Your Task

Robert Fettgather holds a Ph.D in Psychology and Masters degrees in both Psychology and Special Education and received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from West Valley College. Robert Fettgather has served as Special Consultant in psychometrics to the Departments of Education and Developmental Disabilities for the State of California.

Your task is not to seek for love,

but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself

that you have built against it.” ... Rumi

Love can be tricky. Most of us desire love but sometimes struggle with giving it or accepting it. The words from Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet, suggest that love and human affiliation may be our natural inclination-unless we somehow resist and even block it.

Here we will emphasize intimacy and other developmental tasks of adulthood. 

Young adulthood can be stressful as you know from experience!  Part of the stress comes from the fact that so many transitions occur in such a relatively short time span. Still, each transition brings with it new opportunities for personal growth.

Freud, the story goes, was once asked what a normal adult should expect to do well. The interviewer perhaps expecting a profound and complicated response might have been surprised to hear  Freud answer simply, "lieben und arbiten" (to love and to work). Love and work are the primary themes of adulthood- Erikson used the terms intimacy and generativity to describe these two needs.

Let's further unpack issues related to emotional connection. Intimacy is the capacity to engage in a supportive, affectionate relationship without losing one's own sense of self. Previous Eriksonian stages come into play.  A poor sense of identity is only one barrier to intimacy and as you might imagine, so is the capacity to form trust. Gender differences are also important to note. To many women, intimacy is partly a function of self-disclosure. Most men do not see self-disclosure as essential to intimacy. Consequently, many men voice satisfaction with relationships that their female partners may view as inadequate.