met in my twenties, a consummate mentor with an extraordinary capacity to love. Dorothy Wergin had a part-time job as manager of the sleep lab at the university psychology department where I was a graduate student, but she was present on a full-time basis. Few people were aware of what she was actually paid to do. Most of those who visited her office came for the world-class counseling she freely offered. It was her daily pleasure and talent to support people in their confusion, pain, and grief as well as their joy and enthusiasm, all the while assisting them in stepping through the risky but necessary doors into a bigger life and the dangerous opportunities waiting there. In Dorothy’s presence the room seemed to fill with more air, more life. Tension eased, previously unnoticed emotions and bodily states arose into awareness, and the way forward became clear.
I find that my own Nurturing Adult is evoked by another person’s tender need and simple trust in my capacity to love and support. A friend, child, or someone I’m serving as soul guide might offer this implicit invitation. What a blessing to be invited in this way and be able to respond!
We’re also inspired by the nurturing qualities we see in the more-than-human world around us: in mammal mothers and bird parents as they care for, feed, and fiercely protect their young; in the synergy between wild-flower and pollinator; even in predator species that evoke the evolutionary development of the species they prey on; and more generally in the way the world provides the resources, habitats, and ecological niches that such an immense diversity of species needs in order to flourish and evolve.
It’s obvious that Earth has amply provided for us. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the great question before us is whether each of us can fully access the resources of our Nurturing Adult and learn to sustain and enhance the diversity and vitality of the Earth community, which now wholly depends on our collective awakening to our ecological responsibilities and opportunities.
Embracing Each Other in Our Wholeness
When we’re centered in the consciousness of our Nurturing Adult, we’re able to accept everything about other people. We understand — or attempt to understand — each characteristic, trait, or state of others as a coherent feature of those individuals, part of what makes them who they are. Naturally, some human traits — such as violence, hatred, or greed — are deeply troubling, but we sense how such characteristics are expressions of others’ current conditions. By embracing people in their wholeness, we create the conditions within which they can change or mature. The Nurturing Adult facet of the Self — at any age — enables us to experience others, in their essence, as creative, resourceful, and capable of wholeness. From this perspective, we do not judge, although we are highly, sometimes profoundly, perceptive and discerning. We also act to minimize and heal the damage that people cause through violence as well as through actions that might have been well intentioned but unskillful.
With a well-developed Nurturing Adult, we act from the heart, act out of an uncompromised love for others and for the world. We also act from Soul in the sense that we can see from our own depths into the depths of others and into the depths of the world as a whole. We have the capacity to both discern the truth and respond with love. (Buddhists refer to these naturally paired qualities, those of heart and Soul, as compassion and insight.)
The capacities of our Nurturing Adults also enable us to protect our loved ones and ourselves. When another person is a significant danger to us — despite our attempts to love — our Nurturing Adult will lead us away from the encounter if possible and if doing so is the highest good. With Nurturing Adult awareness, we perceive and feel holistically and ecocentrically, seeking to assist not only individuals but also, even more important, the whole system, community, and ecology to which we belong. On those rare occasions when a choice must be made between the well-being of an individual and that of his environment (the family, community, or ecosystem), our Nurturing Adult chooses to serve the needs of the latter, because without a viable environment all members suffer. But most often our Nurturing Adult sees a way to support both the individual and his ecological or social sphere.
Our North Self enables us to nurture ourselves, too. When we have access to our Nurturing Adult, we can embrace, without judgment, our own woundedness or immaturity, enabling a healing shift when our psyche as a whole is ready for it.
CAREGIVING VERSUS CARETAKING
The actions that characterize the Nurturing Adult can also be enacted by our immature subpersonalities, but the results are utterly different. It’s entirely possible, alas, to lead, teach, or encourage others from the woundedness of our North subpersonalities, whose purpose, since early childhood, has been to protect us from harm. What distinguishes one form of caring from the other is our motivation. When centered in our Nurturing Adult, we act with heart (compassion for the other) and with Soul (insight into the real needs of the other). In contrast, our North subpersonalities (our Loyal Soldiers and Rescuers, which we’ll explore in chapter 6) prompt us to act on the basis of a persistent and self-diminishing experience of fear and incompleteness. Although these subpersonalities possess a natural human desire to be accepted, this longing is enacted in a manner that is ultimately undermining, family weakening, and self-defeating. When merged with these wounded selves, we might appear to be nurturing — and are, to some degree — but our primary motivation is to avoid abandonment, criticism, or poverty by securing an accepted place in the lives of others. This is a form of “nurturing” that is more properly described as caretaking than as caregiving. We appear to be giving, but there’s at least as much taking going on. Consider, for example, the socially isolated single parent who does too much for her teenage son because she fears he’ll leave home if he’s able to care for himself. Or the farmer who grows and provides food but, in order to ensure his profits, knowingly degrades the health of the land, water, and people with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified organisms.
In contrast, caregiving is its own ample reward and source of joy, not a means to garner acceptance or socioeconomic gain. By simply being herself, a person with a strong Nurturing Adult contributes to her family, her community, and the ecology of which she is a member. Cooperating with and supporting others is an authentic and intrinsic expression of her innate human wholeness.
GENERATIVE LOVE
To the same degree that it is nurturing, the North facet of the Self is also generative — supporting us to sustain and enhance life by careful planning; designing and organizing projects; preparing meals; dreaming up stories and telling them; building houses; creating art; taking out the trash (or, better, supporting cultural changes and creating a sustainable lifestyle so that there is no trash); governing; and giving birth to children, ideas, or organizations. In short, getting the jobs done — the life-enhancing jobs.
But, again and alas, the Generative Adult is not the only doer in the diverse cast of the human psyche. No doubt our subpersonalities have had a major hand in generating most of the wars, toxic substances, depraved acts, dysfunctional relationships, and life-threatening enterprises of our world.
Here, too, the distinction is a matter of both heart and Soul. A woman with a well-developed Generative Adult does not innovate or fabricate in order to impress others or to secure a place of belonging. Rather, she is simply herself — her Self. If she impresses others, it’s because she imagines, designs, and manifests authentically and in a way only she can. She’s unique in her way of loving, contributing, and belonging. But she’s not inflated about it. Nor is she shy or reserved about what she can do and what she loves. She’s both humble and bold.
Although not as common in contemporary Western and Westernized psyches as one would wish, the Generative Adult, by whatever name, is a familiar character found in stories and communities throughout the world, embodied in images such as the good doctor (Jonas Salk, Benjamin Spock), the mature leader (King Arthur, Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln — even the Lion King), the genius inventor (Leonardo da Vinci, Buckminster
