LESSON 4
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Identity in the Teen Years
is a Crucible for Transformations
Presented by
THE NATURAL SYSTEMS INSTITUTE
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TEEN YEARS:
THE CRUCIBLE FOR CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIONS
IN IDENTITY AND SELF CONCEPT
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Table of Contents
TEEN YEARS:
THE CRUCIBLE FOR CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN IDENTITY
AND SELF CONCEPT
1.
2.
Understanding Social Cannibalism of the Early Teen Years and Its Affect of Identity Formation
Identity And Social Comparison Anxiety Crises In Middle Adolescence: How Do I Deal With Shame And Humiliation? Can I Go? Can I Do It? Do It Know
3.
The Development Of The Secondary Implicit Other System
And Its Role In The Formation Of Identity
During The Transition From Childhood To Adolescence
4.
A Secondary Implicit Other System Begins To Develop In Adolescence And Tends To Be More Consistent With The Private Suppressed
Self
This Results In Transformation Of Identities In Opposition To Parents
This Transition To The Secondary Implicit Other System Furthers The Process Of Emotional Emancipation And Development Of A Sense
Of Self Determination Of Their Identity
Peer Comparisons Shape The Secondary Implicit Other Which In Turn Begins To Shape The Adolescent’s Identity
Eventually The Secondary Implicit Other System Co-develops, Along With The Parents, The Adolescent’s More Enduring Self Image And
Identity
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
It? Do I Have It? Do I Belong?
How to Understand the Nature of Roles and to Optimize the Power of the Positive Formal Social Role and Recognized
Identity
Informal Role Assumption in Childhood and Adolescence and Their Effects on Identity and Behavior Changes.
PUBERTY
Dynamics of Identity Considered Independently From Structured Settings, Situations, Roles, or Relationships
During the Transition Through Puberty
Dealing With Labeling And Identity Stigmata
The Dynamics of Formal Roles in Relation to
Changes in Identity and Personal Maturation
A Positive Model
The Dynamics of Formal Roles in Relation to
Changes in Identity and Personal Maturation
A Negative Model
Practice In Positive Formal Roles Facilitates
Maturation And Acquisition Of A New, Positive Identity
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Understanding Social Cannibalism of the Early Teen Years and Its Affect of Identity Formation
Causes of Social Cannibalism
6.
5.
7.
4.
5.
•Development of Social Cannibalism Over Time
•1. Parent abusively punishes or picks on child for behavior
that deviates from family cultural norms.
•2. Child picks on smaller child.
•3. Child picks on child who is different
•4. Child grows up and picks on smaller child.
•5. Child in early teens picks on similar other early teen for
minor differences and vulnerabilities.
•6. Child as late teen turns on age cohorts who are different.
•7. Child becomes a parent and repeats physical punishment,
abuse, picking on, suppressing hostile come backs, and
attacking behavior that is different.
3.
1.
1.
1.
2.
2.
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The Cycle of Aggression and Picking on People
4.
3.
Escalation of Insecurity when entering new
phase of adolescent freedom of mobility and
choices. Insecurity is transformed into
paranoid suspicion, angry resentment, and
invidious comparisons. They cluster is small
groups of high similarity and pick on each
other.
Being away from parental protection there
comes a fear of older, upper classmen and
strangers. Fear when cornered turns into
explosive rage. Frightened, vulnerable kids in
a group convert to aggression.
Physical punishment and abuse, feeling
picked on at home, and suppression of
hostility results in displacement of anger and
resentment onto peers who are different or
perceived as engaging in put downs or
invidious comparisons.
Desire to make someone else ‘who is not
intimidating’ suffer the same way child had to
suffer. The initiation turnabout syndrome.
Dormant, incorporated parental modeling of
abusive, punitive attacks on behavior that
deviates from family cultural norms re-surges
from the unconscious spontaneously,
welcome or not, when roles are reversed and
the child has become a parent.
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Identity And Social Comparison Anxiety Crises In Middle Adolescence: How Do I Deal With
Shame And Humiliation? Can I Go? Can I Do It? Do It Know It? Do I Have It? Do I Belong?
Who am I? Who defines who I am? How do they decide who I am?
Oh my gosh! They saw what I did and now
they’ll tell everyone and I’ll be ruined forever.
No, you’re
too young.
