Stages of Development, pt 1

Stages of Development--Part 1

Birth to Age Seven

From the time I was a teenager I've had a nagging feeling. Maybe a lot of people feel it, I don't know. There have been two parts to the feeling. One has been a vague but very real sensing of my potential as a human being. The second is a nagging doubt about whether I have the necessary life skills to be able to reach it.

My essential self is trying to come around the traumatic experiences of my childhood so that I can transform them. If I have any chance of experiencing aspects of my human potential, I am going to have to do this work.

I believe that all human beings are spiritual in nature, and that we take on the grist of the earth in order to learn. Right now I am having a powerful inner experience of the grist of my childhood rising up to meet me. If my essential self does not meet this challenge, I feel I may be weakened until such time as I am willing to do the work. This is not an academic exercise.

In this post I will use a developmental model to try to shed light on how the experiences of my childhood shaped who I have become. It matters how old I was when certain things happened. And understanding how experiences worked into me based on my developmental stage can help me understand better the mixture of behavior, feeling and thought traits I have today.

Taking a simple developmental model from the book "Troubled Journey" by Diane Marsh and Rex Dickens, I can predict how things that happened at certain moments of my biography may affect my life today.

During my earliest childhood period (birth to 2) my life seems to have been pretty good. When I was born the general stress level of my family seemed markedly less than it would come to be. My dad had a well paying and prestigious job and my mom had just finished her master's degree. They both had high hopes for the future.

I was born at the end of 1968. My mom said she felt anxious about bringing a child into a world which had such strife and disruption swirling in it at that time. Nevertheless, my folks' prospects seemed good in many ways.

From mom's perspective, the main issue at the time in the family seems to have been my dad's drinking. Even though he was holding down a demanding professional job, he would go out drinking with a friend, stay out till after midnight and come home drunk.

I am reasonably certain that my mom displayed symptoms of bipolar at that time. I am guessing the symptoms were low-level rather than acute. As I imagine into my parents' life together, it seems to me that my mom was overly optimistic about how things were going (which could be interpreted as a symptom of bipolar). If she had been looking at things without having her thinking influenced by mental illness, perhaps she would have passed on having a child at that time. Perhaps she would have been more able to make the judgement that storm clouds were gathering in the form of dad's drinking, and that the context was not ripe for having a child. But mom really wanted a child (dad wasn't so sure) and soon enough I was born.

In my first two years of life it seems to me I had what Eva Marian Brown calls "good enough" parenting and things were off to a relatively good start. I was loved deeply by both parents. I can tell by the photos how each of them looked at me with care and devotion and both mom and dad had a warm and affectionate relationship with me.

The most important pieces of childhood at this age are basic attachment to my parents and a basic trust that the world is a good place. I can see that the attachment with parents was clearly there for me. Trust in the world was likely a little shaky as I perceived in my infant and toddler way the effects of my dad's drinking and my mom's illness.

Preschool age children (3-5) have socialization as a primary task. Additionally, developing a positive self concept, of being a valuable and competent person is key. I was becoming socialized at age three and four and I believe that my self concept was forming in a fairly healthy way. I was a very active child and had a great yard to play in and friends to play with.

When I was four we moved to a new state and so all of the friends I had played with were no longer available and I was not yet in school. I spent a lot of time with my mom as we were settling into the new home. My parents' marriage was in the process of unravelling. We moved from a warm climate to cold, and to a place which was much closer to mom's parents. I think the insecurity she felt in the marriage made her want to be closer to her family of origin.

As I turned five I remember being unhappy. It had been very warm where we lived before and our new home was cold and snowy, and I didn't have any friends. I was adapting to the climate and probably was very tuned in to the strife between my folks.

It was right at the end of early childhood and at the beginning of middle childhood when several shocks happened to me. My parents divorced and mom and I moved to a town eight hours by car from where my dad lived. I was very unhappy. I only saw my dad once that year and I really missed him a lot. And now mom had to work full time whereas before she was much more present for me. We went from living in a middle class neighborhood to residing in an aging trailer near a small boat harbor next door to a bar.

My developmental path had been becoming increasingly tenuous in the late part of early childhood, ages 4 and 5. I was feeling much more stress (of moving to a different town twice, the divorce of my parents, missing my dad) but it was likely still at a place where I could maintain my growth and development in a reasonably healthy way. If things could even out and settle down, I could probably get my footing again and do okay. Missing my dad and doing my best to adapt, I turned six.

The themes of middle childhood (ages 6-12) include developing peer relationships and academic adjustment, learning the basic building blocks that allow someone to succeed in our society.

