Understanding Gerotranscendence in Older Adults: A New Perspective for Counselors

The author describes gerotranscendence as a process that occurs when older adults shift from a rational focus on the present-day, material world to a more universal and transcendent perspective. Accompanying this shift is a desire to move toward the end of life with a sense of integrity and acceptance of one's choices. By gaining an understanding of gerotranscendence, counselors can better meet the needs of their aging clients. Using existing gerotranscendence literature as a guideline, suggestions are made for appropriate counseling interventions. ********** As an adolescent, I witnessed the physical decline of my paternal grandmother as she first spent a couple of years living in my family's home, a time that was followed by her ultimate decline into death a few years after her move into a nursing home. Born into a family of Presbyterian missionaries and widowed at an early age, having had six sons who were between the ages of 2 and 16 years, her life was one in which her faith accompanied her from struggle to struggle. College-educated, just as her own five brothers had been, at a time when education was certainly an anomaly for women and a "lady" when ladyhood was still aspired to by young women, Margaret McIlwaine lived a challenging life. Yet as she moved into her 80s and as her health began to decline, she seemed to have few complaints, few demands, and a decreased need for companionship. She did not seem irritably discontent. She simply seemed to have retreated within herself and to have become more reflective and less interactive with others. This shift from an outer- to an inner-directed standpoint in an older adult can surprise family and caregivers who feel that the individual is somehow "slipping away." However, greater understanding of the changes experienced during the end of life transition can better prepare counselors to meet the needs of older adults and members of their support system. Many theories have been developed over the past several decades in an attempt to explain the cognitive, affective, and physical functioning changes that accompany the aging process as well as to determine ways to enhance the aging process. The changes observed as older adults move from midlife to the end of life have been difficult to quantify and explain in a way that makes sense to all people. Some attempted "solutions" for understanding the aging population include the activity theory (Burgess, 1960; Havighurst, 1961), which supports the conviction that active involvement in life leads to healthy aging; the disengagement theory (Cummings & Henry, 1961), which suggests that older adults remove themselves from active involvement in life events as well as detach from social relationships as they prepare themselves for their approaching death; and the continuity theory (Valliant, 1990), which proposes that people do not really change very much as they age and that the behaviors and activities that worked earlier in life will continue to serve them throughout the aging process. Successful aging has further been described as being dependent on one's social-psychological interpretation of whatever one encounters through the aging process (Johnson, 1995). These theories all appear to make some sense as stand-alone pieces of a larger puzzle, but perhaps a more cohesive explanation of the changes that accompany aging can be found in recent literature addressing a process in which adults experience a "shift in meta-perspective, from a materialistic and pragmatic view of the world to a more cosmic and transcendent one, normally accompanied by an increase in life satisfaction" (Tornstam, 1997a, p. 143). This developmental process is termed gerotranscendence and is believed to occur as people move from midlife toward older adulthood (Tornstam, 1989). During this process, an individual moves from feeling deeply connected to the material world to experiencing a more transcendent and cosmically directed sense of connection (i. …