Responsibility and Independence

Adulthood is a developmental stage that is marked by increased responsibility and independence. In this stage you will develop your ability to make your own decisions based on your personal morality. However, you must be able to discern how your parents and others either positively or negatively influenced your decision-making and virtues. In other words, you need to gain self-awareness and understand the truth about your upbringing. You will not achieve intimacy with another person until you have a clear understanding of the factors that contribute to your irrational thinking. It is important to develop a balance between separating from and attaching yourself to others. Many of the behavioral expectations listed in the previous developmental stages cover issues of independence and dependency.You can utilize the previous behavioral expectations as a guide to demonstrate love, respect, and honesty.

In this developmental stage, you will also need to take the additional step of reflecting on how well you met the behavioral expectations in each of the previous developmental stages. You will not recall the first stage, so begin with the second. As you go through each of the stages and evaluate your interactions with parents and other significant persons in your life, you will need to use the behavioral expectations as a guide. This can be a painful process for those who suffered many hurts throughout their childhood. This will help you to identify specific instances
from the past that have contributed to your present negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. You can develop a time line by keeping a journal that contains the positive and negative memories of each year of your childhood that you can remember. This journal needs to include significant events that you experienced with another person. This journal will include your specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—as well as the behaviors of the other person—during these positive and negative encounters.

Did people significant to you in your childhood demonstrate love, respect, and honesty as depicted in the behavioral expectations? What did you consider to be loving, respectful, and honest from these individuals? How are you presently demonstrating love, respect, and honesty? Does your behavior demonstrate love,
respect, and honesty based upon the expectations outlined in the developmental stages? There are many people that do not demonstrate love, respect, and honesty on a consistent basis. This does not mean that they are bad people or that they do not want to emulate these qualities.

Due to their irrational thoughts about life circumstances, they fail to shift their focus from them to the other person. They become self-absorbed in their needs brought about by irrational thoughts causing them to act in unloving, disrespectful and dishonest ways with the other person in his or her relationship. The most rational people also fail to demonstrate these virtues from time to time. Their ability to atone for these times are what demonstrate their rational approach to maintaining a positive relationship with another person.

Once this person has been able to evaluate how his or her encounters have influenced his or her perception of morality, he or she will need to create his or her own strategy to incorporate behaviors in his or her life that depict love, respect, and honesty. The behavioral list developed from these virtues does not have to include every behavioral expectation listed in this chapter. This person will also need to develop boundaries that are appropriate with the persons that he or she had considered close in his or her life up to this point. This does not mean that this person should stop having contact with persons that have been close to him or
her. Once a person understands these virtues, he or she can determine whether to pursue a close relationship based upon the other person’s ability to show these virtues and atone in genuine ways.