Psychotherapy and Aging
December 15th, 2008 |
By Judith Gusky, MSEd, NCC
Click here to contact Judith and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile
The Challenges and Hopes of Aging
The population is aging. I am aging. Yet here I am starting a new career as a counselor. One of my interests is in end-of-life issues. I am not the Grim Reaper. I don’t have a morbid fascination with death, even as I find myself on the far side of middle age. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t quite been able to let go of Erik Erikson’s eight-stage model of human development and the hope that it offers.
When I was younger, I often would wonder how it was possible that elderly people weren’t consumed with fear of the inevitable. Erikson seemed to have a “good enough” theory to settle my inner turmoil.
As an undergraduate, back in the early 1970s, I surmised from Erikson’s theory that as we successfully move through each stage of development, our “reward” is our inauguration into the next stage. Each success offers the next opportunity to successfully negotiate life’s challenges and conflicts, until we reach the penultimate—an old age of peaceful integrity, not one of despair and fear of death. Read the rest of this entry