I was under stress and felt very angry with my mom for taking me away from my dad. She started talking about "his disease called alcoholism" that made problems for him. After one year we moved back to within a ten minute drive of my dad. I was now able to see him on weekends, which was very important to me. It seems his life had suffered from being alone the past year. I remember a somber atmosphere and large bottles of wine on the table.

He and I would go see movies together and sit in the front row, where he would soon fall asleep and begin loudly snoring. I was very embarrassed. One time he took me, age seven, to see "The Exorcist" at the movie theater. I don't know what he was thinking. I was terrified.

He taught me chess and would start without his queen so as to give me more of a chance to win. Occasionally he let me win. He told me how important it was to try hard in school, especially in math and english.

During much of this time I was being molested by my babysitter after school in my home. Mom was working longer and longer hours trying to get her career going.

One weekend day when I was seven my dad came to pick me up from the apartment where mom and I lived. I was playing in the yard nearby and saw him driving around towards our driveway. I ran around the other side of the apartment building to meet him at the door but he got there first and didn't see me. He rang the doorbell twice, waited less than ten seconds, then went back to his car. I turned the corner at a full sprint just as his car pulled away. I ran after his car as fast as I could, screaming and crying, but apparently he didn't see me.

I don't know where my mom was. She had left me at home alone on a Saturday afternoon, assuming that dad would be picking me up and all would be fine. I thought a minute then grabbed my little seven-year-old bike and started peddling after my dad. I rode all the way to his house, about ten miles, along busy roads.

When I got to his house he wasn't there. I knocked on the neighbor's door and the teenager who mowed my dad's grass answered. I told him what had happened. He crawled up on the garage roof and was able to jimmy open the kitchen window and unlock the front door. I waited in dad's house for a while. No dad. I called my mom who was then back home and told her. She came and picked me up and said something about how my dad had a disease called alcoholism and was probably at a bar.

Within a few months from that day dad announced he was moving back to the state where we had lived before. My mom told me that he was seeing a therapist and the therapist recommended that he move to a warmer place because he was so sad.

At about the same time my mom was hired to a professional job and we were able to move to a much nicer house in a much safer neighborhood. A few weeks after we moved to the new house, I remember dad hugging me, getting into his car and driving away, his red VW ambling up the hill and out of my life. He told me about all the presents he was going to send me on his journeys. In fact he did send me some cool presents that summer, but the letters and phone calls got fewer and fewer over time.

As I reached the beginning of middle childhood, the shocks that came towards me were more intense: the sexual abuse, having mom gone much of the time due to work demands, and having dad visibly decline in his level of functioning, then exit my life.

When I was seven my boat felt like it was swamped and I was out swimming and looking for a life-raft. Neither of my parents seemed to be aware of the stress I was under. The life-raft I found was a way of being that I instinctively took on. I formed important parts of my basic personality at this time and did so, from my little kid perspective, in order to survive

By the time those events happened, when I was seven, I was on my way to becoming what Eva Marian Brown calls a "parentified child". This is a child who perceives at a basic level that the adults around him are not able to provide "good enough" parenting and so the child has to adjust. At that time I began to look at what my mom's needs were and so far as I was able, try to meet them. She was my ticket to survival and so her needs came before mine. If she were to disappear or become incapacitated my life would clearly become even more difficult.

By the time I turned seven, life had reached a certain level of calm, but I was inwardly on high alert for more shocks. It seems to me that this is when I made a subconscious decision to reduce my own needs to as close to zero as possible and do all I could to support my mom. Life as I had known it had changed dramatically and I was trying to get along and figure out how to manage. My mom's illness was not at an acute level and so she was able to hold down a job, shop for groceries and cook dinner. But it was all she could do to keep me fed and clothed. She had very little available, in terms of energy or skills, for the non-physical aspects of parenting.

My mom was unaware of the sexual abuse that had happened. It also seems she had very low awareness of the affect on me of her very long work hours. She did realize that my dad leaving was hurtful to me. To this day she believes that the places where I am hurt are basically about being abandoned by my dad.

That's okay with me--I don't essentially need her to understand my process. If she she ever does that's fine, but it's not necessary. I will never be able to do over again what happened then. All I can do is move forward.

When I was seven is, as near as I can tell, the moment I created "The Bubble" that I refer to in other posts. It is the life-raft that I found which helped me to move forward. The Bubble is a combination of personality traits, behaviors, feelings, thoughts, that all come out of the survival mechanism that was created at that moment of my life, and which continued to evolve over time. The Bubble has served me quite well in some ways, not at all in others. I need to understand it and transform it now in order to become a true adult.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben