Understanding Eric Erickson's Stages: A Guide to Parenting and Child Development - Sally Raymond

Welcome to another episode of the Transforming Lives panel podcast, hosted by Sharmin Prince and Mitzy Dadoun. In this thought-provoking episode, we are joined by the inspiring Sally Raymond, an 82-year-old psychotherapist with over 29,000 sessions under her belt. Sally's journey into psychotherapy began after the tragic suicide of her eldest son, which propelled her into a lifelong mission to understand and prevent the struggles that children face. Her book, "The Son I Knew Too Late," offers invaluable insights for parents to foster resilience in their children. Sally shares her expertise on the eight stages of development, based on Eric Erickson's model, and emphasizes the importance of understanding these stages to prevent crises. She also discusses the signs of depression and suicidality in children and offers guidance on how parents can support their children through these challenges. Join us as we delve into Sally's personal story and her mission to make a positive impact in the world.

Speaker 2
Welcome to the Transforming Lives panel podcast to another episode. Oh, let me, okay. We just need to redo that. That's okay, go for it.

Welcome to another episode of the Transforming Lives panel podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Sharmin Prince.

Speaker 1
And I'm your other host, Mitzy Dadoun.

Speaker 2
Early before we start, we take a few deep breaths to become centered and grounded. So just join me in taking a deep inhale through your nose and let it go through your mouth. Now to deep inhale, hold that breath, and then exhale slowly. Another one in.

Hold it. And let it go. Another one in. And as you take this breath in, just let go of the things that didn't serve you today.

Let go of the things that you have to do. Just let it go and be present for the next 25, 30, even 40 minutes. Thank you for joining us once again. And you know, We have a guest and our guest is Sally Raymond and she is 82 years young.

a psychotherapist with over 29,000 sessions since 1991, when the tragic suicide of her eldest son launched her on a lifelong mission to understand how we unknowingly set our children up for struggle and how to prevent it. Her book, The Son I Knew Too Late, a guide to help you survive and thrive, distills decades of insight to help parents and readers foster resilience at every age. A late bloomer, Sally earned top honors at UCSB in her 40s, modeled in her 50s, and starred in an award-winning documentary in her 60s. Beyond her therapy practice, she's a lifelong adventurer, swimming with dolphins and riding with the Navajo, and volunteers teaching EQ skills to students, transforming disengaged classrooms into spaces where youth discover their worth and agency.

What a beautiful bio. Welcome, Sally. Is there anything you would like to add?

Speaker 3
Hi, Sharmin. Thank you for this great honor. I really appreciate you and Mitzi being here for me and for what I have to say. I really want to make my life better in the world, and that's all I care about at this point in my life.

Speaker 2
So thank you. Let's start with your book, The Son I Knew Too Late. And it hints a painful insight. What's the one thing that you wish every parent understood before crisis strike?

Speaker 3
That's a great question. What I had to find out the hardest way possible, too late for me, but not too late for everyone else, is what each age of life, if there's a core issue, and if we don't know what it is or lead to it, we are unknowingly setting our children up for failure. And so I wish every parent knew what I had to learn the hard way by my son's loss so that you can know what to do better.

And that is to know what is the core issue from birth on. And it keeps rotating through a sequence of eight stages from birth to old age. And if you don't know what the core issue is, you are really at a deficit and your children are too. And so that is exactly what I think everyone really needs to know.

And that's what my book is centered on giving.

Speaker 2
Tali, what are those eight stages?

Speaker 3
Okay, well, there's infancy. And in infancy, the most important issue from the birth, from the moment that baby comes out of the womb is trust. Can I trust you? Can I trust the world?

Can I trust my body? Can I, am I okay? Am I safe? That's the most important thing.

And that's really important that parents know that that's the first stage where, and trust is the most important issue in life. Because if you can't trust, what do you trust? What do you know? And so without trust, you're setting children up for failure.

The second stage is called autonomy versus shame and guilt. And if you're just beginning to move around, you're being able to go play, move and get to places that you could never get to before. And it's important that children can actually you can actually support your children in getting to safe places where they can go and play or check things out. And so they can feel that they have personal autonomy.

They can actually move on their own and do things on their own. And that's also when toilet training comes into play. And so succeeding at these little things that are so big at the time are really important. And if you don't get that, That's when the child falls into shame and guilt.

And shame is, you know, I'm bad. I'm no good. And that's a terrible feeling. And it's very, very dangerous for a child or anybody to feel shame.

That's where we kind of just shut down. And there's more, there's the third stage is initiative, taking initiative, deciding I would like to try to bake something. I would like to go over to a friend's house. I would like to do something on my own.

So, you know, finding out that they have agency is really important. And safe, you know, within safe, in a safe context. Of course, you want to make sure the context is safe and that they aren't going to do something that is going to fail. You want to set them up for success.

