"Psychotherapy, the Separation/Individuation Process and the Struggle to Become an Adult"," While there are many similarities as each individual goes through this transition, the separation/individuation process is unique for each person.
This process takes place throughout one's lifetime and results in the continual development of your own voice.
This makes it hard to take your self seriously and trust your own views and feelings in intimate relationships.
As you go through the process, you should find that you feel more confident about yourself and your ability to know what you want and how to get it.
Frequently, ideas about adulthood are linked to concepts of independence and dependence.
But you really don't have to choose because adulthood is not synonymous with one or the other.
Independence If you ask yourself what your assumptions are about independence you might find that you think about it as something wonderful, scary or both.
But it may also bring up worries that asserting your own voice could lead to conflict and anxiety about how others are responding to you.
You might think you will have to give up the carefree life of childhood and take on responsibilities that you may not feel prepared for.
It is often soothing to believe that if you are dependent you will be taken care of in a variety of ways: you can feel safe emotionally, loved, financially cared for.
Giving up that dependency may feel like an all or nothing choice: be dependent and get your needs met or be independent and your needs will no longer be attended to by parents or partners or others.
Separation/ Individuation To separate does not mean to give up the close attachment that you feel toward parents or in any relationship.
Separation means that you recognize that you are not the same as your loved significant other: you react and think differently.
You can only grow your self and discover who you are after you separate.
It is trial and error.
It is what makes you laugh, cry, run away, come close.
It is a lifelong process.
For example, there may be feelings from others (parents, partners) about your asserting your developing separate self.
Frequently, it takes time and work to learn to tolerate all the new feelings that your changing evokes.
Under these circumstances it is to be expected that you will have a wide range of emotions as you go through this process.
There can also be ambivalence about separating or individuating.
Even when the voice is not critical, knowing that a relied upon and loving other doesn't agree with you may cause you to fall back on silencing yourself for fear of losing that love or of making a mistake.
Probably, if you weren't supported in developing your own voice growing up, you have not had much experience making your own choices or making mistakes.
This means you were not helped to acquire a tolerance for frustration and a vicious cycle can be created where you don't feel you have the emotional means to go out in the world on your own and tolerate the everyday successes and failures that are part of the human experience.
It is the therapist's job to help you separate from parents or significant others in a way that helps you to have a close and good attachment with them when you desire to and still have a strong sense of a self that is separate from them.
You will then have the building blocks for close and loving relationships between yourself as an adult and the significant others in your life and between your parents and you - a separate adult child.
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