We saw what you did. How repulsive. How gross. How
nasty. We don’t want anything to do with you and we’re
gonna tell everyone!!!
Do I belong? Am I accepted? What if I’m
rejected? What does that say about me?
Am I ruined and an outsider for life?
Should we accept
him/her? Is she/he as
good as we are?
I don’t have one
of those so I’m
not good enough
and can’t go to
Can I do it? Everybody is watching.
Everybody else is able to do it!! What
the event.
will it look like if ‘I’ can’t do it?
Can I go?
Everybody
else is
getting to go!
If you don’t
let me go,
everybody is
gong to think
edyoung, PhD, 3-1999
I’mcopyright,
a baby.
I’ll bet he/she can’t do it. He/she is
not that good and will just look
foolish.
You’re gonna miss. You’re stupid
and we’re gonna laugh you off the
field. Nobody will ever want you on5
their team when they see how
clumsy you are.
The Development Of The Secondary Implicit Other System
And Its Role In The Formation Of Identity
During The Transition From Childhood To Adolescence
•
1. A SECONDARY IMPLICIT OTHER SYSTEM BEGINS TO DEVELOP IN
ADOLESCENCE AND TENDS TO BE MORE CONSISTENT WITH THE
PRIVATE SUPPRESSED SELF
•
2. THIS TRANSITION TO THE SECONDARY IMPLICIT OTHER SYSTEM
FURTHERS THE PROCESS OF EMOTIONAL EMANCIPATION
•
3. PEER COMPARISONS SHAPE THE SECONDARY IMPLICIT OTHER
WHICH IN TURN BEGINS TO SHAPE THE ADOLESCENT’S IDENTITY
•
4. EVENTUALLY THE SECONDARY IMPLICIT OTHER SYSTEM CODEVELOPS, ALONG WITH THE PARENTS, THE ADOLESCENT’S SELF
IMAGE AND IDENTITY
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A Secondary Implicit Other System Begins To Develop In Adolescence And Tends To
Be More Consistent With The Private Suppressed Self
This Results In Transformation Of Identities In Opposition To Parents
R
e
a
l
W
o
r
l
d
Lens of
Implicit
Other
The way
the
world
appears
as seen
through
the lens
of the
Implicit
Others
•The world is just like
my parents.
• I can not be the way I
want to be with my
parents and can not be
the way I want to be in
the adult world.
•They are the enemy.
They are all so stuffy
and negative. They
see everything as
being dangerous, bad,
crazy, irresponsible,
and stupid. But they
are the ones who are
stupid.
•But, what about those
other teenagers over
there, my peers?
Maybe we can avoid
that alien world and
find a secret place
where we can be
ourselves.
P
r
o
j
e
c
t
i
o
n
Peer
Group or
Gang
Hey, let’s do our own thing.
Let’s have a party and
throw off their harness, be
free, and have a blast!
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THAT’S THE
GROUP
WHERE I
CAN BE
MYSELF.
THE ARE
JUST LIKE
ME!
PEER PRESSURE
OK. Now. What do
they think of me?
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This Transition To The Secondary Implicit Other
System Furthers The Process Of Emotional
Emancipation And Development Of A Sense Of Self
Determination Of Their Identity
P
A
R
E
N
T
S
PEERS, AS SECONDARY
IMPLICIT OTHER SYSTEM,
BEGIN TO BECOME THE
LENS THROUGH WHICH
PARENTS ARE NOW SEEN
AND JUDGED.
•I’m taking a step toward
emancipation, toward
being my own separate
individual self, being
emotionally independent,
using and having
confidence in my own
judgment, venturing out
into the world to establish
my own place in the world.
•I am ‘Shifting Alliance’ to
my peers as one of the
main ways to help me
accomplish this.
•But, I still need my parents
even while I am separating
from them.
THE INTERACTION BETWEEN PEER RELATIONSHIPS AND THE CHILD’S EVOLVING SELF SYSTEM AND IDENTITY
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Peer Comparisons Shape The Secondary Implicit Other Which In Turn
Begins To Shape The Adolescent’s Identity
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Eventually The Secondary Implicit Other System Codevelops, Along With The Parents, The Adolescent’s
More Enduring Self Image And Identity
implicit
P
A
R
E
N
T
S
Now each peer in the peer
group begins to be judged by
BOTH Implicit Other Systems.
