Case Study 2 — Chapter 14: Psychological Development Across the Lifespan

Amara: What Are You Becoming?

Background

Amara has a photograph of Nana Rose on the small shelf above her desk. It was taken at a birthday party — Amara's sixteenth — and Nana Rose is laughing at something outside the frame. She looked, even then, like someone who had made peace with something. Not complacent. Settled. As if the long argument she had been having with her life had finally resolved into something she could carry without fighting it.

Amara is twenty-four and she does not yet look like that. She has a long way to go. But she is beginning to understand what direction she is going — which is more than she could have said a year ago, when the direction was wherever the situation required.

The MSW acceptance letters are starting to arrive.

The Shape of Her Development So Far

Amara traces her developmental history with the framework from Chapter 14. It is not a comfortable exercise.

Trust vs. Mistrust: Complicated. Grace — her mother — provided love, but unreliably. The love was real; so was the withdrawal. So was the night when Amara was eleven and found Grace asleep at the kitchen table with an empty bottle, and Amara made dinner for herself and went to bed without telling anyone. The base experience was not trust in the reliability of the environment. It was something more like: you can manage, because you have to.

Nana Rose provided the corrective. With her grandmother, Amara could, occasionally, be taken care of — could arrive at the house and be fed and held and heard without needing to give anything in return. The trust that Nana Rose built is the thin but real thread that makes the current work possible. Kemi and Yusuf are extending it into adulthood.

Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt: This one is complicated in a different way. Amara was not shamed for initiative — she was relied upon for it. She managed the household, managed Grace's crises, managed the practical and emotional logistics of a family that needed more than a child should provide. The problem is not that her autonomy was suppressed. It is that it was only valid when pointed outward — when it served someone else's need. Her own desires, her own initiative on her own behalf, remained suspect. Is that selfish? Is that too much?

Industry vs. Inferiority: School was a refuge. She was good at it — genuinely good — and the competence felt like solid ground in an unstable landscape. The sense of industry from this period is real and important; it is a genuine reserve of self-efficacy that she has drawn on when the rest has been shaky.

Identity: Moratorium, then — she is genuinely in it. Not drifting — she has the values, the application, the deepening relationships. But she has not yet consolidated the identity work into a settled sense of who she is choosing to be. She is still becoming.

Emerging Adulthood in Practice

Arnett's description of emerging adulthood fits Amara precisely, including the parts that are difficult.

She is in the identity exploration phase. She submitted the MSW application — that is a move toward commitment — but the domain of social work itself is still being tested against her actual experience of it. The nonprofit work has confirmed the values (dignity, presence, connection) without yet confirming the specific path (direct practice? policy? community organizing?). She does not know yet, and this uncertainty is appropriate.

She is experiencing the instability that Arnett describes: shared apartment with roommates, uncertain housing beyond the next year, a relationship with Yusuf that is deepening without yet being defined. These are not failures. They are the conditions of a developmental period in which the architecture of adult life is still being built.

She identifies with the "feeling in-between" — not an adolescent, not yet fully adult in the sense she imagined adulthood would feel. This discomfort is so common in emerging adulthood that Arnett considers it definitional. Amara has been treating it as a personal failing — evidence that she hasn't arrived yet. The developmental frame recontextualizes it: it is exactly what being twenty-four, in this period of life, is supposed to feel like.

The sense of possibilities is present too, more than before. The acceptance letters. Yusuf. The supervisor's observation that she seems more present. The work she has done in Part 2. There is a sense that the arc she is on has more direction than it did — not a destination, but a direction.

The Acceptance Letter

The first acceptance letter comes from a program in a city three hours away. A good program — ranked, clinically rigorous, a concentration in trauma-informed practice. Financial aid sufficient to make it possible.

She calls Kemi before she calls anyone else.

"I got in," she says. "One of the good ones."

Kemi's response is a sound — somewhere between a gasp and a sob — that Amara has never heard from her before. "Oh my God. Oh my God, Amara."

Then Yusuf. He is quieter than Kemi, more still. "I know you'd get in," he says.

"I didn't know."

"I knew."

She tells Grace last — not because she does not want to, but because she needs to be stable when she makes that call. Grace answers after the fourth ring, sounds like she has been asleep. Amara tells her. There is a long pause.

"I'm proud of you," Grace says. Not "I always knew you could do it" or anything that would rewrite the history between them. Just: I'm proud of you. Something in Amara's chest shifts. It is not forgiveness exactly — that is a more complicated piece of work — but it is something.

She does not cry until after she hangs up. When she does, it is the particular kind of crying that is not grief but release — the body's version of thank you.

What She Is Becoming

Amara reads Nana Rose's question in the chapter — "What are you becoming?" — and sits with it for a long time.

She is becoming a social worker. She is becoming Yusuf's person and Kemi's friend, in ways she is choosing rather than stumbling into. She is becoming someone who can sit with difficult feelings without immediately managing them away. She is becoming a person who has values she has named and can use to navigate choices.

She is becoming, she thinks, the person Nana Rose was talking to when she asked the question — someone who takes her own becoming seriously. Not as narcissism or self-absorption, but as responsibility. The self that is forming here will be the self that encounters and shapes other people for decades. Taking that seriously, doing it well, is not self-indulgence. It is the foundation of everything that will follow.

There is one more thing she notices, reading through Kegan's developmental stages. The socialized mind — deriving values and identity from the expectations of others — is where she has been. The caretaker identity, the approval-seeking, the pre-emptive self-regulation: all of these are ways of organizing the self through the lens of what others require and expect. That is what her developmental history produced, and it had its adaptive logic: a child in Amara's situation needed to be attuned to the needs and states of others.

But she is not that child anymore. The self-authoring transition — choosing her own values, using them to evaluate what she does and who she is — is the work of this period. The application is one piece. The acceptance of the acceptance letter, the choice to be proud of herself without waiting for permission, is another.

She adds a line to her journal, under the heading Things I am beginning to believe about myself:

That I have the right to be becoming.

Analysis Questions

1. Amara's developmental history across Erikson's early stages is traced with specific reference to her actual experience. How does the Trust vs. Mistrust analysis help explain her high-alert pattern, her pre-emptive self-regulation, and her difficulty in accepting care from others?

2. The chapter notes that emerging adulthood is most clearly visible in middle-class Western contexts with access to extended education — and that working-class people often assume adult responsibilities earlier. How does Amara's development complicate a simple "emerging adulthood" narrative? Is she in emerging adulthood? What is similar, and what is different, about her experience of this developmental period?

3. Amara describes Nana Rose as providing a "corrective" to the insecure attachment base formed with Grace. How does the developmental research on attachment modification help explain what this means? What specifically does a corrective relational experience need to provide?

4. Amara frames her move toward self-authoring as "the right to be becoming." What does this phrase mean in developmental terms? Why would someone need to claim the right to their own development, rather than simply having it?

5. Compare Amara's and Jordan's current developmental situations. Both are in some form of identity moratorium. How are their moratoriums similar, and how are they different? What developmental tasks does each still have ahead of them in Part 3 (relationships) and Part 4 (work and purpose)?