life count for something. The sense of being halfway between the start point and end point is a powerful incentive and driver. This is when you set your own agenda for the second part of your life. It is a moment of self-realization that reaches into the past and extends into the future, allowing you to understand your life prior to this and plan your life after this. It is for this reason that our survey starts at this pivotal point.
3. The prime of life
It may elicit a hollow groan from some, but it is true to say that in middle age you are in your prime. Your cognitive and emotional functioning improve, your sense of self and personal identity become stronger, and your body is still relatively youthful and capable. You are ‘comfortable in your skin’, more confident and self-assured.
You will need these attributes, because midlife is a significant turning point in the life course, challenging you in many ways. You are coming to the end of what might be called the first agenda of life – the dreams and plans that were gestated during adolescence and set in motion in your twenties.
Now, you pivot to the second agenda – what to do with the next half of your life. The first agenda was heavily influenced by the hopes and expectations of your family and society, but the second agenda is generated by you. As you reflect on what you want your one and only life to amount to, at midlife you can rewrite your personal narrative and make the choices and decisions that will shape the direction of your life in the decades to come.
What makes this the prime of life? Well, in middle age you have a more assured mastery of the world you operate in, and you function at a high level of competence. Your cognitive executive functioning improves significantly. Your vocabulary is richer. You are better at reasoning. You possess a rich store of the irreplaceable, tacit knowledge that comes from experience. You make better use of time. You feel more in command of yourself. Most of all, there are striking improvements in your judgement. You know when to consult other people, and when you have to make a decision yourself. Even your spatial memory is better – you are better at finding your way around the world, in all senses of the word.
There are some losses in the mechanics of cognition. You are not as fast at processing rapidly incoming stimuli as you were in your