Creating Meaning in Young Adulthood

The Self-Actualizing Power of Relationships

Christopher J. Kazanjian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000609363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

Creating Meaning in Young Adulthood explores the ways in which young adults are creating meanings in life through their relationships with the world. Chapters synthesize research in the fields of child psychology, counseling, multicultural education, and existential-humanistic psychology to offer readers a contemporary understanding of the greater challenges for growth and development that youth currently face. Using ample case studies, the book also sets forth a resilience-based approach for helping readers facilitate the healing, growth, and enlightenment of young adults.

PART I

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251651-2

1

Young Adulthood in the End of Times

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251651-3

In the Shadows of Normalcy

The return to social normalcy cannot stifle the existential embers burning in each person living in a pandemic or even in a post-pandemic world. The novel SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 virus altered global societies in function and restructured the psychosocial atmosphere in the years to follow. Those in the U.S. that survived the pandemic witnessed their family, social, and professional lives radically altered to comply with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines and state government policy. Physical and mental well-being for people across the country took on new meanings as the darkness of existential reminders crept into their daily lives. The existential concerns of mortality, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom have become reignited from the extreme environments and threats of death.

Particularly, mortality designates our observable sense of corporeal finiteness in this life, where death is an impending transition or interval for all beings. Meaninglessness is an existential concern based in the realization that meanings in life are not absolutes but were/are created in our universe. In addition, isolation is an existential loneliness, which Moustakas (1961) outlined as “an intrinsic and organic reality of human life in which there is both pain and triumphant creation emerging out of long periods of desolation. In existential loneliness man is fully aware of himself as an isolated and solitary individual” (p. 24). Lastly, existential freedom allows us to become determinants of the meanings in our lives, where we have free will to choose how to live and what events will mean within our contexts. These existential concerns were most notably studied by Yalom (1980) as the basis for human preoccupations, dissonances, disturbances, well-being, and vitality. COVID-19 has intensified existential concerns for most to become a trauma of depthless and terrifying darkness. For young adults, growth and developmental challenges were exacerbated by the intense psychosocial effects and restrictions. Their normative existential curiosities and explorations were accelerated at disorienting speeds and depths.

Although the age categorization for what constitutes as young adulthood varies per organization, study, or discipline, this book will focus on 13 to 24 years of age, respectively. Young adulthood contains the new processes of socio-emotional intelligences, identity formation, holistic development, and new responsibilities. Yet, this unique and critical phase of human growth is often overlooked.

The percentage of young adults in the world’s population is rising, and they have become integral to the success and function of all nations. Kumar et al. (2020) described how young adults

represent the potential influencers of future economic growth and development and this period between 10 to 19 years of life is the ground for investment and provides a window of opportunity for laying a strong foundation to a brighter and healthier future.

(p. 5485)

Supporting a nation’s success and well-being means taking precautionary steps to reduce high-risk behaviors of citizens and promote healthy habits. For example, the worldwide leading cause of mortality for young adults continues to be road accidents (Mirkovic et al., 2020). Other risky behaviors include suicide, unprotected sex, violence, and substance experimentation or abuse. Unhealthy habits can result in malnutrition, health problems, STDs or STIs, mental disturbances, as well as death. The long-term well-being of young adults is influenced by their habit formations and availability of psychosocial resources.

Young adults are typically a disregarded population (Sun et al., 2021). During the pandemic, they were at greater risk for “increased school drop‑outs; increase gender gaps in education; stress and other mental health disorders; smartphone dependence or addiction; early age of initiating smoking, alcohol, or drugs; interrupted learning depriving opportunities for growth and development; parents unprepared for distance and home schooling” (Kumar et al., 2020, p. 5485). The onset of most mental disturbances begins in young adulthood and have sequelae of effects and consequences to well-being, such as lower academic success/graduation rates, substance abuse, and somatic disorders.

Furthermore, young adults may wonder what happened to their youth cultures, routines, and sense of stability, as the “new world order of mass quarantine to prevent the spread of COVID-19, reveal[ed] the arbitrariness and privilege of this discrete separation between the mentally disordered and the ‘normal’” (Calder et al., 2020, p. 641). The psychosocial atmosphere had been altered by constant reminders of mortality. For example, the daily death toll reports and news media images of body bags being stored in mobile morgues caused nothing less than death anxiety. Cultural norms were promptly created in order to help people stay alive and be free of infection, even though these behaviors were once considered clinically abnormal. Excessive hand washing, social distancing, hoarding cleaning and paper products, long periods of isolation, and hypervigilance became the new normal (Fegert et al., 2020). These practices offered power and control over the risk of death and the abysmal sense of uncertainty. Young adults may have wondered if these behaviors were considered abnormal before the pandemic and normal during it, then what society determines as normal, health/illness, or sanity must be culturally relative and contextually dependent. Szasz (1970) argued that clinical definitions of normal and abnormal are relative and have occluded our understandings of mental phenomena:

The finding of mental illness is made by establishing a deviance in behavior from certain psychosocial, ethical, or legal norms. The judgment may be made, as in medicine, by the patient, the physician (psychiatrist), or others. Remedial action, finally, tends to be sought in a therapeutic—or covertly medical—framework. This creates a situation in which it is claimed that psychosocial ethical, and legal deviations can be corrected by medical action. Since medical interventions are designed to remedy only medical problems, it is logically absurd to expect that they will help solve problems whose very existence have been defined and established on non-medical grounds.

