Troubled Relationships

The way that childhood challenges can alter a life course is illustrated in Dianne Wetherbee's oral history.

"I was married at 19 to get away from a bad situation and I got into another bad situation and then I got married a second time, more, more for security than anything. And that's another bad situation."

Dianne Wetherbee in her interview spoke about how her rocky relationships with her parents and strained marriages shaped her life and her sense of self-worth when she was younger.

"I do believe, I do believe in the goodness of people. And even though there's a lot of evil around, I believe, I'm, every day I meet someone or a lot of people that really are good people. They make, make things the world go round."

Despite not having had strong relationships earlier in life, Dianne built healthy and meaningful friendships and believes in the goodness of people.

"When you find like-minded people, you just stick to them like glue because they're a source of my comfort and my happiness, along with my pets. And, um, yeah. I don't know what I’d do. God, I hope none of them ever leave. And they all have a little something different to add to the, you know, to add to the interest. It's, it's like a soup, you know, you put all interesting things in it and then you get something wonderful in the end."

Thus, Dianne revealed in her interview the hallmarks of having positive relationships with others, as defined by well-being researcher Carol Ryff (for example, Ryff, 2016): a deep concern about the welfare of others and an understanding of the giving and receiving inherent in relationships.  If the concern and understanding were products of a challenge, whether in childhood or adulthood, then they would be signals of post-traumatic growth, one facet of which can occur in relationships (for example, Meyerson et al., 2013).

Works Cited

Meyerson, D.A., Grant, K.E., Smith Carter, J., & Kilmer, R.P. (2013) Posttraumatic growth among children and adolescents: a systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review 31: 949-964. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2011.06.003

Ryff, C.D. (2016) Eudaimonic well-being and education: Probing the connections. In D.W. Harwood (Ed.), Well-Being and Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: Bringing Theory to Practice.

Troubled Relationships