Maturing into Gerotranscendence

According to the empirically based theory of gerotranscendence, the individual moving toward gerotranscendence may experience a series of gerotranscendental changes or developments. These include a redefinition of the self and of relationships to others, as well as a new understanding of fundamental existential questions. It is not farfetched to associate this with a kind of transpersonal development. Gerotranscendence, however, does not imply any state of withdrawal or disengagement, as is sometimes believed. It is not the old disengagement theory in a new disguise. Rather, it is a theory describing a developmental pattern that goes beyond the old dualism of activity and disengagement. Research in various parts of the world confirms the existence of gerotranscendence, and lately a promising new type of counseling based on the theory has been created in countries as widely dispersed as Sweden and Taiwan. Author Note: The theory of gerotranscendence was born, almost 25 years ago, to address what I saw as a mismatch between present theories in social gerontology and some existing empirical data. Based on intellectual input from scholars such as Jung and Erikson, together with qualitative as well as quantitative data, I have been able to capture a certain kind of positive aging in a grounded-theory-like concept I have called gerotranscendence. The theory suggests that human aging includes a potential to mature into a new outlook on and understanding of life. Gerotranscendence implies a shift in metaperspective, from a materialistic and rational view of the world to a more cosmic and transcendent one, normally accompanied by an increase in life satisfaction. RETHINKING PUZZLING FINDINGS Since the very beginning of scientific gerontology, the misery perspective has been a recurrent theme in the research. Gerontologists have predicted, as I have as well, various problems connected with aging and old age, and have been puzzled when, for example, retirement is not typically perceived as a trauma or when old people do not report as much loneliness as we expect them to. To date, many studies have shown that retirement does not normally imply a trauma, and lately Westerlund et al. (2009) found, in their very large longitudinal study, that when it comes to subjective health and well-being, retirement even seems to serve as a kind of rejuvenating cure. On average, retirement makes people feel healthier and better than they did prior to retirement. In Sweden, repeated surveys have shown that, on average, problems of loneliness do not increase with age as most people believe, but [email protected] Copyright ’ 2011 Transpersonal Institute 166 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2011, Vol. 43, No. 2 rather decrease with age (Tornstam, Rydell, Vik, & Öberg, 2010). Figure 1 summarizes two postal surveys in which questions about loneliness were answered by 2,795 Swedes in 1985, and 1,742 Swedes in 2008. The degree of loneliness, as reproduced in the graph, is an index based on questions concerning how often the respondent feels lonely, how intense the feeling is when it occurs, how much loneliness the respondent feels as compared to how the respondent thinks others of the same age feel, whether the respondent feels lonely in the company of others and whether the respondent feels lonely right now. When examining the graph, note that it is a ‘‘blow-up’’ of the part of the index scale on which the mean values and slopes are located. The scale as such varies from 0 to 18. This also means that all differences are blown up. This said, the two most striking features in the figure must be (a) how loneliness basically declines with age, and (b) how similar the results are across the 23-year period. If we accept these as factual invariances and try to understand them, a number of possible explanations come to the fore. One such explanation might be that, as we age and mature, we learn to handle life better, another that when aging, we also transcend some barriers surrounding our Selves and thus become more ‘‘transpersonal’’ and less prone to feeling lonely. I have described the above and other perplexing findings elsewhere (Tornstam, 2005), as well as our tendency to explain them away as ‘‘errors in methods’’ rather than as ‘‘errors in theory.’’ We social scientists can be very imaginative Figure 1. Loneliness among Swedes in 1985 and 2008. Gerotranscendence 167 when, for example, trying to explain away the findings presented in Figure 1. If, for example, you only take the data from 1985 into consideration and only look at the last two age categories, at the same time as you change the index scale to cover only values from 6.0 to 7.0, you get a blow-up that certainly seems to confirm the assumption of increasing loneliness with age, even though this blown-up difference is not statistically significant. And to be sure, all studies have their drawbacks, but why must we always try to use the ‘‘error in methods’’ argument when we are confronted with interesting contradicting data that in fact imply that reality does not adhere to theory? Experiencing just that, and dissatisfied with the state of the art, I began more than 20 years ago to experiment with some new theoretical ideas and studies in an attempt to achieve a better match between the empirical data and theory. Inspired by, among others, Jung (1930), Gutmann (1976) and Chinen (1985, 1986), I started conducting qualitative interviews with old people, who told about how they had perceived their lives in various phases and transitions. It was then I discovered how life was often described as a positive development involving increased life satisfaction in the context of a developmental pattern typically including a redefinition of the self and relations to other people, as well as a new way of understanding existential questions. These informants described how they had become less self-occupied and at the same time more selective in their choice of social and other activities. A transpersonal sense of affinity with others and with earlier generations had developed, as well as a sense of being part of a whole. Informants also talked about a kind of redefinition of time, space, life and death, and an increased need for positive contemplative solitude. These changes are often misunderstood by relatives, who label them as pathological. Old mothers are thought to be depressed, lonely, lacking in activities or on the brink of some kind of dementia. However, the individuals we interviewed did not suffer from any pathological conditions. They enjoyed life and expressed great satisfaction. What I saw in these early interviews was the unfolding of a new and intriguing developmental pattern, and I decided to use the term Gerotranscendence to describe it. I chose the prefix Geroas in gerontology and the suffix transcendence, because it seemed to me that much of what my informants described concerned transcending borders and barriers that had circumscribed them earlier in life. Based on these early qualitative interviews, I conducted a number of large quantitative studies, which are described in Tornstam (2005). In these studies, different random samples of Swedish and Danish inhabitants in the age range 20 and 104 years were kind enough to answer questions about their outlook on life, themselves and their relations to others. Without going into technical details, I will provide a brief summary of how these studies together define and describe gerotranscendence in relation to three major dimensions and their respective signs. In each of the dimensions, I have gathered signs that qualitatively belong together. The Cosmic dimension is about broad existential changes, while the dimension of The self concerns changes in the view of the present self and the The theory of gerotranscendence now has its own Internet site: www.soc.uu.se/research/gerontology/gerotrans 168 The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2011, Vol. 43, No. 2 self in retrospect. The dimension of Social and Personal Relationships captures developmental changes in precisely these matters. Please note that not everyone who has developed in the direction of gerotranscendence necessarily shows all these signs. THE COSMIC DIMENSION