The Defining Decade PDF – Meg Jay

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The Defining Decade PDF: This book is about my work with twentysomethings, as a clinical psychologist in private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia, and as a clinical professor at the University of Virginia, and previously as a clinician in Berkeley, California, and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Defining Decade PDF – Meg Jay

Throughout these pages, I do my best to tell the personal, and sometimes poignant, stories of the clients and students who taught me about the twenty-something years. To protect their privacy, I have changed their names and the details of their lives. The Defining Decade PDF

In many cases, I have created composites from those with similar experiences and with whom I had similar sessions and conversations. I hope every twentysomething who reads this book sees him or herself in the stories I include, but a resemblance to any particular twentysomething is coincidental.

When Kate started therapy, she had been waiting tables and living—and fighting—with her parents for more than a year. Her father called to schedule her first appointment, and both of them presumed that father-daughter issues would come quickly to the fore. But what most struck me about Kate was that her twentysomething years were wasting away.

The Defining Decade PDF – Meg Jay

Having grown up in New York City, at age twenty-six and now living in Virginia, she still did not have a driver’s license, despite the fact that this limited her employment opportunities and made her feel like a passenger in her own life. Not unrelated to this, Kate was often late to our appointments. The Defining Decade PDF

When Kate graduated from college, she had hoped to experience the expansiveness of the twentysomething years, something she was strongly encouraged to do by her parents. Her mother and father married just out of college because they wanted to go to Europe together, and, in the early 1970s, this was not condoned by either of their families.

They honeymooned in Italy and came back pregnant. Kate’s dad put his accounting degree to work while Kate’s mom got busy raising four kids, of whom Kate was the youngest. So far, Kate had spent her own twenties trying to make up for what her parents missed. She thought she was supposed to be having the time of her life, but mostly she felt stressed and anxious.

The Defining Decade PDF – Meg Jay

“My twenties are paralyzing,” she said. “No one told me it would be this hard.” Kate filled her mind with twentysomething drama to distract herself from the real state of her life, and she seemed to want the same for her therapy hours. When she came to sessions, she kicked off her Toms, hiked up her jeans, and caught me up on the weekend. The Defining Decade PDF

Our conversations often went multimedia as she pulled up e-mails and photos to show me, and texts chirped into our sessions with late-breaking news. Somewhere between the weekend updates, I found out the following: She thought she might like to work in fundraising, and she hoped to figure out what she wanted to do by age thirty.

“Thirty is the new twenty,” she said. This was my cue. I am too passionate about the twenties to let Kate, or any other twentysomething, waste his or her time. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in adult development, I have seen countless twentysomethings spend too many years living without perspective.

The Defining Decade PDF – Meg Jay

What is worse are the tears shed by thirtysomethings and fortysomethings because they are now paying a steep price—professionally, romantically, economically, reproductively—for a lack of vision in their twenties. I liked Kate and wanted to help her, so I insisted she be on time for sessions. I interrupted stories about the latest hookup to ask about the status of her driver’s license and her job search. The Defining Decade PDF

Perhaps most importantly, Kate and I debated about what therapy—and her twenties—was supposed to be about. Kate wondered aloud whether she ought to spend a few years in therapy figuring out her relationship with her father or whether she should use that money and time on a Eurail pass to search for who she was.

I voted for neither. I told Kate that while most therapists would agree with Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a lesser-known quote by American psychologist Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: “The unlived life is not worth examining.”

The Defining Decade PDF

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