Generativity and Healthy Survivorship

A second lesson on Healthy Survivorship gleaned from a cursory look at the work of psychologist Erik Erickson has to do with so-called generativity.

After successfully negotiating the first six of Erikson's stages of development, people face the challenge of the seventh stage: creating or nurturing things that will outlast them. If successful in raising children and/or contributing to projects that leave a positive legacy, people enter the final, eighth stage of development with a sense of fulfillment.

Thus, at the end of life, as people experience declining physical powers (with the associated loss of roles and independence) and a progressively narrow time horizon, their reviewing and reflecting on their fulfilling life journey leads to peacefulness.

Unfortunately, illness can thrust people into their last stage of life without the opportunity for generativity -- for doing the things they would have done to leave a meaningful legacy at the end of a long life.

For me, Healthy Survivorship guided me to embrace everyday opportunities to teach my children the lessons and skills I'd want to teach them if I had all the time in the world. And it helped me let go of clinical medicine as my path to fulfillment (not without a lot of tears) and embrace the meaningfulness and joy of writing.

Healthy Survivorship helps by encouraging you to incorporate generativity into daily life, even when this means doing so at a much younger age than usual and/or doing it in ways you couldn't have imagined prior to your illness.

Comments

[Jan Baird Hasak]

I'm already leaving a legacy by scanning in photos and making scrapbooks for my children. It lends me a peaceful feeling. I didn't realize there was a clinical psychological term for this phase.