And, each parent begins to be
judged by BOTH Implicit Other
Systems. This becomes very
confusing and very stressful.
Peer secondary
implicit other
system
Other
p
a
r
e
n
t
s
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Peers
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How to Understand the Nature of Roles and to Optimize the Power of the
Positive Formal Social Role and Recognized Identity
•
A. The Nature of Roles.
–
–
–
–
•
1. The meaning of a role: expectancies and experiences.
2. A role as a function of its complement.
3. Identities, styles, and being versus having a role.
4. Assumption, learning, and enactment of roles.
B. Problems in the Treatment and Alteration of Roles.
–
–
–
–
1. Transitions from prior deviant roles in the home community to socially acceptable roles
2. Multiple, changing, and conflicting roles.
3. Mistaken inferences from role to person.
4. Types of roles, role relationships, and their dynamics.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
–
•
a. Roles that transform settings-situational specific identities.
b. Roles in conflict with former setting-situational identities.
c. The potential conflicts in the interaction between personalities and their former roles.
d. the potential conflicts in the interaction between personalities and their current assigned or acquired roles.
e. the potential conflicts in the interaction between an assigned or acquired role and other prior or current
relationships
f. roles that generate relationship conflicts between role inhabitants and their cohort groups.
g. roles that generate relationship conflicts between role inhabitants and their cohort groups and cliques vis-à-vis
outsiders.
5. The dynamics of role interactions from the point of view of role structures within the structure of
settings.
C. Therapeutic Use of Roles.
–
–
–
1. Social skill learning and role taking.
2. Personal limits and boundaries in relation to role rigidity.
3. Rank, office, roles, identities, and sub-roles and the detachable nature of their functions, tasks and role
behaviors.
– 4. Roles constraining and channeling individual life-teleological processes.
– 5. Memory as organized by roles and role functions.
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– 6. Problems in altercasting [seeking people to fill complementary roles] in the home, with peers, in
intimate relations, at work and in the community.
Informal Role Assumption in Childhood and Adolescence
and Their Effects on Identity and Behavior Changes.
•
•
•
•
•
The developing child is assigned informal roles first by parents and then by peers. Roles are
identified by role behaviors. As the role develops, family members crystallize expectations for
role appropriate behavior. Eventually family members develop a consensus concerning
expected behavior. Finally, terms are applied that match the consensus and these terms
identify sets of expectations and identity is born. Informal roles in families complement each
other and sustain each other. Family members shape shape roles and then use roles to meet
and need in the family system. This process can often be very constricting and destructive.
Role appropriate behaviors are acquired unconsciously but become deeply ingrained and later
in life are difficult to shed or alter. These early identities often follow people all of their lives,
even when, many years later, there is not a single remnant of the early role appropriate
behaviors. Informal roles operate in systems.
If one person with an assigned informal role interacts with one or more peers, the tendency is
to elicit a primary complementary informal role from one other peer and secondary
complementary informal roles from other available peers. Peers learn to do this with each
other in the same way it was done to them in the family. However, within peer groups there is
never the perfect match of roles as there is in the family. Therefore, a new shaping process
takes place and everyone in the peer group has to accommodate to greater or lessor degrees to
one another, thus expanding their informal role repertoire.
In the teens years, teens tend to pair off in short term relationships with people who have the
closest matching complementary informal roles. Each in a pair tries to shape the other to fit
the needed complementary role. Imperfections in role behaviors and in matches tend to make
these sweetheart dyads stormy and short-lived.
Teens in sweetheart dyads often revolt from the imposed, complementary informal role. Peers
may also revolt against their group, but much less frequently since it is easier to diffuse noncomplementary behaviors among a group than with a single individual. Peer groups, therefore,
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edyoung, PhD,a
3-1999
become
refuge from dysfunctional, failing sweetheart dyads and family systems.
PUBERTY
Dynamics of Identity Considered Independently From Structured Settings,
Situations, Roles, or Relationships During the Transition Through Puberty
• As the child passes over into adolescence, as a result of puberty, a new and
powerful set of inner factors begin to assert their influence in opposition to the
familiar and socially recognized identity.
• The sexual impulses that arise are unfamiliar and intense. Typically there are no
guidelines that specifically and directly address this emerging force of nature.
Society has two opposite ways of dealing with sexual desires and feelings.