(p. 17)

If what constituted as abnormal becomes normal in different contexts, then young adults begin to see the absurdity of many exclusive cultural norms, definitions, and customs. The danger of certainty about mental disturbance phenomena is that, “one culture can reshape how a population in another culture categorizes a given set of symptoms, replace their explanatory model, and redraw the line demarcating normal behaviors and internal states from those considered pathological” (Watters, 2010, p. 197). Although cultural norms shift over time with new knowledge, global integration, and transmigration, COVID-19 has accelerated a critical evaluation of cultural norms by causing existential trauma. For many young adults, the pandemic revealed the absurdity of predetermined values and conclusions, leaving many with a sense of meaninglessness or despair.

Breaking news, smartphone alerts, and social media feeds constantly reminded young adults to stay home or offered death tolls for the day, week, or month. Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center (2021) reported that in almost one year, COVID-19 claimed roughly 2.7 million people worldwide. The violence caused by the virus cannot be solely left to quantification, as its trauma has caused many other forms of death and suffering, while having long-term, intergenerational consequences. During the pandemic, the emotional and physical trauma regardless of geographical locale increased in rate and severity; most notably in the abuse and violence toward children and young adults (Blosnich et al., 2020). These effects are pronounced for minority and marginalized populations of youth. For example, youth that were classified as refugees or internally displaced persons were faced with greater economic hardships, psychological and social challenges, and at an increased risk of being infected by COVID-19 (Fegert et al., 2020). Restricted travel and detention centers reduced the quality of life for immigrant and refugee populations while limited safety precautions increased the likelihood of contracting COVID-19. The virus spread at alarming speeds and societies around the world entered states of emergency, where the care of immigrant and refugee populations were no longer a priority.

Fear and hypervigilance have damaged the physical and emotional well-being of global societies. The fear of others influences young adults to develop habits of distrust and cynicism, while also causing chaos and rigid mental schemas that decrease openness to experience for forming new diverse relationships (Francica, 2020). Nevertheless, some young adults may feel that the psychological sense of community has broken down and may never be regained. Conversely, a perceptual shift can enlighten them to a stronger human community that formed during the pandemic; one that worked together to stay home, be vigilant for loved ones, and do their part to follow CDC guidelines to end the suffering for all. The story of cynicism and loss of faith in humanity during the pandemic may be as absurd as determining what is normal—a different perspective reveals another reality.

The Things Children Carry into Young Adulthood

Mandatory quarantines and curfews worsened the degree of trauma for youth with increased exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), especially for underserved populations (Houtepen et al., 2020; Purkey et al., 2020). ACEs are categories of experience that designate: sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, emotional neglect, domestic violence, separation from guardians, substance abuse, incarceration, and having a person with a mental disturbance in the household. The mandatory quarantines increased the opportunities for these events to take place or worsen ones already present. Families where parents have lost their jobs due to the economic consequences of the pandemic experienced increased socioeconomic pressures and challenges. Increased levels of socioeconomic pressures and stress is correlated to higher incidences of emotional disturbance, domestic abuse, and neglect of children (Herrington et al., 2021; Pinchoff et al., 2020). Research has shown that children that experience ACEs have a high probability of suffering from long-term somatization disorders and emotional disturbances (Maunder et al., 2020). Longitudinally, empirical studies have revealed that these children have greater chances of experiencing lower subjective well-being, cognitive impairments, challenges with regulating emotions, accelerated aging, and shortening their lives by up to 20 years (Colich et al., 2020; Kalia & Knauft, 2020; Lorenc et al., 2020; Park et al., 2020; Yağci et al., 2020).

For most young adults, the pandemic increased the risk and severity of mental disturbances, especially for anxiety and depression (Folayan et al., 2020). The incidence rates for depression tripled in U.S. throughout 2019 and 2020 (Çoban & Tan, 2020). Young adults that have limited social support systems and nonexistent growth-promoting coping methods are at a greater risk for developing destructive habits of thought and behavior, which reduce their quality of life (Read et al., 2020; Yağci et al., 2020). Emotional disturbances disrupt the normative processes for identity formation that is independent from the family unit. Managing social spheres, navigating romantic encounters, and detangling inner-core values from externally given ones are challenges where emotional disturbances can intensify (Reinhardt et al., 2020).

A young adult’s depression may have begun during childhood and gone unnoticed—which begets the question that if the pandemic’s quarantines increased the rates of ACEs, how does existential trauma factor into the intensity of long-term depressive (dysthymia) symptomology in young adulthood? Incidence rates of depression have been shown to increase throughout young adulthood; “during adolescence the prevalence increases from a lifetime prevalence of 8.4% in the age group of 13–14 years to 15.4% in the age group of 17–18 years” (Eigenhuis et al., 2021, p. 2).

Furthermore, Tsehay et al. (2020) studied the relationship between ACEs and depression in Ethiopia. The researchers found that females had a higher incidence rate of depression than males, and 9.3% of both genders reported having experienced more than three ACEs. Studies have found that abuse or child neglect were strong predictors of developing bipolar disorder (BD) later in life, especially during young adulthood. Moreover, an analysis of clinical data from the National Institute of Men...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Conclusion
• Index