And then the fourth age is in school, and that's about industry versus inferiority and feeling I can learn. I can do things. I can make friends. This is really important.

And if we don't lead to these things and say, yeah, do this, it's going to be good, but always within what they're capable of. know and lead to it support it and then there's in in adolescence it's about um identity versus um identity versus identity confusion. And it's like peers are trying, you're trying to work with your peers and find out who you are within your peer group and learning that you matter and that you can do things and you have a personality and you find your people and you find your position, what you want to do with your life.

And the next stage after that is intimacy versus isolation, finding love, finding someone, people that you feel affiliated with, that you, you know, work and work together with, all of that is really, really important. The next stage after that is generativity, and it lasts for like 30 years or 40. And that's where you're there trying to contribute to your family, your community, your your people, the world, the environment, whatever it is that your passion is. And if you don't lead to that, it diminishes your sense of self-worth.

And the last stage, of course, is either ego integrity or basically chaos. because either you're gonna feel good about your life looking back because it's gonna be too late to change or you're gonna feel like you're gonna be furious, you're gonna be angry, you're gonna be bitter, you're gonna be resentful because it didn't go the way you wanted and you don't see that the outcome was worthwhile. And that's where hell is to me.

That's exactly where hell is. So living your life in a way that sets you up for the final feeling of integrity, success, triumph, feeling good about your life, no matter what happened along the way, that overall it was worth living is really important. So this is basically the scaffolding that we all go through. And if we don't hit those markers and lead to those particular issues as they cycle through, that is going to undermine life.

Speaker 2
It sounds like, is it the same as the Eric Erickson stages of development?

Speaker 3
It is exactly those. And you're one of the very few people who knows about Eric Erickson. And so many people have no idea. And I never had any idea before I became a psychotherapist.

And that was when my son was already in the university. And so I was like, why don't we know about this from the get-go? Why not? Because this is so helpful.

It helps us know exactly what to do and what to avoid at every stage to keep life worth the living. And so I have the story which shows where things went awry for him and he was being hollowed out as he was just looking like a rocket ship going straight up. he was being hollowed out the whole way and i didn't see it

Speaker 1
wow what are some of the things that a parent should look for that would make them aware that their child is hollowed out or missing some of these things like

Speaker 3
well you'd look for alcohol and drugs you look for someone who's starting to isolate or isn't finding joy in things that they used to love. If they start to become reckless and do dangerous things, that's somehow, that's very highly associated with suicidality later on because they're getting used to the idea doing dangerous things. So just being silent and not talking or else sleeping too much or too little. These are all signs that people could be considering suicide.

And also one of the worst, one of the most important signs is if they've been depressed for a long time and all of a sudden they seem happy, all of a sudden they seem like they're free, they're okay. It's not a good sign. It often means they've been depressed and they finally thought about, I'm going to just take myself out. And once they've made the decision, they can feel much relief and seem almost delighted and happy and normal.

But that's often the most important sign of all, that suicide may be imminent.

Speaker 1
So how would one know if somebody had sort of gone through it and was actually feeling better about themselves and had come through the other side, so to speak, versus pretending or having made that decision to take their own life. Are there ways to help sort of be able to differentiate and tell whether it's a false happiness or a truly gotten through it happiness?

Speaker 3
If they've been really seriously depressed for a long time and all of a sudden seem like they're free and blight, that's a very dangerous sign. What I tell people is that early on, when they're young, talk about the fact that sometimes we get really depressed. We really get sad at things that can really seem hard and really scary. And sometimes we just don't want to live anymore sometimes.

And if that happens, you need to talk about it. You need to bring it up. And I would say, and if you don't bring it up, I will. If I notice something wrong, I'm going to say something, because I want to know if you're OK.

And if you're not, it's really too important to get help, because you deserve, and I only want the best for you. I want you to have a fantastic life. And when I see something going wrong, I'm going to say something. So just expect it.

And know that I'm just here to help you work through whatever it is that you're going to be working through and get the help you need if you need help. And that to make sure that you have a life worth living, that everything is going to go well. Because that's what I want for you. And that's what you deserve.

Speaker 2
Sally, I want us to go back to Erickson's stages of development because oftentimes, and as you said, it's not a popular thing that you would walk into a pediatrician office and see a chart. No. I believe that very first stage is so important where there is trust versus mistrust. Because I think everything starts from there.

Because once the child does not trust the parent, mistrust leads to other things. Correct me if I'm wrong, it would be kind of impossible for the child to switch from the negative aspect of mistrust to autonomy. Yes. Right.

So can you encourage or talk to our parents about the importance of that chart? Yeah. How much it can support our lives.