– First, in almost all social settings sexual behavior is completely inhibited and verbal
references concerning sex are absent from public communications.
– Second, public communications are often briefly punctuated by sexual innuendoes and
stifled laughter. Further, there is a wide range of types of entertainment that deliberately
expresses sexuality in varying degrees of explicitness from subtle but undisguised jokes to
displays of nudity and sex acts.
• These opposite trends in society leave the youth’s sexual desires and feelings
piqued yet suppressed. The suppressed, intense, sexual feelings find an outlet in
fantasies and clandestine sex acts.
• This suppressed, inner sexual life, or clandestine sex, pits the inner self concept
in opposition against their public identity and results in extreme private suffering
and confusion and a feeling of being a hypocrite. This feeling of being a hypocrite
exacerbates the youth’s resentment of, alienation from, and cynicism toward
society can result in rebellion or super-idealism.
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Dealing With Labeling And Identity Stigmata
• At every stage of life, individuals can be negatively labeled by peers,
those who are above or below on some scale, outsiders, persons of
the opposite gender.
• Negative labels are usually publicly announced.
• Negative labels usually serve the purpose of raising the esteem of the
labeler above that of the individual labeled and possibly above the
labeled individual’s group.
• To avoid the loss of status that having a negatively labeled person in
the group, a group may shun the labeled person.
• Negative labels, therefore, can hold a power to undo a labeled
person’s identity and their status of belonging to their group and the
protection and benefits of their group.
• When this kind of negative labeling has this kind of devastating effect,
it changes from a mere label to a stigma which can, in some cases,
ruin a person’s entire life. For this reason, stigmata are a matter of
serious concern to the authorities who are guardians of the health of
the society as a whole.
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The Dynamics of Formal Roles in Relation to
Changes in Identity and Personal Maturation
A Positive Model
•
Societies create institutions designed to shape the developing children and adolescents toward socially
valuable behaviors and skills.
– These institutions have structures within which formal role systems select publicly acknowledged
behavioral criteria to be used in selecting people for the role and behavioral expectations to be performed
while inhabiting the role.
– Role inhabitants are selected for formal roles based to a large extent on the values of the dominant social
class and/or ethic group present in each institution.
– Children and adolescents move through a stratified system of formal roles. Sometimes there are visible
emblems or signs or being in a role.
– Accommodating to the behavioral expectations of the formal role usually results in some form of formal
recognition.
– Role performance usually results in modification of the identities of the role inhabitants.
– Informal roles may lead to identities which become like invisible, unchanging garments in which the real
person is incarcerated, frozen over time because they are passed on from stage to stage and maintained
by consensual reassignment of identity from stage to stage, regardless of whether the person’s actual
attributes have changed.
– With stratified formal roles, identities are usually expected to change as the person moves up and
develops increasing maturity and overcomes deficiencies and personal problems. Such stratified role
systems can prevent immutable imprisonment in an identity.
– With a widely diversified set of formal roles in which everyone in the group can participate in some way, it
is possible to avoid stigmatizing people who do not occupy roles as inferior or outsiders.
•
The transitional period of puberty requires special types of formal roles. Crises during the puberty period can
result in identity stigmata that follow the youth for life or at least for the rest of their life in the institution.
Providing special programs and formal roles systems within which youth can be taught inter-gender social
skills and channel sexual impulses through civilizing positive role expectations can prevent youth from
becoming perpetrators or victims of sexual or gender trauma.
•
When institutions provide of adult parent surrogates as maturity coaches, they become neutral third parties the
youth can safely relate to without feeling they are betraying their natural need for independence and still keep a
sense of security from the support of a positive adult. These maturity coaches aid youth in acquiring the skills
required for performance of their formal social roles and they ease the process of emancipation from parents
and the development of emotional independence, self reliance, and responsibility as well as reducing the need
for destructive rebellion from parents and authority figures. Since families and peers so often unconsciously
assign informal identities, the combination of maturity coaches and formal roles makes it possible to replace
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edyoung, PhD,
3-1999
negative
identities
and behaviors and to supplant negative parental and peer implicit others, thus overcoming 15
possible life-long handicaps from the influence of negative implicit others.
