The Need for People to Repeat Missing Stages of Emotional Life

In getting closely involved with other people, we may come up against a rather improbable-sounding  but often very disruptive and painful phenomenon: the powerful need for someone to go back and repeat a stage of life that they may not – unbeknownst to them and certainly to us – have properly completed at the normal time. Missed emotional development stages can indicate a need for someone to go back and do lots of now rather age-inappropriate things (including, perhaps, leaving us), in order to accede, finally, to their proper adulthood.

A way to understand the phenomenon is to say that life has an emotional trajectory that is meant to unfold alongside biological evolution. Every decade of life can be associated with archetypal psychological developments that should, all being well, emerge in sync with physical changes. Between 0 and 10, for example, we typically learn about love, trust and self-esteem, picking up lessons about how to rely on others and how to speak our needs. Between 10 and 20, all being well, we learn about our position in social groups and, in the later part of that decade, through a lot of often messy experiments, about our power to sexually attract other people in safe and gratifying ways.

When emotional development stages are skipped

The difficulty is that things don’t often go entirely well. All kinds of traumatic events can get in the way of someone completing their necessary emotional modules. There might be a war, an illness, an accident or an act of violence. What is worse is that it can be very hard for the person involved to understand the gap in themselves and therefore to warn those close to them of their lingering need to redo some missing years. Someone may – with great sincerity, at the age of 30 – present themselves to us as sharing in certain of the key emotional goals expected of a member of their generation. They can tell us with certainty that they want to settle down with one person, develop their identity outside of a friendship group and focus on their talents.

But, around 45 or 52, they may nevertheless be pulled powerfully in contrary directions. Despite marriage, children and responsibilities at work, a person may be drawn to ingratiating themselves with a social group made up of young people they met through a sporting club, or flirting randomly and dangerously with strangers, or redoing their wardrobe, going on dating apps and questioning their career. Though they may not be able to spell out what is happening to them in coherent terms for a long time, they are in essence having to go back and complete lessons that they skipped long ago, perhaps at the age of 15 when they happened (tragically) to have been assaulted or had to deal with a parent’s sudden death or a family bankruptcy.

The curriculum always returns

There isn’t really any such thing as being ‘advanced for one’s years’; it is only a cover term for being denied the growth that actual years should always allow for. We need in the end to do exactly what our biological decades ask of us, and, if we have raced ahead, we will simply have to go back and finish what was skipped. The emotional curriculum can never be rushed.

If our once-stable companion has now acquired a nose ring or ear stud and is dancing somewhere in town every night, we may get furious and sad of course – but it may, at the same time, be interesting and poignant to explore which emotional development stages they might have missed, and how they have come to need to be younger than they are, on the basis of traumatic events that long ago forced them to be older than they were.