Speaker 3
Oh, yes. It's really a roadmap for each individual to realize that these are the core issues that we don't recognize, we don't have words for, we haven't talked about, and that's why there's been no chart. There's been nothing like that. And that's what I have put into the book on purpose so that my son's stories can be arrayed within each stage and you can see exactly what happened at each stage to have him go into the negative instead of the positive.

And I didn't see anything happening because it was inside of him. And he didn't know how to, he didn't have any words for it either. And so giving us words gives us power. And so each stage, if you know, oh, this is about trust or mistrust, and then how to lead to trust.

And you can see it in the child. When they feel trust, you see it in their eyes brighten up. There's big smiles. There's happiness.

There's freedom. There's a lot of free play and all kinds of things because they feel safe. They feel like, oh, she's trustworthy. She won't hurt me.

She's gonna be there for me. And I have a terrible story about what happened to John, which created mistrust in him. Addressed or mistrust is so important that I only know now that if trust isn't led in the beginning and that child ends up feeling mistrust later on in life, they have a high percentage of committing suicide. Because without trust, you really don't know, you can't make sense of things.

And then you only find things that you can't trust. If that makes any sense, you're looking for the negative for the rest of your life, you'll find it. And it demoralizes us.

Speaker 1
It's those situations where Trust was broken by a parent. I mean, unfortunately, kids that were put up for adoption felt trust was broken or one parent abused them, but the other one didn't or circumstance like that. So how can one help a child recover from someone else breaking that trust at such a pivotal point?

Speaker 3
You're right, that is such an important point, Mitzi. And there's actually, there's two things that we all do. It's called primacy effects and recency effects. And primacy effects are the first things that happen, and they're like mistrust, learning mistrust, because if a parent's either innocent or on purpose defaults.

But as we grow, there's something called recency effects. And that's what people are like as you go through life and you evolve through people and teachers and social situations and everything. And a lot of people who basically prove that you can trust them. You can overcome that little by little.

So it's really possible, that's what healing is all about, is giving them what they didn't have and giving it in a way that embeds the opposite of mistrust, which is trust. Yes, I can trust this person. Yes, I can trust that person. The more you can do that, the more you are overcoming that terrible, terrible beginning and that horrible legacy.

But it's still there, but you can lap it over by our behavior and how we treat people.

Speaker 2
You know, Sally, only today I was speaking to a 16 year old who has been exhibiting confusion. And I know that's the stage of identity versus confusion. And her mother, of course, took her to the doctor and she told the doctor that she was suicidal. And now she's in the psychiatric ward.

Having a conversation with her, and it's all about the confusion of identity. She is in that stage, but instead of the positive aspect of the stage of identity,

Speaker 1
where

Speaker 2
she's confident in who she is and what she is, there is this high level of confusion. And this was the last thing I expected to be discussing on this episode. So it is so real. And what encouragement can you give to parents who are listening to help them to go look for a chart?

Speaker 3
Yeah. It's online, but I have my own version of it, is what I've kind of just tinkered just a tiny bit because it's so good. It's in my book, basically the first page. And you really study it, it will give you what to do and what not to do at every stage to keep life worth living and help people just continue to become more and more resilient, empowered, more clear, and more sure of themselves.

But we aren't, we don't, we've never had that distributed through the whole world. And so everybody's been, it's been a random function, whether you hit it or not, and you have no idea whether you did or didn't, because you're not aware of it. And this is a terrible lapse in parenting, because this is the one thing we've needed to have, and we never had.

Speaker 2
What is a toxic statement parents say without realizing it?

Speaker 3
You'll be okay. That was the last words my ex-husband said to my son when he got the call. He just said, you'll be all right and hung up on him.

Speaker 2
What should be a parent or an adult response to a teen when they say, nobody gets me? Talk to me.

Speaker 3
I want to understand you.

Speaker 2
And finally, what's your proof that life gives second chances?

Speaker 3
Life is an emergent process. One and one don't make two, one and one make three. You can't predict what is gonna happen from one moment to the next. It's a mystery, it's a discovery process, and you have a lot you can do about it, but you have to stay alive.

Speaker 1
Wow, thank you. Thank you so much, Sally. This has been so emotional and thought provoking. And I think it will really help so many people who kind of feel there's something wrong, but they just don't know where to start or how to.

Your book and the information from Eric Erickson You know, this is, as you say, something that you have the baby and it should kind of come as the next thing is, you know, here's your starter manual. And thank you for sharing such a personal and difficult situation so openly so that others can hopefully prevent something similar from happening.

Speaker 3
Yeah, that's my hope. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. I mean, I can't bring John back, but I can sure tell you, he taught me so much.

Speaker 1
He taught us all so much because you've shared.

Speaker 3
That's, that's my hope. Thank you. Mitzy, you're great. Sharmin, you're great

Speaker 1
too. Thank you so much.