The Dynamics of Formal Roles in Relation to
Changes in Identity and Personal Maturation
A Negative Model
•
•
•
With an exclusive set of formal roles, the problems youth bring to the group, such as those listed
below are perpetuated or exacerbated. The grading system, and informal and formal role systems
of public schools and juvenile correctional institutions tend to perpetuate or exacerbate such
problems. When the problems show up, they are then blamed on the personality of the youth rather
than the structure of the system:
–
–
–
–
–
–
immaturity;
neuroses;
underdeveloped social skills;
stigmatized socio-economic class or ethnic identity;
invidious comparisons and disordered self esteem;
cliques and social cannibalism.
Institutions that have a exclusive or restricted formal role system exhibit the following
characteristics:
– lack of access to roles or a limited number and variety of roles
– limited provision of types of roles
– lack of stratified role ladders
– lack of an inclusive system of rotational roles
– basing inclusion or exclusion on social biases rather than objective criteria for entry into roles
– lack of visible means of identifying one’s role position
– lack of objective criteria for recognition of growth and achievement
– use of prestige, power, status or influence to gain access to formal roles
These factors that usually result in the following psychologically harmful consequences:
– enforced inequality
– enforced inferior identities
– learning social insensitivity
– social cannibalism
– social ostracism
– learning discrimination
– learning manipulation
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Practice In Positive Formal Roles Facilitates
Maturation And Acquisition Of A New, Positive Identity
A structure of formal pro-social roles with role specific behaviors results in replacement of negative
behaviors with positive and develops self esteem, emotional security, a positive view of the world,
and a wide range of positive, effective, social skills for success and ultimately a changed in identity.
Acquisition of
Behaviors Expected of New Formal Social Role:
new identity
Social and
learning rules of conversation
Formal
pro-social
roles
through
work
learning rules of discussion in groups have a positive impact
assuming new
groups
planning
on one’s behavior and
formal roles
improve.
decision making
relations in social and
goal setting
work settings.
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negotiating
learning self discipline and time management
Social and
problem solving
work
Success with the new identity leads
studying-learning
groups
to promotion in formal social roles.
working
accept a
cooperating
new
playing for fun
identity.
participating in organized recreation and sports
learning sportsmanship and dealing with winning and losing
competing
resolving conflicts
Role specific behaviors
mediation
expressing feelings and humor with sensitivity
dealing with other’s feelings
dealing with others’ inappropriate behavior
dealing with differences in beliefs, values, opinions
helping
supervising others
evaluating self and others
dealing with problems in giving and receiving credit
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dealing with selection and promotion decisions
dealing with giving and receiving awards and rewards
SUMMARY OF TEEN YEARS:
THE CRUCIBLE FOR CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN
IDENTITY AND SELF CONCEPT
1. The transition into adolescence brings out invidious comparisons and social cannibalism which is one
of the reasons for the emergence.of hostile cliques and gangs.
2. During this period adolescents face developmental tasks necessary for the next stage which is entry
into adulthood. These tasks generate anxiety over performance and social comparison and can be
damaging to self esteem and result in enduring negative identities.
3. Peers become a secondary implicit other system which has the power, for good or bad, to influence
identity.
4. Peer secondary implicit other system tend to ally with the youth’s suppressed, private self and result
in the development of identities in opposition to that which was assigned by parents.
5. Peers facilitate the process of emancipation from dependence on parents, but left to itself, this
process can result in negative identities.
6. Puberty thrusts upon the adolescent drives that create anxiety and insecurity in the absence of a
structure of programs and formal roles to educate and ease the transition in a positive way.
7. Due to the enormous lack of preparation for adolescence and uncertainty about expected behaviors,
youths tend to make mistakes which the tendency toward invidious comparisons and social
cannibalism turns into enduring identity stigmata.
8. A positive system of formal roles results in all youths passing through this period acquiring positive
identities.
9. A negative system of formal role or the absence of or inadequacy or formal roles and the presence of
unregulated and negative informal roles results in the acquisition of enduring negative identities.
10. The practice of behaviors required by formal roles, along with the coaching of positive adult maturity
coaches facilitates maturation and the acquisition of enduring positive identities.
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EXERCISES FOR
TEEN YEARS: THE CRUCIBLE FOR CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN
IDENTITY AND SELF CONCEPT
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MOVIES FOR
TEEN YEARS: THE CRUCIBLE FOR CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN
IDENTITY AND SELF CONCEPT
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